Yeah, I have made the leap to straight online marketing and website dev for contractors, but I still listen to the radio and I still watch TV. While the world was fixed to their TV’s this past week for over-priced, useless pabulum dressed up as advertising, I heard a fantastic radio spot by IBM.
Yeah, I know, IBM
They were promoting their cloud-based storage solutions when the basically bitch-slapped the two 800 pound gorillas in that space…Amazon and Google.
As the voice went on and on about how great IBM was at cloud storage, they said, and this is the part that floored me, “why leave your business data to a book store (Amazon) or a search engine (Google)?” and I friggin’ loved the balls to the wall approach Big Blue is taking to win back mind share.
What this means to you
You not only need to position YOUR company in the marketplace, but you try and pigeon-hole your competition as well. If your work is only custom decks, then you better be screaming from the rooftops why you are the better option than the guys that do decks, windows, doors, blah blah blah.
Specialization means something to the consumer
It means you know what the hell it is you are talking about, and it gives you the ability to charge more. That’s it, there is nothing else more to say about it. I do websites and online marketing for contractors…you couldn’t ask for a more specialized niche. So I practice what I preach, and so should you.
Next steps…
Your marketing online or off should make sure you talk about you, but also how you are different from your competition, and making them the inferior choice is the way to win, because in the war of apples to apples comparisons, the only winner is the one with the lowest price, not a game you want to play, because as I have said before a hundred times:
If the only way to improve your product is by lowering your price, then you are doomed to go out of business, you just don’t know it yet.