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Contractor Marketing Tips From Famous Dog Trainer Cesar Millan

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Product or Service Extensions Broaden Your Reach of Clients

An old expression made famous by Dean Martin, “keep those cards and letters coming,” actually has a direct application to any contractor marketing plan.  There is a well know tactic in the internet business world that can be applied to other types of business rather easily.

Consider a Cesar Millan, famous K-9 training expert and star of NatGeo’s Dog Whisperer for a second.  Cesar has years of experience handling different types of dogs with various problems and successfully turning these rascals into well-behaved pets.  In order to reach more people and generate more revenue, he puts all of his tactics and proven tips into a book and sells it through his website.  People contact him, pay for his book and receive the package while leaving behind their name, address, and email.

A couple of months go by and Cesar learns of a great grooming technique that works amazingly well with a new shampoo.  What does he do?  He gathers the list of email and addresses and sends out a little note to his past customers “hey, thought you might want to know about this wonderful dog shampoo and grooming technique.  Drop me a line if you want more information.”  What do you think happens?  People buy more stuff from him because they have confidence in him based on past work.

Are you collecting addresses and emails of past clients?  Do you let them know about new developments in your industry?  This is a very simple method of using the success and satisfaction from past projects to land new work without the need for using expensive means of finding new clients.

Quick Tips for Contractors #9 – Read a Book

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I am going to ask you to ready one book if you want to market your business on your own – Ogilvy on Advertising (affiliate link). Why? Because everything Ogilvy did was about delivering a response.

In other words, there are no budgets for branding. You are not Coke or Pepsi. Every dollar you spend on advertising has to come back to you dressed up like a $2 bill.

And Ogilvy hated the creative types who could burn through ad budgets faster than Grant through Richmond. So get the book and learn something today.

The Market You Don’t Know

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I talk to contractors everyday who can tell me everything there is to know about their best customer. But as the conversation moves along, there is one aspect of their market that I always educate them on because they never seem to focus on this type of client or customer…

New Movers

New movers represent a black hole to many contractors, but to the smart construction companies out there who spend a portion of their marketing budgets catering to this demographic, the return is absolutely ridiculous!

The big deal about new movers

Did you know:

  1. New movers typically represent about 25%-35% of your local market
  2. New movers, on average, spend more on their homes in the first 5 months than they do over the next 5 years.
  3. New movers are influenced by your advertising, not referrals.
  4. New movers have no idea who you are, how long you have been in business, or how many people you have worked for over your 40 years in business. In other words, you mean nothing to them, so your “everyone knows me” excuse for not marketing falls squarely on its ass right about now.
  5. You need new movers to replace your former clients or customers who moved, died or went with your competition.

But what do new movers buy?

If you took a sampling within the first 8 months, 100 new movers will need:

  1. Electrician 30% of the time
  2. A new fence 18% of the time
  3. Masonry services 15% of the time
  4. Plumber 28% of the time

And I am not talking chump change here. On average, those same 100 new movers will spend:

  • 72% – Between $10-$25k
  • 14% – Between $25k-$40k
  • 6%  – Will spend over $40,000

Now, there are only a few ways to get after these types of prospects and you need to have a consistent marketing program in place to make sure you are hitting each batch of new movers as they migrate into your area each month.

Depending on your particular industry, direct mail, YP or search marketing will give you access to these hyper-active buyers who have cash in hand and NEED to buy. But, If you prefer to keep thinking that everyone knows you, just ask yourself, what are you doing to replace the 25%-35% of those people each year who die, move or shop else ware?

Using Your Competition Against Themselves

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If you have read this site for any length of time, then you know that you don’t just sit down and “knock out” an advertisement. Fact is a good amount of detail should go into each of your ads. But if you are having trouble designing and developing ad copy on your own, then use these quick tips to get off to a good start and use your competition’s ads against them!

  1. Study what part of your business you are going to advertise from the consumer’s point of view –  In other words, you know everything there is to know about building a deck or finishing a kitchen, except what the triggers are that make the consumer pick up the phone and call you. So find out how, what, why, where and when your competitors are advertising a similar product or service as yours. You are not doing this to steal copy points or ideas, but to see how the consumer sees or “consumes” the ad message.
    1. Now I want you to go to the Google keyword tool and put in the broadest search term for your market to understand how people are searching in Google for what you and your competition does. Doing this is the most compelling way to understand how buyers view your product or service. But be careful, you can spend all day drilling down deeper into the minds of your customers, but for now, I just want you to make a note of the broad terms they use to find you instead of how you should market to them.
  2. Now I want you to go back and review all the advertising your competition is doing, paying special  attention to the following:
    1. How are they positioning their company against the market – and you!
    2. What are they saying in their ads?
    3. Where are they advertising – make sure these are not one-off ads, you want to know that they have advertised in these mediums for a while.
    4. Who are they targeting
  3. Compare their ads against your findings from your keyword research. Is you competition hitting the mark, or are they blindly dropping ad dollars on campaigns that don’t SPEAK TO BUYERS?
  4. Now I need you to start talking to those buyers. This can be anyone from former leads to family to strangers on the street. You want to get an idea if they will buy, what they will buy and most importantly, how much will they pay for it. Determine the pain or pleasure (these two factors are THE leading reasons why people buy) your product or service provides and you have the makings of a solid ad program!

Now, let’s say you don’t have the time, energy or money to put all this together for one little ad, then go ahead and place the ad…and you too can be part of the “50% of my advertising works, I just don’t know which 50%” club!

Point is…Do Your HOMEWORK BEFORE YOU ADVERTISE!

The Law of 25

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I don’t care what trade you are in. I don’t care if you are one-man band or a team of 50; you are in sales first and a contractor second. If you don’t agree with me, just ask yourself how many days you could live on just building stuff without selling it to someone – it wouldn’t be long before you had nothing to do.

So I want to introduce you to the law of 25

The law of 25 says that if you have a minimum of 25 customer facing interactions a day, you will have more business than you know what to do with in no time. Again, the size of your organization doesn’t matter, if everyone who is responsible for making the cash register ring touches 25 prospects a day, you will be rocking.

How do I know?

Been doing it (and recommending it) for years, and the numbers are staggering. You just have to commit yourself to doing it every single day and I promise you will be very well off in less than a year.

Think about it, if you touch 125 people’s lives a week, you interact with 500 people a month. These interactions could be simple things like handing out door hangers or flyers or spending time following up with old leads or asking former clients or customers for referrals. It doesn’t matter how you do it, you just have to commit to talking to 25 people a day.

And it’s easy…

If you have ever sent direct mail, you should have gotten a list of the people you mailed to along with their phone numbers…pull them out and call them. If you have been in business for any length of time you have a “dead file” that is packed with people who didn’t close – get them out and either call them or have someone call them (Chris!).

The answer is…

As I have said before, you then have to follow-up until you either get a yes or a no. People love persistence, they assume you will be just as diligent with your work, so make sure your follow-up habits are rock solid.

If you think this is impossible, then prove me wrong. The best way to shut me up is try it for a month and tell me it doesn’t work. But I know it does, I see it every day, so get out there and good luck!

Contractor Marketing Ideas: What Are Benefits?

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Yesterday I talked about the difference between features and benefits. After re-reading the post, I came up with an even easier way for you to determine the difference between the two. Benefits answer the “What’s in it for me?” question every consumer has when looking for a home improvement contractor.

That’s why your marketing has to be about results

A customer’s perception of each of your features is what moves them to action. When someone chooses a self-cleaning pool vacuum, the assumption is that the benefit is convenience, and the results are that they won’t have to clean their pool as much.

When you only talk about features, the customer is responsible for figuring out how it is going to either give them pleasure or remove pain. But people are lazy…or busy, or whatever, so make it easy for them by spelling it out for them, because that is the advertising they are going to be drawn to.More

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