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Marketing & Advertising

Your 5 Minute Business Profile

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If you asked me what I hear most during my consulting meetings, I would have to say “I don’t know.”

How many more jobs can you do a month?

“I don’t know”

How much do you have set aside for advertising?

“I don’t know”

How many jobs did you get last year from your current advertising program?

“I don’t know”

Starting to see a pattern here? This lack of knowledge can often times be linked back to having to spend so much time working in their businesses and not on them. So today I am going to give you a quick project to help you get out of the “I don’t know” dog house. Print the page, answer the questions, and hang it up somewhere you can look at it every day. Make any changes needed as you, your business or your market changes.

Ready?

Who is my target audience:

_______________________________________________________________

What is my call to action for my target audience:
_______________________________________________________________

What are my convenience factors: Examples are personal service, 7-day turnaround, etc..
_______________________________________________________________

What are my most profitable products or services:
_______________________________________________________________

What are my confidence factors to my customers:
_______________________________________________________________

What is my business function: (Hint, making money isn’t the answer)
_______________________________________________________________

What makes me different from my competition:

_______________________________________________________________

Who do I compete with:

_______________________________________________________________

What additional lines of business could I add to improve profitability:
_______________________________________________________________

Why do I advertise:
_______________________________________________________________

Current media activities:
_______________________________________________________________

Do I have co-op available:
_______________________________________________________________

Customer type: (male, female, corporate buyers, high income, all ages)
_______________________________________________________________

Ad headline: (what tagline appears on all of my advertising and marketing, and “nothing” is another bad answer!)
_______________________________________________________________

Again, this should give you some insight into your own company and how you think about it, and how your prospects perceive it. Maybe you haven’t had a chance to do some deep thinking in a while? Hopefully this will give you a chance to check your current business plan to decide if any changes are needed to improve your top line revenue for the rest of the year. Let me know how you make out!

Positioning Your Company

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This video is a few things – First of all, it is my first video with a new camera, so I know I have some bugs to work out with sound and positioning as I cut off the top of my head. But it’s funny that I need to worry about positioning the camera since that is what the video is about. Positioning your company not just against your competition, but against all of the alternatives homeowners have to NOT do business with you. So, enjoy the video, and I promise the next one will be better!More

Keep Your Friends Close – But Your Competition Closer!

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This is a guest post by one of my clients, Chris Spoerl at Magic Pool Services in Orlando. Chris took my post a few weeks ago on paying attention to your competition to heart…to say the least! What would you do if you were in his shoes and thought your competitors were duplicating your efforts?

“All war is based on deception.” – Sun Tzu

Marketing is a tough business, and if business is tough, people will do whatever it takes to succeed.  I am referring to your competition folks, and sometimes if you are not careful, they will try to get the best of you.

This weekend we attended the 2011 Orlando Pool and Spa Show, which is basically the pool-a-palooza for the pool industry.  Vendors from across the United States and the world display the newest products and technologies and there are also continuing education courses and training seminars.More

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.

Remodelers: Steal a Play from the Southwest Airlines Playbook

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Southwest Airlines is one of the only profitable airlines flying these days, and one of the main reasons is their use of standards across their business. For example, Southwest operates short hop flights in secondary cities, has the quickest turn-around time in the industry and only flies one type of plane, the Boeing 737. This means they only have to worry about purchasing, maintaining, equipping, training, flying and buying parts for one kind of airplane, and it works.

Remodelers are doing the same

Over the last few years I have seen a lot of contractor advertising for fixed-price remodels; $9999 basements and $3000 kitchens come to mind. I think the idea is brilliant for a few reasons.

  1. You can buy, warehouse and deliver a limited inventory which drives down overall costs.
  2. By limiting the product, you can perform more jobs each month, which increases top line revenue.
  3. Any upgrades are premium-priced, which helps with margins.
  4. Easily marketed
  5. More jobs going at the same time

I have to imagine this can work outside of the remodeling category too, but you have to be a bit more creative…and willing to say no to jobs that are not part of your company’s core competency. Tough to do in a bad economy, but still an idea worth considering to some degree.

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