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Marketing and Advertising

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.

Quick Tips for Contractors #2 – Pick a Number, Any Number

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Contractors ask me all the time how much they should spend on marketing, and I have answered the question in a couple of posts here at Darren’s. But this time I am going to make it simple – just pick a friggin’ number and start!

If you haven’t decided to set aside any amount of your gross sales to apply towards building your business, then what the hell are you waiting for? Pick something; $100 a job, 5% of gross a month, something. Just start doing something to assure your business is around not just next week or next year, but 5 years from now.

Who is Your Daddy, and What Does He Do?

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This is a guest post by Chris Spoerl, owner of Magic Pool Services in Orlando Florida. DISCLAIMER: As it will become obvious in a paragraph or two, Chris is a client of mine. Why I don’t know, since Chris has some pretty serious marketing chops himself. But none the less, I am happy to say he is a client and now a friend. While I appreciate his comments, I think the takeaway here is that once you actively engage in social media, many doors open that were once closed. Enjoy his post!

My kids ask me all the time what I do for a living.  I tell them that I clean pools.  This is a very simple answer to a complex question,  What I do, is market my business Magic Pool Services so that I can get more jobs, so I can keep growing my business.  A lot of small business owners get tied up in “working in their business” as opposed to “working on their business”.More

5 Reasons To Use How-To Articles for Contractor Marketing

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You have a lot of information locked away in that head of yours. Information (and skill) that people are willing to pay for dearly. Your job is to get that information and your skill into your prospects hands as often as possible.

That’s where writing How-To articles comes in…

Let’s say you are a remodeler, and you specialize in green building initiatives. You could kill multiple birds with one stone by creating How-To articles for consumers on how to become energy-efficient and save money around the house. Writing these types of articles will:

  • Expose prospects to your company, brand and message
  • Plant an impression in their minds about your business
  • Sets you up as an expert
  • Puts you above the pack when they are ready to buy
  • Increases web traffic over time to your site

So let’s break it down:

  1. Expose your company and message – How-To articles target the early stage shopper. I say that because as a marketer, I want to tell them what they need to do, then charge them to do it. Same thing with you. You want to give Mrs. Jones tips on cutting energy costs, but when it comes time to install new windows, you want her to hire you to do it.
  2. Plant an impression – Impressions are what make people buy over time. Unless you are a plumber and the crapper is overflowing, people need to be exposed to your message over time, so being seen by a prospect is a good thing and leads to new business over time.
  3. Sets you up as the expert – When you write enough How-To articles, people will position you as the expert in the topic you are talking about. You aren’t going to get there writing one article and being done with it, you need to spend time crafting yourself as the expert. The benefit to this is that over time, people will seek you out AND price will not be the primary topic of conversation, your skills will.
  4. Puts you above the pack – This one is obvious, if you are the expert who has positioned themselves properly in the marketplace providing consumers with enough impressions to develop a positive opinion of you, then you have moved yourself to the head of the pack above all of your slacker competition who are sitting around doing nothing to promote themselves.
  5. Increase web traffic – Having 5, 10, 50 short, 250 word articles on your website will increase your organic traffic tremendously over time. The more you write, the more traffic you will get, I promise.  And

And you don’t even have to be the best writer or a writer at all. You can use video to do the same thing. In fact, video How-To’s do a better job of teaching and will move you into “expert status” faster because people now have multiple touches or “impressions” of you and your company during the same video.

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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