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The Times They Are a Changin’

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I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago called “It is Important to Eat Your Own Dog Food“. In it, I described the definition. In short, you have to sometimes take your own advice.

This is what I spent the holidays doing

And I decided I was going to make some changes here at Darren’s, one that I hope many of you will like.

I am going to focus on the smaller shops, the 1-10 person contracting companies, the ones that have to do everything, and I mean everything themselves.

I am doing this because I think this is where I can have the most impact. You see, smaller shops need the help I offer, while the 10+ man shops think they know it all already. And while many of them do well, they are not who my target audience here at Darren’s is. [Read more…] about The Times They Are a Changin’

5 Starter Tips to Advertising

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Advertising doesn’t have to be hard. Like construction, advertising is simply knowing what goes where and how. Unfortunately, many contractors don’t get the results they want (or need to stay in business) so this type of advertising fits into the square peg, round hole portion of our show. So to avoid that, here are 5 quick tips you can use when advertising your construction business.

1. Use your ad platform to work for you. In other words, let the newspapers, YP and radio or TV guys do your production for you. Believe it or not, they know what sells on their ad platforms.

2. Talking about your benefits vs. features always sells better. The reason is the benefit induces an emotional reaction to the product or service your company provides. [Read more…] about 5 Starter Tips to Advertising

Construction Marketing 2011: Want Better Results? 15 Questions You Need to Ask Yourself NOW!

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construction marketing 2011I spend a lot of time thinking. Sometimes I can sit for an hour just trying to work through a series of problems or questions in my head. I do this because once things are in action, they tend to take on a life of their own, so I want to make sure I have my ducks in a row before five or ten people get involved in a campaign.

It takes me this long because I know the process flow in my head that I use to formulate a campaign. Problem is, if you are a home-gamer trying to figure out your marketing you may not know exactly what you should be asking yourself when developing your campaign strategy for 2011.

I am here to help. So without further ado, I present to you, 15 things to ask yourself AS you develop your marketing strategy for 2011.

1. Obviously, you need to know who your target audience is, residential, B2B, or a combination of the two. Whatever it is, knowing who you are targeting will make it easy to put the rest of this puzzle into place.

2. Figure out early on in your campaign what you want your call to action to be. Things like “24 hour emergency service” or “same day service” come to mind, but whatever it is, make it about what your competition ISN’T doing in the market.

3. Ask yourself what are your convenience factors.

4. How many locations do you have or how far will you travel?

5. What are your high-profitability centers within your company?

6. What makes people confident in you and your services? “20 years in the area” or “family run business” are examples of confidence factors.

7. What makes you different? Put some time into this one since it really can be a deciding factor for home owners when they pick up the phone to either call you or your competition.

8. Additional or secondary lines of business – People may not know that you do roofs as well as windows unless you convey that message in your marketing.

9. Ask yourself why you are advertising – Is it to bring in new clients or customers – is it to protect old ones? Maybe you are carrying a new line or expanding into another service area. All of these come into play during the planning phase.

10. Where are you thinking about advertising? Where are you thinking of marketing? If you don’t realize there is a difference between the two, you need to call me right now!

11. Seasonality – is your product or service seasonal? When should you start marketing to make sure you hit the best time when clients or customers are ready to buy?

12. Co-op – Know what suppliers or vendors will be willing to help cover some of your costs BEFORE you create your ads, this way you don’t have delays if changes are needed due to co-op guidelines.

13. Customer demographics – Do men or woman hire you? Older or younger? This matters since you need to know where to place your advertising and how to come up with the right creative to make sure you hit the mark.

14. Headlines – Nothing in your advertising on any platform is more important. Spend plenty of time developing quality headlines.

15. Ask for help – You aren’t supposed to know it all. If you get stuck, talk to others (who are successful) with their marketing. Just don’t talk to your buddy who is sitting in a bar at 3 o’clock on any given day about his marketing, because it obviously isn’t working.

Photo Credit: Rogilde

Saturday Coffee Talk – Long-Tail Keyword Use for Construction Marketing

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The Saturday Coffee Talk question this week comes from Karl in Dallas. Karl asks what are long-tail keywords and how can contractors use them in their marketing online. So Karl, this is going to be hard, but I am going to try to talk about long-tail keyword use in less than 500 words. So here we go.

In short

In studies on long-tail keyword use, research has found that long-tail searches have a higher conversion compared to the more generic (and shorter) keywords. This means that long-tail keywords can be extremely profitable for contractors through a lower cost per action coupled with a higher return on investment.

The Long Tail History

The Long Tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy. Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

The distribution and inventory costs of businesses successfully applying this strategy allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The total sales of this large number of “non-hit items” is called the Long Tail.

Given a large enough availability of choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items (“hits” or “head”) against the other 80% (“non-hits” or “long tail”). This is known as the Pareto principle or 80–20 rule.

The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases. These phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but when taken as a whole, can provide significant targeted traffic that convert well.

In other words, most people search for the keyword “plumber” to get info, but search for “24 hour emergency plumber in Miami Florida” when they are ready to buy. The nice part about using long-tail keywords in a PPC campaign is that you can generally pay much less on a per click basis for long-tail keywords than you would for shorter, more generic keywords, but get a better conversion ratio.

Long-Tail Examples

Using the Google Keyword Tool, let’s take a look at some common searches:

Keyword Cost per Click & Monthly Searches

Plumber has 450,000 searches and costs $3.91 a click

Emergency Plumber has 14,800 searches and costs $5.30 a click

Plumber Miami has 1,900 searches and costs $4.92 a click

24 Hour emergency plumber in Miami Florida shows unknown searches but costs $.05 a click

Notice all the keywords have significant traffic (at a significant cost) except the “24 hour emergency plumber in Miami Florida” keyword. Trouble is, you also don’t know the search volume for that keyword either. But here’s the catch.

How contractors win using long-tail keywords

Don’t worry about how much traffic a keyword generates because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad! And since your cost is only going to be a nickel, then you might as well bid on it since the next closest keyword is 78 times more expensive than your long-tail keyword. Build yourself a solid list of quality long-tail keywords and you can generate enough cheap traffic every month to be a very happy plumber.

One word of caution

Don’t set up a campaign based solely on long-tail keywords. The reason is Google is evaluating you as a marketer just as much as you are evaluating them as a marketing platform. If your conversion ratios aren’t high enough, your overall quality score for the campaign can suffer as well as the quality score for your entire Adwords account, so be careful!  And by the way, I missed 500 words by about 146!

Construction Marketing Online – A Primer

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One of the things I think many contractors worry about when it comes to advertising their businesses online is the technology; hosting, websites, blogs, email lists, who the hell has time for it all right? Well, I am going to give you a short list of things to do so you can get your company online and in the faces of your clients or customers.

In full disclosure, some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, I get a few bucks if you sign up to use their service. I will designate these links by adding (aff) next to each one, but you should know I use each of these companies and would have no problem recommending them to my mom.  So, here goes.

Registrar – This is the company that will register your domain name for you or your business. For example, https://darrenslaughtercom.stage.site had to be registered before you could see it online. The 800 lb gorilla in the domain registration space and registrar for this site is GoDaddy (aff). The name may not ring a bell, but like them or not, the Super Bowl commercials sure will.

Hosting – Hosting is where the files for your site reside. Most sites can get away with a shared plan when they first launch, and one of the best shared hosting companies out there is HostGator (aff). HostGator is great for one reason…uptime. If you know your hosting company’s name it’s probably because your site is always down or you are having other problems with them. Now, I don’t know if HostGator is hitting the fabled five 9’s, or 99.999% uptime, but I have never had a problem with these guys and I have had hundreds of sites with them.

Once your site grows and you need something a bit more robust than shared hosting, take the next step and get a VPS setup. The company I use for this is KnownHost (aff). The entire organization is fantastic and they will even transfer your site files to their servers for you for free with minimal downtime. Best of all, their people are awesome!

After you have your domain registered and you have settled on a hosting company, you need to design the site. If you want to have a static site (not a blog) and don’t mind getting your hands dirty under the hood, then I suggest using a website software package called XSitePro (aff). There is a bit of a learning curve, but it really is great software and they have fantastic support and training. You need to understand that you are trading time for dollars, and you should know that you are not going to whip up your perfect site in a day, but you will be happy with the results.

If it is a blog you are after, nothing is going to beat WordPress. WordPress is a “blogging platform” or skeleton that is the framework of your site. If you aren’t sure what the difference is between a blog and a static site, do a Google search, there is plenty of info.

Once you have decided on a blog or a standard website, you then need to decide on a way to let your prospects stay in touch with you by adding them to your email list. Hands down, the best in the industry is MailChimp. The best part about MailChimp is their free accounts and deliverability. There are plenty of other options on the market, but if you want your email to actually find its way into your subscriber’s inbox, then MailChimp is the way to go.

Now that you have the makings of a proper site in place, it is time to figure out ways to get prospects to your new site and using your business. One of the easiest ways to do this is with Google Adwords. Nothing provides traffic to your site faster and cheaper than advertising your small business online with Adwords. A word of caution, if you don’t know what you are doing with Google Adwords, you can spend thousands before you realize what the hell happened, so get a free 5 day Guide to Adwords (aff) by Perry Marshall BEFORE you plunk down your credit card.

Domain name…check, registrar…check, site up on the net…check!

You are almost there, but there are a few more things you still need to do and one is to get yourself a cheap 800 number service. You might be saying to yourself that you can get along fine with your local number, but remember you are going global (or at least extending your local reach), and people may call you from places you didn’t even think existed, so you need to make it easy for them to reach you. The toll-free service I use is from a company called Grasshopper. They not only offer cheap rates and bundled minutes, but they can give your business that’s run out of your second bedroom a big company feel for less than $10 a month, so check them out.

Now, if you are not married to a desk all day and you need to stay in touch with the office, email and clients, then do yourself a favor by not getting sucked into the iPhone hype and get yourself a true business tool, the Blackberry.

And that’s it; you are well on your way to having your contracting business online and ready to advertise. Continue to embrace technology and watch how easy it becomes to stay in front of your customers and prospects.

Use OPM to Market Your Business

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I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails lately asking how much contractors should spend on advertising, which has led to an informal series of posts on the topic. But let’s face it, there’s no fun in watching ad budgets, you want to spend as much as you can to let the world know about your good name right?

Enter co-op advertising!

Thousands of manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers from almost every product you can think of in the trades sets aside a little scratch to give to contractors like you to be used in your construction marketing program. Co-op funding, short for cooperative, is second only to referrals as the best way to get new clients or customers for your contracting company, and even better if you are in startup mode.

Unfortunately, many of you either don’t know about co-op programs or how to use them to your advantage. Or maybe you didn’t even know that you had money available to you? Maybe your distributor told you in the past that you didn’t buy enough to qualify. Well, I am here to tell you, manufacturers want their products sold and you probably do have dollars waiting for your somewhere, you just need to start asking your suppliers.

What’s the downside?

Well, one of the disadvantages to co-op is that it is riddled with paperwork and is a bit of a pain in the ass to administrate. So if you suck on the paperwork side of the house, you better let someone else manage it, but don’t not do it. Using co-op the right way will give you an opportunity to move your company forward while using someone else’s nickel to do it. Just know that it’s going to take a bit of work, but in the end free advertising is free advertising.

How do you get paid?

Well, co-op programs are like snowflakes with all kinds of restrictions, but reimbursement typically takes the form in one of three ways (there are others):

  • Cash reimbursement — Provide proof to that your ads ran and your co-op vendor cuts you a check, easy peasy.
  • Discounted merchandise — You get a discount equal to the amount of your reimbursement applied to future product orders. Not as great as cash, but still pretty good.
  • Free product — Kind of the same thing as discounted merchandise, except here your entire order is gratis. Still not cash, but free product is as good as free advertising!

To me, it doesn’t matter what type of reimbursement I am getting from a supplier, it’s like finding cash on the street, and all I had to do was fill out some forms and follow a few guidelines. So the next time you go to the supply house or call your vendors, ask them what you have available to use, and do it quick, since a lot of co-op cash get forfeited at the end of the year and the meter starts all over again on Jan 1.

Be Careful of The Company Who Promises Page One on Google!

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I hear from contractors all the time AFTER they have shelled out serious coin to some SEO company promising page 1 of Google. Now, there are a hundred ways to get to the 1st page of Google, some legit and some not so much. But to STAY there requires time and effort, but mostly time. If someone guarantees that you will appear on the first page  of Google you need to come back here and play them this video!

About Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam.Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google.

In other words, Matt Cutts is a rockstar in SEO world!