Tricks to Free Online Marketing for Your Contracting Business
Regardless of your trade, the marketing efforts for building a contracting business are more involved than they’ve ever been before. These new styles of marketing your trade should not be overlooked because we need to keep up with trends, or else we fall behind; however, we cannot discount our traditional marketing efforts. If you want to keep your profits growing, use both Online and offline marketing strategies, and you’ll boost major payoffs for your contracting business. These tricks will get your Online and Offline marketing strategies reflecting the great work you do in your trade and create exponential growth in your business.
Don’t Stop with Traditional Marketing Efforts
Traditional marketing efforts for your trade should never be discounted and replaced solely with Online marketing. A contracting business is built on trust and word of mouth. Much of this trust is built within the areas that you work, and the relationships that you’ve built along the way. With integrity as your base, you can grow into a successful contracting business through referrals or many sorts. Building these sources of referral marketing by joining a local business referral group or your City’s Chamber of Commerce is a great strategy to grow your relationships.
Once you use these marketing strategies to build the customer base for your contracting business, you can then put money into print or radio advertisements to generate more sales. While you’re doing these sales, keep in mind that you will want to spend the money on the creation of a professional website. Few people look for their contractor in the phone book anymore, because they can Google numbers on a computer or Smartphone in a fraction of the time. You want to be the business that comes up when they do their search.
Social Media, the Easy Way
Your webpage for your contracting business must show up in the top few search results for potential customers to chose your business over a competitor. Once you have more money to pump into your advertizing campaigns, you can sink it into paying a computer nerd to bump up your SEO, thus bumping up your search results. Until that point, there are some simple techniques that you can use to help bring targeted traffic to your website. Best of all, they’re FREE.
Contractor’s use for Social Media
Start up your own Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest pages for your contracting business. Once you’ve got these sights up and running, add targeted people to your pages. Once you have a following, the next step is to offer good information to your followers so that you can begin to build a trusting relationship with these individuals. Make sure you link your pages to your website to generate organic traffic to your site.
Blogs
Blogging and tweeting are great ways to post fresh, informative content to all your pages and followers. Google, also really likes to see fresh content, and will rank your contracting website higher on the list if you have a blog with a lot of content on your website.
Staying In Touch
Staying in touch is integral in a contracting business so that your trade doesn’t get lost in the mix. Offer email newsletters to your past clients. These newsletters can detail new developments in your business, links to informative blog posts, deals, or ‘thank you’s. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers for a referral of someone they know who your contracting services could benefit.
Offer Something the Other Guys Aren’t
Within your sales promo for your contracting business, that can either be done via blog posts, email marketing campaigns or through your website, you will generate more sales by offering something that your competitors aren’t. You can offer incentive programs such as discounts to customers who ‘like’ your Facebook page, or who refer you new customers. Giving customers something for free, whether it be advice, a service or a discount on future service will give them incentive to use your contracting business again.
Another way to build customer relationships in your contracting business is to remind customers of your integrity to your trade. Many contractors give binders to their customers showing past work so they know the quality of trade work that will be performed in their home or business.
Advertise that You are Fully Insured
It is also integral to show your customers that you are fully insured. Some customers do not understand the liability involved with uninsured contractors entering their homes to do work. Certification stickers are offered to all tradesmen who use a neoprene non-slip overshoe over their safety boots because you must wear your safety boots at all times on a jobsite to be covered under their policies. This offers your customers an added sense of security that you will not track in dirt and mud into their homes, nor will they have to worry about liability, because you wear your safety boots on the jobsite.
Any benefits that you offer in your business should be clearly displayed to your customers, so that they can make educated choices about choosing you as a trusted contractor who they feel comfortable referring to their friends and family.
