7 Digital Marketing Strategies That Will Change Your Company!
When it comes to marketing for contractors and home service professionals, many business owners are lost. It’s not a bad thing! Marketing is difficult and you are focused on your trade. The good thing is, there are lots of marketing ideas that you can apply to your business.
We’ve implemented so many contractor marketing ideas, it’s insane! We generated hundreds of thousands of leads for contractors through digital marketing in the last 3 years. Because we have so much data, we see what works. And we’re about to share it with you… so strap in!
We are opening up the hood.. unleashing the secrets… don’t just take a glance at this, there are a lot of marketing nuggets in here that can help you grow your business through search engine marketing, content marketing, online marketing and email marketing. We also go through which ones make the most sense for you to focus on so you can grow your construction company.
When it comes to marketing for contractors, it can be extremely successful, but you have to position your contracting business correctly. Don’t just start a pay per click and expect it to be successful.. because everyone’s done it! Don’t just build a website and expect to get calls.. because everyone’s done it. You have to differentiate your small business, and here’s how!
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How do contractors get clients?
Usually contractors get clients in 4 to 10 ways depending on their level of sophistication. Here are the main ones!
- Referrals from other customers
- Submitting Bids and responding to requests
- Other General Contractors
- SEO
- Adwords
- Networking Groups
- Facebook Marketing
- Lead Generation
- Print Advertising
In the article below we are going to detail all of the ways we answer the question, How do you market a contracting company.. And how we’ve found success for our clients. Here’s a hint. It’s all about ROI!
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Digital Marketing Keys To The Kingdom For Contractors
Professional Construction companies are amazing. They have the skills and talent to take a vision and make it a reality right before your very eyes but promoting a small business can be tricky. So let’s make sure you’re implementing the right contractor marketing ideas so you can crush it and make your jobs a sight to behold.
1). Optimizing Google My Business (GMB) For Contractors
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Lot’s of marketing companies bring the fluff, but let’s be honest, you can acquire new customers just from having a google my business that’s set up the right way. It’s an essential part of SEO.. Don’t forget it!
In a nutshell, Google My Business is a FREE content management system for your business that allows you to list all of your information. We are going to spend the most time on this because this is something every contractor should be taking advantage of. Google directs a TON of traffic for local business to Google My Business and it is arguably the most important platform for Contractors in every industry, including concrete coating, epoxy flooring and industrial flooring contractors to get new leads. A GMB listing showcases business information like your address, contact information, and reviews. When people search for your business, products, or services on Google Search or Google Maps, Google will display the information from your My Business account found at https://www.google.com/business/. This helps businesses increase visibility among local Google users. Google my business is an efficient and extremely useful tool for businesses.Here are some ways we have found success in optimizing and ranking your GMB listings to get into the top 3 (referred to as Map Pack).
- Optimizing Google My Business Pictures
- When posting your images to your business page you should use high quality photos that you take at the job site. Believe it or not, google knows the difference between your pictures and stock photos. They want photos taken on a real device such as DSLR camera, smartphone, or other cameras. If you cannot get images for the business for whatever reason, get pictures of the city and area.(Lower quality lack luster photos will diminish the user experience, it’s the same concept as wearing flip flops to a business meeting vs dress shoes).
- Make sure you have pictures in every category that google provides. These photos should showcase the inside of your business and the products you sell to tell people. Google recommends you add photos in JPG or PNG format with a minimum resolution of 720 x 720 pixels and between 10KB and 5MB in size.
GMB Business Site For Contractors and Construction Companies
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- One of the features that come with our GMB listing is a free GMB business website. This website will automatically pull in information from our GMB listing to populate the site.
- The GMB Business site is different from a Google site, and just because it auto-populates information from the GMB listing doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do to optimize it.
- We can access our business site from the GMB dashboard on the left menu under the website.
Primary Button
- The primary button is the most important call to action for the business site because it is right in the top header of every page and usually the first thing that anyone will see. There are six options for the CTA – Call Now, Contact Us, Get Quote, Make Appointment, Message Us (SMS), Message Us (WhatsApp).
- We prefer to use the call now button because it is simple and converts really well. Call Now doesn’t necessarily achieve the conversion either, but does put someone from the business in a position to close the sale far better than an email or text message does since the potential customer can ignore email and text responses. We believe having a captive audience on the phone is the best option.
Add a Detailed Business Description
You will need to have a detailed description. To make your description as effective as possible, you will need to incorporate the keywords customers use to find your business or products and include a unique mission statement as well. Be very thorough with your description, this helps customers understand and have an easier time on your page.
Utilize posts to showcase your products. Posts allow you to showcase a product name, type, price, and CTA button, including a “Book,” “Order Online,” “Buy,” “Learn More,” “Sign Up,” and “Call Now” button. You can either set a dollar amount for your price or a price range. Having an optimized google my business listing is the best way to make sure you show up for many internet users seeking what your business offers.
GMB Posts For Contractors And Construction Companies
GMB posts are extremely helpful in ranking your google my business. You can link them back to your website and they also automatically post to the free google my business website that we just set up. We usually create custom graphics and post at least once per week. Here is an example of one of our GMB posts.
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2) Mobile Friendly Website Design For Contractors and Construction Companies
Most Americans (96%) now own a cellphone of some kind, you are going to want to make your website mobile friendly. When a website is hard to use people tend to get frustrated quickly and move on. Here are some things to keep in mind when thinking about mobile:
- Your website should be easy to use with little VERY easy calls to action. This will make sure your customers can easily click a button and talk to you.
- This can make a huge impact on your digital marketing strategy out of the gates is to optimize for user-friendliness. We have literally seen website leads DOUBLE sometimes just from making forms easier to fill out or numbers easier to call. This can be a huge benefit to include items on your site such as click-to-call or instant chat features, a page for testimonials and photos of past work, and anything else that keeps your customer-engaged on your website.
- As of the most recent 2020 Google update, the mobile website is what google first looks at and indexes, so it has to be easily navigable from a mobile perspective. It WILL affect your rankings.
- Most of the information you need is on the first page, so you do not have to click through 1000 tabs to figure out what you need.
- Make sure you are upgrading you are your blog and providing great informative content to keep readers educated.
- Make it Trustworthy and aesthetically pleasing without any spacing issues. In fact, it mentions on service titan that a mobile-friendly web design will keep users on your page for a longer period.
- Your website needs to be fast: The average customer expects a web page to load in three seconds or less.
- Make it functional: Websites should be properly coded for SEO, which means adding structure to the site with metadata such as schema, optimized images, and title and meta tags. Add things like cost calculators and even virtual reality to make things really pop.
- It needs to be mobile-friendly: 57% of all U.S. online traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets. Having a site that is optimized to be mobile-friendly is a must.
- It needs to be secure: 94% of the sites on the first page of Google are HTTPS, which is not a surprise since Google has confirmed that they favor HTTPS sites.
- Have the right website content and structure it the right way and you’ll see great business growth!
3) SEO is A Great Way To Find Exponential Long Term Growth
So you have a website, great, now what? Maybe you’re wondering, why did I pay for a website if it doesn’t get me business. The truth is, if everyone could just build a website and rank it #1, There would be millions of websites in position 1. Not only is that impossible, but it’s also silly because google would go out of business, and no one would use it. Google NEEDS to show the best search results, same with bing and yahoo. If they give bad results that don’t have good information, consumers will start using a different product. To avoid a digital marketing disaster like being on page 2, your first priority after creating a website should be to perform search engine optimization (SEO) and local SEO.
Actualy, according to Ahrefs, one of the most popular traffic tracking softwares on the internet, “90.63% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google.” Most websites NEVER get any traffic. So to get your to be found by potential clients, takes work.
Each month, consumers in the U.S. perform more than 1.6 million monthly searches for contractors and general contractors.. Here are some ways to make sure you take a portion of that search volume:
- SEO is everything for local business. EVERYTHING.
- We put GMB first because it’s the foundation for SEO but without solid SEO and site structure, you won’t show up on search. This is the crux of what we do and how we make all of our clients so much money.
- SEO is the process of adding content to your website, structuring it appropriately for user experience and search engines and also earning backlinks from other reputatable websites.
- We have developed a list of 7,000 websites over the years that we post content on and get links for our clients. It works. It’s in depth but it works when done the right way. This is by far the best marketing tactic that we go over in this article for business owners to explode their growth.
- You can view our SEO frequently asked questions to learn more about the process of SEO and how to do it right for the construction industry.
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4) Linkedin Marketing Construction Companies
Understand your target market!! Just posting on facebook or social media marketing won’t actually get you clients! Linkedin is a social network that focuses on professional networking and career development. Linkedin is a tool that you do not want to sleep on. You can use Linkedin to connect with commercial customers. Here’s how it’s done:
- First, purchase linkedin sales navigator. It costs about $80 per month unless you pay up front annually.
- Choose exactly what type of commercial customer you want to get in contact with, for instance
- Restaurant kitchen owners
- General contractors
- Industrial manufacturers.
- Do a search for one of those industries
- Connect with everyone on that list.
- You can use automation to do with www.dux-soup.com
- After you connect to send a personal message to everyone you connect with
- Don’t be salesy. This is an initial introduction. You should let them know who you are and what you do and ask them a thoughtful question to engage in a dialogue. The goal here is to start the conversation, not to pitch the person immediately, or they will never respond.
5) Reputation Management
As a company you want to make sure you are managing your reputation. Specifically, a few things to keep up are addressing potentially damaging content, using customer feedback to try and solve problems before they damage your reputation. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Have an automated system for sending texts and email requests for reviews once a job is completed
- Your email and text messages should forward to a landing page that requests a review
- You should be able to choose the platform you are receiving a review on
- It’s important to have reviews on multiple platforms including google, Facebook, BBB and Yelp at a minimum
6) Video Explainer Videos For Contractors and Home Service Providers
Video Marketing is one of the best forms of marketing. Research proves that video content marking is worth its weight in gold! In fact, a 2020 report from Wyzowl.com found:
- 89% of video marketers say video gives them a good ROI.
- 83% of video marketers say video helps them with lead generation.
- 87% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website.
- 80% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales.
- 95% of video marketers plan to increase or maintain video spend in 2020.
Explainer videos work great as sales collateral. If you create a short 1 minute video explaining the benefits of all of your different flooring solutions, it can be used to send to potential clients after the first interaction with them. Businesses also need easy sales collateral to send to potential customers when they call. You can also use Sales collateral comes in different types. An organization should aim to develop a variety of materials that target every stage of the buyer’s journey. Here is an example of a really well done sales video. Full disclosure, we did not make this video, but we think it’s great. The owner of this company must have his head on straight.
7) Sales Collateral That Works For Contractors
- Whitepapers – whitepapers play an essential role in building brand image, spreading expertise, and prospecting as well as generating leads.
- Case studies – these help companies to impress their potential buyers with the work they have already done.
- FAQ cheat sheet – this assists a company to deal with any questions that might arise from customers regarding their products. This should also go on your website because it will tell google you know what you are talking about and will help move consumers along before they even talk to you.
- Buyers guide – buyers guides can be targeted at primary decision-makers, and they are an important part of sales collateral. Sales representatives can use these guides to help push their deals. This can be in the form of a video so it is more easily digestible for the customer
- E-newsletters – these are best for online B2B marketing strategies and can be a beneficial lead generation tool, as well as help in developing relationships with potential customers.
- Email templates – even though emails are not good for every prospect, it is always important for sales representatives to have an email template ready. You can have a template that automatically sends out to your customers after the first call with your explainer videos attached. When developing an email template, ensure that you carefully draft the subject lines, email opening, body and the signature. Also, do not forget to change the email content/video according to the requirements of each prospect.
Ask For A Referral (Not Digital Marketing Related)
As the owner, manager or sales rep for a company you have to take responsibility for your own destiny. These digital marketing tips can be extremely helpful but they shouldn’t be your only source of business and 100% relied upon. We tell everyone that we work with that you have to take responsibility, join networking groups, hire a sales team.. Go get it. For instance, you can also grow you business just by asking your current customers for referrals. “Our business runs based on referrals, if you enjoyed working with us, the best compliment you can give is referring us to some of your friends or colleagues. Do you know anyone right now that needs work done?” Done, it’s as simple as that. Practice this and live it.
Summary Of Marketing Strategy
In Conclusion, if you are trying to grow your contracting company, there are many ways to do it. Here’s the biggest trick.. Just start marketing. In our opinion it’s impossible to do marketing the wrong way because if you are marketing and answering the phone… You are better than 90% of the other businesses out there. Grant cardone said it first but we subscribe to it.
THE BEST KNOWN BEATS THE BEST EVERYTIME. Get noticed, get attention. Start marketing. You will have a learning curve and might go through a few companies but ultimately, you haveto start marketing in one form or another unless you always want to be a freelancer. Marketing and just getting started is the key. We have seen great results and have helped contractors double, triple and quadruple the size of their business from putting these marketing ideas into action. Brand North considers itself a partner to contractors.
We have worked with over 50 construction contractors and have done everything from marketing strategy, search engine optimization seo, local seo and at the end of the day, your takeaway from this article should be that marketing is great. There are tons of different strategies that can be implemented based on your revenue and growth projections, but marketing campaigns work and understanding marketing and becoming a student of marketing strategy will get you to the next level.
We’ve generated over 100,000 leads in the last 2 years for contracting, home remodeling, concrete and epoxy flooring. We **** working with contractors and helping them grow their business because we are so confident that we can help make a difference. We hope that you will consider us when you are ready for the next phase of growth.
