Many contractors put their clients at the end of the line when it comes to marketing when they should be doing the complete opposite. This also applies to many contractor business owners. Contractor marketing is crucial to help you grow your business. In this article, we dive into some effective contractor marketing strategies that will help you get on the road to success. 

“Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.”
– Joe Chernov

Business owners tend to make the assumption that marketing is simply endorsing products and services to any person they come across. However, this megaphone marketing technique is outdated and not quite effective.

Currently, marketing is centered around putting your customers at the forefront of your priority list. Instead of trying to market your products and services, focus on selling how your product can solve the problems of your clients and how it can benefit them.

Marketing is an investment – invest your marketing efforts in showing how your products can enhance the lives of your clients.

Keep two things in mind when contractor marketing:

1. Sell the benefit of your product or service to your consumer
2. Make sure you offer the benefit to a targeted audience

Those are just two tips on how you can improve your marketing for your contractor business. We have much more to offer than that. Continue reading to find our tips, tricks, and marketing strategies to help your contractor business generate more leads and make more sales.

As we’ve mentioned above, contractor marketing is an investment. It’s a long and ongoing process of putting in the effort for your contracting business.

As years go by, consumers are becoming more educated, conscious, and smart about their buying decisions. They will do their research before hiring any contractors in their local area, whether that be through the internet or by asking a friend.

With that in mind, competition is more stiff. You really have to put your contracting business out there and market the hell out of it to get the customer’s trust and attention.

In order for you to do this, you’re going to have to do some research. Marketing will require you to hit the books, or, in our day and age, do some customer research on Google.

Gain some insight into your buyer’s wants, needs, problems, challenges, and things your contracting business can do to make their lives easier.

Create a customer persona so you know who your customer is, when and where to sell to them, and what messages trigger them to buy.

Once you have this information, it gets easier to target and sell your services to the right audience.

Aside from the obvious benefit of gaining more leads and sales from marketing, there are a few more benefits that will convince you to start investing more time into your marketing plan.

• It educates – Marketing offers business owners, like yourself, a chance to let people discover your business and services. Customers will want to know more about your brand before buying or acquiring your services. They need to understand what you’re selling, who you are, why they should choose you, and what they gain from working with you. Marketing is the perfect chance to communicate your value proposition in a fun way.
• It’s sustainable – Marketing is sustainable because it keeps your business fresh in people’s minds. Marketing is something you have to work on everyday to maintain your presence and develop a healthy relationship with your consumers. You get to create relationships through marketing, and just like any relationship, you’re going to have to work on it consistently for it to thrive.
• It grows – Marketing will help your business grow. The customers you have now should be your main priority, but it wouldn’t hurt to expand your customer list. Marketing will help you achieve that. Engaging with new people online through social media or email campaigns will not only strengthen your relationship with your current customers, but also gain you new ones.

You may think this year isn’t really the best time to invest in contractor marketing, especially because of COVID-19’s impact on the economy. It’s easy to assume that people aren’t really looking for contractors to hire these days.

However, it could be that the reason you aren’t getting many customers is because you don’t have a proper digital marketing strategy in place.

There are 1.6 million online searches for contractors every month, which shows how COVID-19 isn’t stopping your target audience from searching for businesses like yours.

A great digital marketing strategy can put you ahead of the competition and get you customers even while you’re sleeping.

Are you ready to grow your contractor business? Read on below to get started.

It all starts with a goal, without one you’re headed nowhere. Your marketing strategy needs to have a clear objective. List down what you want to accomplish like your revenue goal, number of sales, target area, time frame, etc.

All these things need to be defined in order to create campaigns and strategies around that goal.

Setting your contractor marketing budget is a crucial step to creating a marketing strategy. You can’t and shouldn’t spend money you don’t have, but you also can’t create an effective marketing strategy without spending.

Allocate a budget for your marketing efforts by:

1. Determining Your Revenue Target – This ties in with the first tip. Create goals. Set a goal you can work towards and ask yourself: how much money you want to make, how much you want in sales, or what your overall goal is.
2. Allocating a Percentage of Your Revenue Goal – The next step is figuring out a percentage that makes sense for you and that will help you hit your revenue target. The percentage that works well for companies and clients is between 10-20% of total gross revenue. We suggest allocating half of the percentage towards paid ads and the other half towards experienced marketers, like us, who can do the work for you.
3. Determining the Marketing Strategies That Work Best for Your Business – Now you can start looking into what marketing activities you can do that make sense for your contracting business and your goals. Just make sure that you’re spending your budget on the right campaigns.

Once you’ve set a budget you can start listing down possible marketing channels. It’s important to be extra strategic with tis step. Think of which marketing channels will benefit you the most before doing your research.

List how you got customers in the past. Was it through your website? Social media? Ads? Add them on the list then rank them depending on the cost, resources, and time you used on each channel.

Some possible channels are:

• Website
• Ads
• Social Media
• Email
• Referrals

A fast-working and mobile-friendly website is a necessity, especially during trying times like these when everyone is relying on the internet for their daily needs.

Having a website establishes your presence and existence in the digital sphere. Without it, you don’t exist. Aside from that, your website will act as your 24hour sales representative. Potential customers can visit and engage with your business anytime, anywhere.

Studies show that at least 92% of consumers will look at websites when deciding on a contractor to hire. And at least 75% of these consumers will judge your credibility based on your website’s design and functionality.

If you don’t have one, now is the time to acquire the services of an agency to help you with your web design and development. If you do have one, make sure it’s optimized and up-to-date.

Your website checklist should ensure that your website is:

• Fast
• Functional
• Secure
• Optimized for mobile

A landing page is a page on your website that will help convert visitors into actual leads.

The landing page’s objective is to focus on one product or service and to get the customer to fulfill an action. Hence why the landing page has 1-3 call-to-actions. The goal could be to get a customer’s email or get them to download a pdf.

Landing pages usually have forms that allow you to acquire the user’s information in exchange for your offer.

A landing page is important because it:

• Generates leads
• Tracks data
• Offers clarity and purpose
• Encourages visitors to make a decision

Increase your conversion rates by creating a landing page that’s fast and has a clear goal. A landing page is where you can get straight to the point to communicate your value proposition to your prospective clients.

For a more in depth discussion of landing pages, click here.

Aside from a fast, functional and well designed website, you can also increase conversion rates by developing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

A website optimized for search engines has better chances of landing a higher rank and getting more organic quality leads. A great SEO strategy will also give you an advantage against your competitors.

A few ways you can improve your SEO strategy is by:

• Publishing relevant content with the right keywords.
• Regularly updating your content.
• Adding metadata such as meta titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords.
• Using alt tags.

Search engine algorithms, especially Google’s, are constantly changing. You’re going to need to keep up with the constant changes in order to get the top spot.

It’s going to take time and effort to learn everything involved in the SEO process. Instead you can hire a digital marketing agency like us to do it for you.

We’ve worked with dozens of businesses from different industries for all of their digital marketing needs.

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a faster way to get high quality leads compared to SEO. Therefore, publishing PPC ads can get contractors a spot on the first page of Google in a snap.

It’s a fast and effective way to get results. Additionally, you get to target your ads to people who are actually looking for your services.

Studies show that when people are looking online to buy a product, ppc ads receive 65% of all clicks.

PPC advertising works by only showing your ads to people who are actively searching for your services. Take the example above. I typed in keywords that triggered the ads to show on my search results.

To get your ad placed on that spot of Google’s search results page, you’re going to have to bid on certain keywords. For contractors it could be “contractor services”, “contractor for hire”, “licensed contractor Los Angeles”.

Aside from keywords, factors such as the quality of the landing page your ad links to and the relevance of the ad based on the searcher’s query will also affect your ad rank.

Whenever you type in a particular business or service on Google with the added location in the keywords like “Contractors in New York,” you’ll find an image of a map below the paid ads section with a few company listings with their specific location. That’s what you call Google’s local pack.

In order to get a spot on Google’s local pack, create a business page on Google my business. Once you have your page fill in all necessary information like your number, service hours, location, a link to your website. Another tip is to include reviews.

Our last suggested contractor marketing strategy is crucial. You need to know where your business is standing in a marketing point of view.

This is essential research because you’ll know what tactics to avoid and what to keep doing on your next marketing campaign.

Measure your leads and conversions, track your calls, ROI, etc. All of these can help your business grow.

There are many third party analytics and software trackers like Google analytics, Clicky, Cloud Flare, and KISSmetrics.

Looking for someone to help you with your contractor marketing? We can help! Just Digital is a digital marketing agency dedicated to helping businesses like yours grow and thrive.