1. What kind of return on investment can I expect with your services?

2. Will you charge me per click, per call, per lead, or on some other basis?

3. As an Adwords account matures, if managed properly, the account should get a better and better Quality Score, and thus cheaper and cheaper clicks relative to the competition, right? So, with your service, who owns the Adwords account? If we part ways down the road, who gets control of the Adwords account? Do you pass the cost benefit of a high quality score on down to us, or does that only benefit your company?

4. Do you offer phone call tracking? If we part ways, who gets the phone number used for the Adwords campaign?

5. What about landing page quality? Do you set up a new website for us and handle all issues with landing page quality? If not, will you guide us on whatever changes might need to be made to our website to help our Adwords campaign convert as well as possible?

6. If you set up a new website for us, who gets control of that website if we part ways? If you keep it, can you guarantee you will pull it off line? Or will it keep getting leads down the road that do not come to our business?

7. What else do we need to know in order to ensure the highest possible return on investment?

8. Do you have any specific success stories of businesses like ours getting a measurable return on investment?

9. How much do we need to spend per week to meet our revenue goals? How will we measure this a month from now after we’ve got the campaign going, and into the future from that point on? Because the only thing that matters to us is return on investment, so we need to discuss campaign accountability and tracking that will occur once we’ve signed on the dotted line, so we may as well determine this now, right?

10. What is a reasonable Click Thru Rate (CTR) to expect for a campaign like ours?

11. What is a reasonable average cost per click to expect for a campaign like ours?

12. How many clicks will that likely generate for us?

13. What is a reasonable conversion rate for that number of clicks? (Meaning, how many new clients is that likely to generate for us?)

14. If those numbers don’t pan out after a month or two when we can clearly see the results of our campaign, what will happen then?

15. Is our campaign likely to provide us with a measurable ROI right off the bat, or will it take a certain amount of time to show a return? How long?

That should give you a pretty good start.

Technorati Tags: Construction Marketing, Contractor Marketing

How to cut the fat & waste from your marketing budget and at the same time increase your sales by up to 30% in 90 days.

The business owners I talk to on a day-to-day basis are usually in one of three categories:

• Their business is OK but they want to do better.

• Their business is stagnant, flat-lined, no growth in sight.

• Their business is declining.

Where is your business today?

Here are some of the most effective local marketing techniques for service businesses:

1. How is the business handling existing traffic? Are people getting a warm friendly welcome and excellent follow-through? This is a VERY common problem. Everyone is so obsessed with Google traffic but then they have a site that won’t convert for squat, no clear compelling offer, and terrible phone answering infrastructure. A friendly voice goes a LONG way.

2. DATABASE: Does the business have automated follow-up to it’s database of customers? A fun, entertaining, engaging newsletter is cheap, extremely effective, and can foster referrals quickly. This can be automated. If I had a database of 100 clients as a builder and could only do one marketing effort, it would be this.

3. Sales training for all staff (or the business owner). More balls are dropped in this phase than anywhere else. Everybody thinks they are just naturally good at sales, but having a sales system is paramount.

4. Asking existing clients for referrals. Don’t offer anything in return, but then thank them and maybe send a little gift if they refer people. The single most effective thing a builder could do right now is just sit down in front of the phone and start calling past clients with the intent to get into friendly appreciative conversations and then ask for 3 names. You will call their friends and offer to come inspect their home for XYZ important preventative whatever. Or you could offer an educational lunch-and-learn on a topic of “How to Increase Curb Appeal” or “How to Maintain Your Home to Prevent Lost Home Value” or “Easy DIY Green Home Makeover” or something compelling. Have them come to your local library or Whole Foods or something and talk to them for an hour about your topic and then answer questions, and leave them with a nice newsletter or guide or book.

The above can be sold to cold prospects using a very similar script to the one on page 67 of Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes.

5. Differentiate or die: Create a USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Sounds cliche, but it is a MUST. Integrate USP with all Marketing material. Integrate with all staff, vendors, customers, etc… Add USP to business cards, invoices, letterhead, trucks, uniforms, etc…

“Marketing and innovation make money. Everything else is a cost.” -Peter Drucker

6. THEN you think about your website. MUST HAVE a lead capture and compelling offer as the PRIMARY FOCUS on the website. Model after this guy: http://www.vamedmal.com/

7. The money is in the list. Set up e-mail responder. Capture e-mails on website. Create auto responders. Professionally written e-mails. E-mails can be forever, unlike a home address. Implement drip campaign.

8. Off-site online marketing: Press releases are AWESOME for SEO. Video marketing and distribution (Traffic Geyser or Tubemogul), podcasts on Apple.com and blog talk radio interviews, publish a book on Amazon.com (VERY easy to do…only has to be 28 pages long), big-budget PPC on all three major search engines, banner ads, build links.

9. Joint Ventures can be the fastest way to huge opportunities. What organization has a large list of your dream clients? Find ways to add value and serve their members or clients, and they will promote you to their list. This is a HUGE opportunity.

10. Direct Mail: use the Dunning mailer method (see this video, skip to 1:00:51 to get right to it) to your dream neighborhoods. Most people try direct mail ONCE and then quit. Direct mail works like crazy used as a CAMPAIGN, rather than a one shot deal. The keys are, mail to your dream neighborhood, have great copy, and sequence the mailer properly. It’s a campaign, not a single promotion. Most businesses aren’t serious enough about how they approach direct mail, so they fail.

Anyway, those are some of the best things a business can do to get results. If you want to have a conversation with me about how you can do this for your own business, talking is always free. Fill out my contact form here, and we can schedule a phone call.

Technorati Tags: Contractor Marketing, HVAC Marketing, Plumber Marketing