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

Technorati Tags: Online Marketing, Social Media

Welcome to the ultimate small business marketing resources website. If you’re a small business owner… you’re in the right place. Grab a cup of coffee, relax, and take a look around.

There is a whole vault of resources here to help you improve your marketing skills.

• Free report: Marketing Overview.
• Guide to internet marketing.
• The Marketing Manual for Today’s Information Age.
• Educational videos.
• Audio tutorials.
• Hundreds of informative blog posts on marketing for small business.

So feel free to take a look around and see if you can find that one valuable tip you can use today to land that next project!

Technorati Tags: Construction Marketing

A Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign is an excellent way to get instant, targeted traffic to your website.

In fact, recent marketing studies have shown that potential customers who click on Sponsored Links on Google are more likely to make an immediate decision to purchase.

With our PPC campaign management service, you can control your own budget, and know what you can expect from day-to-day.

Benefits of PPC Management:

• You pay for your clicks at cost.

• No mark-up, just one flat monthly fee.

• We build you an asset that you own (your own Adwords campaign with a high Quality Score.)

• Your cost per click gets cheaper over time as your Adwords campaign matures.

• It’s all hands-free, done for you.

• You can turn it on and off at will.

• You set whatever click budget you are comfortable with, and you can raise and lower it any time.

• You get weekly reports showing you where your leads/customers are coming from, click data, and more.

• You can call us any time and speak directly to us to resolve any issues.

Contact us for more information about starting your own PPC campaign.

FREE – Download our Pay-Per-Click Checklist (pdf) on how to manage your own Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click campaign. To download, click here.

Download your copy now.

Get a free Pay-Per-Click consultation from a Google Adwords Qualified Individual.

Technorati Tags: Construction Marketing, Google Adwords, Pay-Per-Click

Where They’re Still Building Strong in the US.

In this recent article from BusinessWeek, we get the inside scoop on America’s 20 Strongest Building Markets.

Some are due to recent storms, some because of an influx of population; and yet others are due to factors such as recovery funds and even *GASP* a strong economy.

Builders: If you’re miserable where you are and your market is in the tank for the foreseeable future…do you ever think about picking up and moving to where the action is?

Those of you who live in these areas are cursing me right now. But, well, sometimes you just have to take matters into your own hands and take some action, right?

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Builder Marketing, Construction Jobs, Construction Marketing

If you are trying to master your marketing because you want to grow your construction business, you’ve come to the right place.

This blog is a vault of resources that you can use to get your marketing plan humming along nicely, so you can spend your time focusing on your actual business, and what’s important in life. (Imagine that, right?)

Rather than pulling your hair out trying to find that next project, you can put a marketing system in place to help “automate the process” and get a steady stream of new targeted leads flowing in.

There are some great FREE resources available in the blog posts below. But don’t just take my word for it…read for yourself and decide. The goal here is to give you at least one marketing idea you can apply RIGHT NOW to your business to help you bring in new projects.

Technorati Tags: Construction Marketing Resources

Would you stay there and keep putting 20’s in until you ran out? Would you have your wife run and get you more 20’s? Would you take out a loan for as many 20’s as you could get?

Hmm.

OK, now, if a marketing consultant can make you 10 times the money your pay him….would you hire him?

How about 20 times?

Or more?

Just curious….

Offering, free of charge, both a Consumer Awareness Guide and a Fast Start Remodeling Planner, AtDesignRemodel provides real value up front, with no strings attached.

This is a perfet example of how to create trust and establish your company as a trusted advisor all at the same time.

Throughout these free resources, AtDesignRemodel’s John Clark shows his remodeling chops and gives away some of his valuable experience and industry wisdom for free. And this, my friends, is the new model of marketing. You cannot give too much value up front.

Some companies are reluctant to give away their knowledge and expertise up front because they fear they are “giving up their secrets.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. Customers do not buy your secrets, your experience, or your wisdom. They buy your services because they trust you, and they feel they get more just because they enjoy the experience of dealing with you.

So, by giving away some valuable information for free (Clark doesn’t even require an email address for his resources) you build instant trust and authority in your customer’s mind. And this is truly the single most important part of marketing; the battleground inside the customer’s head.

Technorati Tags: Addition, Bath Remodel, Builders, Cape Cod Remodeling, Cotractor, Kitchen