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Contractor Marketing Simplified – 8X Your Leads Without the Hassle · Contractor Business Builder Podcast

0:00
Imagine getting a steady lead in your pipeline automatically
0:03
every week. New leads coming into your
0:05
pipelines, ideal clients, ideal projects, and you can get to
0:09
choose. You get to set your prices.
0:10
You're not scrambling or chasing down leads or going through
0:15
that. No, worst case scenario where
0:16
you look at your pipeline and it's empty and you're closing up
0:19
projects and you've got nothing on the books moving forward.
0:22
So that's not where we want to be.
0:23
Wanna have lots of projects that you can enjoy your life, Get out
0:27
on the lake or to the beach or whatever you enjoy doing with
0:30
your friends and family and not have to be stressed or worried
0:33
about leaves Leads sound good? So the first thing I'm going to
0:37
mention here is a key mindset shift of often as business
0:41
owners, we wanna grow as fast as possible and wanna scale and
0:45
that means more projects, larger projects, more revenue.
0:48
But this often leads to a very abrupt dead end and overwhelm
0:53
and stress and things falling apart.
0:56
The key idea that you want to get through here and the
0:58
difference between, you know, facts and myths is the fact is
1:01
what you want to be doing is lowering your production and
1:05
increasing your demand. So you always want to make sure
1:08
that demand for your service is much higher than production.
1:11
Because if you're always meeting demand, you're going to go
1:14
through those busy, busy seasons and maybe you get 5 or 6
1:18
projects or 10 projects and life is good.
1:21
And then all of a sudden things slow down and now you've hired
1:25
these guys, you maybe hired some office staff or project manager
1:29
and now you don't know what to do because you're scrambling for
1:31
work. You end up lowering your prices.
1:33
You end up challenging or laying guys off and it's just not a
1:35
great cycle and it's, you know, very stressful and it says boom
1:38
and bust mentality that goes on. Of course, there's gonna be ups
1:40
and downs in economy and demand as far as seasonal and things
1:44
like that. But that's why you want to make
1:46
sure that you're doing everything you can to maximize
1:49
demand for the right types of projects.
1:50
And you have a nice cap of production, however many
1:53
projects at one time that is for you.
1:56
And then your scheduling projects farther out or you
1:58
being more selective with clients to be more profitable,
2:01
it is almost easier to do less revenue and be more profitable
2:06
than to try to do large revenue on small profit margins.
2:09
The company model works much better.
2:11
And it's much easier to run a company that's operating with
2:14
maybe a couple of projects on the go that are highly
2:16
profitable than, you know, a ton of projects that you're just
2:20
razor thin on margins and you end up typically losing money
2:23
or, or having hard times later on.
2:25
So just want to get that clear. I'm going to be going through
2:28
three key areas today. Three different things.
2:30
The first one is to double your leads, then to double the
2:32
lifetime value of those leads, and the last one is to double
2:36
the amount of project. So 2 * 2 * 2.
2:38
That's like a possible 8 times return that you can improve on
2:42
your current lead Gen. revenue. And then I'm also going to be
2:45
going over some common mistakes at the end just to make sure
2:47
that you're not sabotaging your success with with a few common
2:50
mistakes that I see. Everything good so far.
2:52
If anybody has a question, feel free to drop it in the chat is
2:56
the best way. So just drop it in the chat and
2:58
I'll make sure to check that every now and then if you have
3:00
questions. And we'll do a little Q&A at the
3:02
end as well. So first thing with lead
3:04
generation made simple, you wanna double leads.
3:07
Whatever many leads are getting, we can double it.
3:09
And there may be some of these that you're doing, but you need
3:13
to be able to optimize these. And there's probably a few of
3:15
these things that you're not doing where it would be fairly
3:18
easy over the next couple of months to to be able to double
3:20
leads. So first one is search engines.
3:23
AI is slowly changing this, but Even so, people are still going
3:26
to search engines to find your company.
3:28
So you want to be there and you want to be prominent.
3:30
Google is the big one, number one numero Uno.
3:33
Google is, I don't know exactly, but 80 to 90%, I'm sure upsurge
3:37
traffic goes through Google and Bing would be second and I
3:40
believe Yahoo is third. So these are the three you wanna
3:43
be listed on with your company. You wanna get a business profile
3:46
on each of these. And for Google specifically
3:49
reviews info and pics, that's what it's looking for.
3:52
So First things first, how many reviews do you have compared to
3:55
the rest of the other contractors in your niche?
3:58
The more reviews you have, there's other things as well,
4:01
but that is going to be a big differentiator of kind of where
4:03
you land in the search results. And one thing to remember is
4:06
it's not just the number of reviews, it's also the
4:09
frequency. So just because you maybe think
4:13
like, oh, I've got 20 reviews now or 30 reviews or five
4:16
reviews or whatever, that should be good.
4:18
Your next guy over is, is getting maybe 5 new reviews
4:21
every couple of months and you're getting maybe 2A year.
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They're just going to outpace you.
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So it's, it's not just a number that you're trying to reach, but
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it start thinking about frequency of how many reviews
4:33
can I get? No per month or you can get one
4:35
per job, but how many, you know, ideally you want to do every one
4:38
their job for reviews. Just as you've got elites
4:41
pipeline for, you know, new lead comes in where they at?
4:44
We do like a home console. Did we do an estimate budgets,
4:48
preconstruction, whatever it is, you've got that pipeline for
4:51
leads. You should also have a pipeline
4:53
for reviews. So a client completes a project.
4:56
How many of those clients you know, did you send them an
4:59
e-mail to review? Have you texted them?
5:01
Have you called them? If you asked them where are they
5:03
at? Have they written review?
5:05
Yes, then you know they're out of the pipeline and it's a
5:07
success. If they haven't yet, continue to
5:09
follow up or ask them you know why they haven't.
5:11
You don't need to hound them by keeping track of that.
5:14
We'll give you an idea of having a little bit of a system to get
5:17
better reviews and also just how many completed projects turn
5:21
into reviews for you. So getting set on search engines
5:25
very important. And this is a continual thing.
5:28
It's not just got to get it set up, but every project get a
5:31
review, update your info if there's new info and every
5:34
project put new pictures on Google.
5:36
So the more information, the more pictures and reviews and
5:40
everything, more likely Google has to to rank you higher.
5:43
The 2nd place that we're gonna help you double your leads and
5:46
where you wanna be looking is listing sites.
5:48
So there's lots of different business directories and places
5:51
to list your business online. And the reason you want to be
5:54
there is first, so that when a client searches your company,
5:58
they're going to get this screen in Google or whatever search
6:01
engine and it's going to have all these different things.
6:03
And what you want is those top 510.
6:06
Ideally, that first page to all be your business should be your
6:10
website, your Google profile, your LinkedIn page, your
6:13
Facebook page, maybe an article that was written, written about
6:16
you, it's somewhere else or a podcast that was done with you
6:19
or whatever. So you wanna be totally, you
6:21
know, staked out on that first page of Google if someone
6:24
searches your specific business name.
6:25
And the reason for this is any referrals, anybody looking to do
6:29
some research on you, they want to trust you.
6:31
If you can hit all those marks, they're they're going to know
6:34
legitimate business. You're definitely out there.
6:36
You've been around for a long time and it builds a lot of
6:39
trust. So just a few listing sites
6:41
here. You're Chamber of Commerce, the
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local, you know, city that you're in or town or county or
6:46
whatever. You got to have a Chamber of
6:47
Commerce. You could even do a few Chamber
6:49
of Commerce around if there's, you know, multiple cities that
6:51
you that you service house is a good one.
6:53
Angies list as well. A lot of these will have other
6:56
services like software or lead generation or or things like
7:01
that that may just letting you have your in.
7:04
So they will have X. They don't like additional
7:07
things that they're gonna try to sell you, which is whatever
7:09
normal. But most of them have a free
7:11
service where you can just list your your website and that's
7:14
what you want because it creates a link to your website.
7:16
It builds trust and it gets you in search rank results even if
7:19
it's on someone else's website. So that's the reason behind it.
7:22
I'm not big on paying per leads on these lead Gen. sites.
7:26
You can try it if you want. I've found very few people with
7:29
success on that. But the purpose here is just to
7:32
get yourself listed, not to do like pay for leads, but you do
7:36
you. If if you want to, to try some
7:38
of those services. The 3rd place that you can help
7:40
you double your leads is social media.
7:43
So at the very least you should be on it like 3-4, five
7:47
different social media platforms and you don't have to be posting
7:52
every single day or have all this like, you know, big, huge
7:56
branded profiles and everything like that.
7:58
But at the very least you should have a profile.
8:00
It should have your company name.
8:01
You should have your information, your website again,
8:04
because that website is going to link, you know, to your what
8:07
that website link is going to go to your website, which helps for
8:10
SEO that also helps people find you know, more information about
8:13
you. And what I suggest is posting
8:14
weekly. So I think without much
8:16
involvement, it's pretty easy to post weekly.
8:19
Do a quick video of the site or a quick picture of the work
8:21
you're you're doing. I'll share, you know, an article
8:24
or something like that. Just set out a weekly post and
8:27
it doesn't have to be you. If you've got an office admin or
8:30
somebody that helps you with some of the back end stuff, they
8:32
can probably handle this. You give him the picture, they
8:35
do a quick write up, you know, with AI and stuff like that,
8:37
it's easier than ever. But at least you're somewhat
8:40
current. And if someone does find your
8:41
site, they go to your Facebook page, you know, they're not
8:44
seeing posts from like 3 years ago and it's like, you know,
8:46
they still open or what have they been doing the last three
8:48
years, right? So just post start on a cadence
8:51
that works for you. If it's monthly, make it
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monthly, but I would suggest at least weekly.
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And then the fourth thing that I'm going to mention is the easy
8:57
leads action list. So this is a downloadable
9:01
resource and I'm just going to put it in the chat here.
9:04
This is specifically for people that came to show up alive to
9:07
the event today. Really appreciate you for
9:09
showing up live. So I want to do something extra
9:10
special for you. So if you can go to the chat,
9:13
click the link and then click download and you can download
9:16
this free guide that will help you.
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It'll give you step by step kind of instructions for how to set
9:21
these three things up. And then it's got about maybe 20
9:25
different sites that you can list your company on.
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And it's it's got it all there with links to to go set up
9:31
profiles and all those different listing things.
9:32
So use that resource after the training today and go list
9:35
yourself on those those different sites that we have for
9:38
you there. Alright, so by setting all this
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up and doing this in a regular fashion, it can help you double
9:44
your leads. But we're not going to stop
9:45
there. Of course, we're also want to
9:47
help you double the lifetime value of those leads.
9:50
So typically you've got a lead, you get a customer, and that
9:53
customer may do a project with you for $200,000.
9:56
Typically that's the lifetime value of a client.
9:59
They do 1 project with you and maybe they'll reach out to you
10:03
in the future. But typically for most
10:05
contractors anyways, they do a large renovation or home build
10:08
and maybe commercial projects might be repetitive.
10:11
But typically speaking, lifetime value is 1, maybe 2 projects
10:14
where a lot of people are, you know, leaking profits and
10:18
leaking leads is without having a proper e-mail marketing
10:23
campaign or sequence. I'm going through what that
10:25
looks like in a second. You've already put in the money
10:28
and the energy to bring these leads in, whether that's through
10:31
referral, whether that's your website, maybe that's paid ads,
10:34
whatever it may be, they've come, they've contacted you,
10:36
you've you've done the hard work to find that lead without a good
10:40
e-mail or nurture sequence, you're kind of letting them, you
10:43
know, go off on their own and probably not return.
10:47
So without this in place or in a good follow up sequence, it's
10:51
really you're, you're leaking leads and not, you're not
10:54
capitalizing on the people that already know your business and
10:56
you already have some trust built with them.
10:58
So what do you need to use for your e-mail marketing?
11:02
The tech stack that I would suggest is we have rapidly CRM
11:06
and if you go to rapidleadcrm.com, you can book a
11:11
demo with us and we can walk you through the software.
11:14
There's some other information on the website there that is the
11:17
one that I would suggest and just going to so should be my
11:21
suggestion. We can set up automations.
11:23
It's got a whole lot of stuff besides e-mail marketing.
11:25
Fantastic program. If you want something just free
11:28
and easy to get started with, I would recommend MailChimp.
11:31
MailChimp is a free option. You have to kind of click around
11:34
a little bit because they want to get you on a subscription,
11:36
but there is a free option last I checked and you're able to
11:39
send out campaigns. You can't set up the automations
11:41
and some of the more advanced stuff, but it'll get you started
11:44
with sending out campaigns to a list of people.
11:47
The first thing they are going to do is a reactivation
11:49
campaign, which essentially you're going to get the list of
11:53
past leads and clients from to be like a QuickBooks or if
11:57
you've got project management software anywhere where you've
11:59
got a list could be the contacts on your phone.
12:01
You can create a list of past people that reach out to you and
12:04
you're gonna just send them an initial e-mail.
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Hey, you know, we maybe haven't talked in a while.
12:07
Just wanted to send an e-mail to let you know about, you know,
12:09
whatever is going on. You could have some sort of
12:11
promotion if you want to is as far as like free consultation or
12:16
maybe a percentage off on, you know, preconstruction services
12:20
or whatever it may be, but you'll send out that
12:22
reactivation And then from there you set up a monthly newsletter.
12:26
So the nice thing with the monthly newsletter is you can
12:28
tie it in with your social media.
12:30
So you can send out the newsletter with whatever
12:32
information and you can reuse that same kind of information to
12:36
do as social media post. So I definitely like reusing
12:39
content across different mediums and different channels because
12:44
it's good information. So you don't have to recreate
12:46
the wheel on every, you know, different channel.
12:48
With the monthly newsletter, often you can do seasonal.
12:51
So whether you know, maybe it's like a fall thing or summer
12:54
thing, could be a holiday that that's happening, Thanksgiving
12:57
or whatever. So you can use the seasonal
12:59
thing, or you could use something, maybe something new
13:02
happened in the company you hired some, you know, a new
13:04
person that you want to highlight.
13:05
Or maybe you just completed a, you know, nice really project
13:08
that you want to highlight. So whatever you want to put in
13:11
the newsletter when you're sending out an e-mail, try to
13:13
think of it like what value does this have to the recipients?
13:16
Are they learning some new information?
13:18
Is there some entertainment value?
13:20
Are you keeping them informed about something that's important
13:23
to them? You know, are you talking about
13:25
maybe security or ways to save money on on their home builder
13:29
renovation or things like this? Right.
13:30
So what's the value that you're providing?
13:32
The more value you can kind of pack into the e-mail, the more
13:34
likely they're gonna read it and want to read the next one that
13:37
you send. Making sense for everybody so
13:39
far. All right, so system us once
13:41
you've got this sort of set up, what you want to do is build a
13:45
system. So customize is again, with all
13:48
this lead Gen., maybe at the beginning you're doing yourself
13:51
because you want to learn it and you're maybe the only person
13:53
that can really handle it right now.
13:55
So what you want to do is build out a little bit of an SOP of
13:58
the, of the steps of how people should do this.
14:01
And you can definitely have someone else create these assets
14:04
for you as far as the content pieces and set up a bit of
14:07
systems so that you would probably review it before it
14:10
gets sent out. But as far as the creation, the
14:13
scheduling, putting things together, you can definitely,
14:16
you know, there's lots of good software online or you know,
14:19
probably also you you have somebody in your business that
14:22
can help handle it. Nurture campaigns are sort of
14:24
next level after the monthly newsletter and nurture campaign
14:27
is something where it'll be automated.
14:30
So the first time they reach out to you, no matter whether that's
14:33
phone call, e-mail to perform on your website, they will go into
14:37
an automation that then sends out like a welcome type e-mail.
14:41
Thanks for connecting with us. Here's, you know, some
14:44
information if you can give them like a free guide or something
14:47
about hiring a contractor or designing like thinking about
14:50
design for their new project, whatever it is.
14:53
And then you can have a nurture sequence where maybe over a
14:56
period of two weeks, you send note 3-4 different emails with
15:00
very, very specific, pertinent information that's highly
15:03
valuable and impactful for them. This keeps you top of mind and
15:07
it keeps them in the loop. And it, it portrays your company
15:10
as kind of the trusted advisor or the expert in the field.
15:14
If you're giving really good information during that nurture
15:17
campaign and nurture campaigns, you can schedule them out as
15:20
long as you want. Essentially, if you're doing the
15:22
monthly newsletter, you don't need much of A nurture campaign
15:25
because you're really only trying to hit the mark on that
15:27
first few weeks when there are new lead.
15:29
But you could essentially sequence this out and have like
15:31
your monthly newsletter B and nurture campaign.
15:33
It's just if you're doing seasonal stuff, it doesn't
15:36
really work in a nurture campaign because you don't know
15:38
when they're starting. You could set it up that way,
15:40
but it would be a little difficult and you want Evergreen
15:43
content that's always relevant. Yeah, Supercharged.
15:46
I won't go into the rabbit hole of AI and how to use it right
15:49
now because that would be a whole another program in in and
15:52
of itself. But essentially it is easier
15:55
than ever with AI to write emails, to write blog posts, you
15:59
write social media posts and things like this.
16:03
What I like to do is make sure you're giving the AI as much
16:07
information about you as they can, as you can.
16:09
So have links to your website, the, the, the home page, the
16:13
about page, like all the different pages.
16:15
If you have any brand documents or if you have past emails or
16:19
posts that you've done, give it as much of that information as
16:21
you can. You can create like a custom
16:22
GPS. You're not loading it every
16:24
time. It already has that background
16:26
knowledge to work from. But this is the way that it can
16:28
vary. It can know your business really
16:31
well. It already knows your messaging,
16:32
your services, your branding, all that kind of stuff and then
16:35
create really tailored content pieces for you.
16:39
That's all I'm gonna say about that.
16:40
If you want more help with that, you know, feel free to reach out
16:42
to me or ask me later. I can definitely make this
16:45
easier than ever for you. Last thing I'm gonna mention
16:47
about e-mail marketing is keep it clean.
16:50
When you're first getting set up for e-mail marketing, there's
16:54
certain things that you want to set up as far as having like a
16:57
sub domain and making sure that you're not sending from from the
17:01
well, the e-mail provider MailChimp is pretty good with
17:04
this, but other other programs you need to kind of set up your
17:07
own sub domain. I don't wanna get too technical,
17:10
but the reason for this is because if you don't, you don't
17:13
wanna have have your emails going out classified as spam or
17:17
have too high of a of a rating because then you can get
17:20
blocked. And of course, you know, you
17:21
don't want that. So keeping it clean after every
17:24
campaign, check your sending ratios and if anybody you know,
17:28
if you have bounced emails or bad emails or people that
17:31
haven't opened emails, like if you sent like 5 emails and they
17:34
haven't opened any of them or 10 emails, you know that they're
17:37
probably not interested or their e-mail link is, is probably not
17:39
working. So you can remove them from your
17:41
list. You should be looking to have at
17:42
least a 30% open rate. 30 to 40% is is ideal.
17:46
Anything lower than 30%, you should be cleaning up your list.
17:49
Anything over 40%, you're doing good.
17:51
When you get started, you're probably going to have a high
17:54
open rate because most of the people are going to be curious
17:57
because it's one of the, you know, you're kind of sending
17:59
emails for the first time in this, in this style.
18:01
But also they all will personally more or less know you
18:05
because they probably talked with you and you've 3 year old
18:07
clients or leads that I know you quite well.
18:10
When you start having new leads come on here, they maybe don't
18:12
know you as well. So the open rates you can expect
18:14
to to go down a little bit. Alright, making sense.
18:17
So double your leads, double the lifetime value, move it on.
18:20
We're not done yet. We're going to double your
18:22
projects. So 2 * 2 * 2 eight times.
18:25
And the way to double your projects is to get people
18:28
talking, get people talking about you.
18:30
One last thing to mention about your marketing is I know some
18:34
people can be apprehensive about it cause it's like it's too
18:36
markety. I don't know what to put and all
18:38
this stuff. I had a client who we started
18:40
doing e-mail campaign, same, same boat.
18:42
Never done, really done marketing, never sent e-mail
18:44
campaigns. We started sending them out
18:46
after I think about two months. Ended up getting a few referrals
18:49
from a guy that did, he was like a holler.
18:51
I think he hauled materials and, and dirt and things like that.
18:55
And he's like, yeah, you know, I saw your emails coming through
18:58
and you know, I like him. They, they do good.
19:00
So it wasn't necessarily that he didn't already know this guy or
19:03
that the person saw the e-mail and then, you know, booked the
19:06
project. But even people who maybe you
19:08
just haven't talked to in a while or maybe don't see you in
19:11
that light. And this could be
19:12
subcontractors, this this could be past leisy and talked to for
19:16
years. When you start sending e-mail
19:17
campaigns out, they just brings you top of mind and they start
19:20
to understand you and your brand, your company become more
19:23
familiar, builds more trust and there's there's a lot of
19:26
different things that all connect and and do well there.
19:29
Alright, so double your project referrals are your best leads.
19:32
The highest trust lead you're ever going to get is when
19:34
someone refers you because, you know, they're essentially
19:36
already built up that trust with their friend, family, neighbor,
19:40
co-worker, whoever, and now they're referring to you so you
19:43
can build off of that trust that's already there.
19:46
The thing with referrals is ask, ask and ask.
19:50
And the reason I say this three times is because on every
19:52
project you should be asking three times.
19:55
The first ask is usually done before the project starts.
19:58
So even this is typically after they've already signed the
20:01
contract, they know they're getting, you know, started with
20:03
the construction phase of it. You simply ask them, hey, do
20:06
you, you know, I'm, you know, so happy and excited to get started
20:09
with your project. If you know anybody else that's
20:12
considering us and you know a similar project and your
20:14
neighbors are talking about, you know, doing similar remodel or
20:18
home build or whatever, do you mind just mention them to us
20:20
Something you want to just keep it light.
20:21
You don't wanna, I mean, you can do what you like depending on
20:24
the report you have with the the client, but you just want to
20:26
kind of put it there, put it top of mind.
20:28
Hey, we're a referral company. A lot of our business comes from
20:30
referrals. If you know anybody, you know,
20:32
we would really appreciate the referral, something like that.
20:35
Then kind of midway through the project, ask again and just say,
20:38
hey, you know, hopefully maybe ask them for feedback how the
20:41
projects going. Is everything going well?
20:43
Is what you expected, considering things are going
20:46
well and there's no, you know, big hurdles, no project goes
20:49
100% perfect. Ask them again, you know, hey,
20:52
by the way, you know, we, we've got some availability coming up
20:56
in a couple of months to, to start some new projects.
20:58
You know, anybody that's, that's considering, you know, building
21:01
or whatever. And then of course, at the end
21:03
of the project, you would ask them again, similar thing,
21:05
asking feedback, how the project go this and that.
21:08
And then, hey, do you know anybody who's who's, you know,
21:11
considering building in the next year or, or what have you?
21:13
So three times on every project, make it simple.
21:16
You do not want them to have to jump through hoops or do a bunch
21:18
of things or be left in the dark of like, they asked me to refer
21:21
this person, but how should I do that, right?
21:24
Tell them, hey, if you know anybody, just send me an e-mail
21:27
with their name and their phone number and I'll be happy to call
21:29
them. Or if you know anybody, you just
21:31
text me their information and let me know and just ask me to
21:34
reach out to them and I'll be happy to call them.
21:35
So whatever you think is best, tell them specifically how they
21:39
should refer someone, whether that's, you know, should they
21:41
text the information So they send you an e-mail, if you can,
21:43
can give them a template of, Hey, here's a templated e-mail.
21:46
Just fill in the names and, and send it to me and then CC the,
21:50
the other person and, and we'll be happy to, to contact them or,
21:54
or what have you. So make it as simple as possible
21:56
for them. Reward action.
21:58
If someone referred somebody else to you, make sure you're
22:01
always, you know, give them a call or send them a message and
22:04
just thank them like so much for sending, you know, this other
22:07
person to you. And then what I like to do is,
22:10
is give them a gift card of some kind.
22:12
Doesn't have to be huge, but small gift card Starbucks,
22:15
something like that. And depending on the size of the
22:17
referral and your company could be, you know, $20 could be $50,
22:21
whatever, something small. You don't want to make it feel
22:23
like payment. It's more of like a thank you
22:25
and and a small gift. If the referral works out,
22:28
especially if it's a large project, then you you want to
22:31
send them something a little bit nicer.
22:32
So this could be, you know, maybe a hundred $200.00 gift
22:36
card to a nice, you know, steakhouse or a restaurant,
22:40
something like that. Just as like a really big
22:43
appreciation and thank you if if the person ended up doing a
22:46
project, if it's more of a business referral, maybe you do
22:49
like 1% or you know, half a percent of of the overall
22:53
project, something like that. Something a little bit more
22:56
monetary. If, if it's like a if you have
22:59
that sort of a business to business referral relationship.
23:01
Depending if you referred them five people and now they
23:03
referred you one, you know, you can consider it kind of even.
23:05
But always make sure that you're rewarding action because what
23:08
you want is for them to prefer more and more people to you
23:10
because of their time, energy efforts not to do that red
23:13
carpet experience. Make sure that any referrals,
23:17
any clients that you have there referrals, put them at the top
23:19
of your list. They are the first people you
23:21
contact. They have priority.
23:23
Yes, all clients are important, but referred clients, you need
23:27
to give them the red carpet experience to make sure
23:29
everything goes off without a hitch.
23:31
Says perfect as possible because the last thing you want is to
23:34
decrease, you know two peoples trust in you because the person
23:37
that referred you, you know is also not going to want to refer
23:40
more people. If the person they referred has
23:42
a bad experience, so they have a bad experience, they're not
23:45
going to do business with you and the person that referred
23:47
that person to you is no longer want to maybe do business with
23:50
you or refer that that other person.
23:52
So just make sure that you're paying attention to that and red
23:55
carpet experience, you know, whatever you can do to make sure
23:58
that they're at the top of your list for people to, you know,
24:02
check quality, communicate with get estimates out faster, you
24:06
know, bump them up in the line. If you've got 5 estimates and
24:09
someone refers someone, try to get that, you know, there's out
24:11
in in a very reasonable amount of time, even if you got to
24:14
maybe put off some other projects that aren't quite as
24:16
important. Last thing I'm going to mention
24:17
on the referrals to double your projects where you know, every
24:21
project should turn into another project.
24:23
That's the ideal situation where we want right, ideally more than
24:26
one project down the road. But if every project turn
24:29
another project, you already need far less leads, even though
24:32
we've told you already how to double them.
24:34
Becoming an insider. So this happens when you can
24:38
start to build a bit of a network in certain social
24:41
circles. I'll give you 2 examples.
24:43
I was working on the, on this huge home that we were doing
24:47
framing services for and this concrete guy ended up referring
24:51
me to someone he'd a client that he had who had he done work with
24:55
for a long, long period of time. And it was a fantastic referral.
25:00
We ended up doing some great work for this, this person at
25:04
their, their huge cottage cabin, whatever you want to call it out
25:07
at the lake. And so we did some work for
25:10
them. He was a repeat client.
25:11
We ended up doing a few work for him a few different times.
25:14
And after the first time we did work for him, he within I think
25:17
couple weeks of completing his project, he referred us to some
25:20
like one of his neighbors, you know, a couple of of cabins down
25:24
on the same lake and then that person up referring us to, to
25:27
somebody else. So we became kind of like the
25:29
known builder for everybody that on this lake, right.
25:33
And when you start to work off referrals, you start to become
25:38
the known builder in that neighborhood or in that, that
25:41
business circle, whatever it may be.
25:43
And it becomes like a source, like a well of repeat business
25:48
that happens. And and because there's this
25:50
like network effect, get more and more referrals from more and
25:53
more people, even though it's like a smaller population.
25:56
Another great example is working with this builder who had an
26:00
office admin manager and she was part of a moms group in their
26:04
local community. And she wouldn't like, you know,
26:07
spam or try to purposely, you know, advertise the company in
26:11
that moms group. But whenever somebody came up
26:13
like, hey, we're thinking of, you know, renovating or building
26:16
a house, anybody know a good, you know, general contractor
26:19
should of course always say, hey, you know, I work with such
26:21
and such. They do great work.
26:22
You should reach out to them whatever and within, I don't
26:26
know, maybe a year or so, pretty much that that that group, that
26:29
moms group of that, like a lot of the community around there
26:31
with of the family members all was part of they always reached
26:35
out to this contractor whenever someone brought up anything to
26:39
do with home improvement. So by coming the the insider you
26:42
just you build this massive trust and this like kind of
26:44
rotating referral network. That's a beautiful thing when
26:47
you when you get it working properly.
26:49
Alright, everyone doing good here moving on.
26:51
I'm going to be going over the 5 big mistakes that I've seen in
26:55
in marketing and and then we'll get into some question and
26:59
answer right after that. So top five marketing mistakes
27:02
that I see very often with with contractors.
27:05
The first one is being too general where general
27:08
contractors, but that doesn't mean marketing should be
27:11
general. And what I mean by this is I've
27:14
talked about how to get leads and all these lead Gen. things,
27:16
but there is some like branding and niche sort of components
27:19
that will help all of those be more effective.
27:22
So what you can think of is like your marketing is sort of like a
27:25
tree and a lot of contractors, they grow this gigantic tree and
27:29
they have clients come here or they have services here.
27:32
They work in this town, in this city and, and this tree just
27:35
kind of grows out of control. And you're marketing is this
27:37
huge, massive tree that nobody knows what's happening with,
27:39
right? So you want to be pruning it,
27:41
you want to like cut it down. What are the core services?
27:44
What's the core like ideal client?
27:46
And it's not that you won't do work for other types of people
27:50
or other types of projects if they come in, but you want your
27:52
marketing to be very specific and speak to specific person in
27:56
a specific demographic location, so on and so forth.
27:59
And you want your marketing to be very pinpointed because it'll
28:02
just be that much more effective.
28:04
Being invisible is another one. So you don't want to blend in
28:07
with everybody else. And this is another common thing
28:11
where you, you kind of see these contracting companies where
28:14
they'll go on their website and you could have five of them
28:16
lined up and they all kind of sound the same.
28:18
We're going to do good work. We do quality, we really care
28:21
what our customers. It's all good stuff, but it ends
28:23
up kind of just becoming more generic and general and you sort
28:27
of you blend in like camouflage because you just look like
28:30
another builder. So do whatever you can just to
28:32
stand out a little bit. You don't have to be crazy and
28:36
have like, you know, this big colourful website with things
28:39
popping out everywhere or you know, all this like nuts stuff.
28:42
But just how can you differentiate yourself to some
28:44
degree from your competition or just find a niche that nobody
28:48
else is quite ill really claimed yet to differentiate yourself.
28:52
When did you channels? I see this a lot too.
28:54
Is maybe you're on Facebook and Instagram or LinkedIn and, and
28:59
Facebook, right? So you wanna expand the amount
29:01
of channels that you're on and you're already creating social
29:04
posts or e-mail marketing or whatever it is for, you know,
29:08
one or two channels. You may as well broaden out
29:10
because the time out of time to then take that content and put
29:13
it on other channels is, is pretty much nothing.
29:15
Especially with the right software like our rapidly CRM,
29:18
we can post out to 5 or 6 different social channels all at
29:22
the same time. It takes just as much work to do
29:24
1 as it does 5. So definitely Instagram,
29:27
Facebook, LinkedIn, those are like definitely the big top
29:30
three. You could do Twitter or tick
29:32
tock if you, if you got videos and things like that.
29:34
YouTube is a great one as well, as well as the e-mail marketing.
29:37
Like I mentioned, you could do blogs on your website.
29:39
So there's lots of different channels or avenues where you
29:42
can make content and, and just reach more people because some
29:46
clients will use Facebook, some clients may be more LinkedIn
29:50
people, some may only see you on, you know, TikTok, even
29:53
though it is like a young demographic, things are changing
29:57
and you'd be surprised who is on these, these different
30:00
platforms. Another one is, is not having a
30:02
budget. So I've told you a bunch of ways
30:04
here that you can essentially do this stuff for free.
30:06
But even if you're running a lot of your marketing, just doing
30:09
the free stuff that'll get you started.
30:11
But put a bit of a budget. This is an investment and it's
30:14
investment that can pay off 1000 times what you put in.
30:17
So typically speaking, most like successful contractors are going
30:21
to be spending around 3% of of their revenue on marketing.
30:25
If you really want to get, you know, out there and a bit more
30:27
aggressive, you could do 5% if you're just starting out and you
30:30
don't have much, you know, one 2%.
30:32
But you should allocate a percentage of your revenue,
30:35
however small it is to putting into some sort of a marketing
30:39
budget. Even if it's just to get some
30:40
signs and some door hangers or maybe update your website, doing
30:44
some preliminary, you know, ads on Facebook or Google, whatever
30:47
it may be. But start putting a bit of
30:48
investment. You invest so much into your
30:51
business with, with your time and your money and all this
30:53
other stuff and, and, you know, learning different things.
30:56
Spend a bit of your revenue on, on, you know, marketing, because
31:00
eventually as you grow as a business owner, you're not gonna
31:03
have the time, energy or will to do all the marketing and you're
31:07
gonna need to learn how to turn money into leads.
31:11
And, and that's where you can really scale up your marketing
31:15
because organic marketing, you kind of get saturated at some
31:18
point. So in order to grow you, you
31:20
need to be able to, to invest money to, to improve your lead
31:23
Gen. and then adds before brand. If you are considering doing
31:26
online ads, you know, Facebook or Google are are really the,
31:29
the big two that work and in different degrees.
31:33
But before you ever spend any money on ads, make sure you're
31:37
you spend money on branding or time on branding, because
31:39
there's no point spending money to get people to go to your
31:42
website. If your website is unclear or
31:44
doesn't look like, if it's not set up to then convert those
31:47
leads, you know, convert that traffic in into proper leads or
31:51
if it's the wrong type of leads going there and the, the, you
31:55
know, websites not looking good. So put a little bit into
31:57
branding and before you spend money on ads.