E52 — 10 Tips For Contractor Marketing

Imagine having nearly 30 years of collective experience in the contractor marketing space right at your finger tips. That’s us. And we popped into your inbox to let you know we have compiled and tediously handpicked the 10 most helpful marketing tips for contractors.

Born from the blood, sweat and tears of working with a wide variety of contractors over the years this list will help you improve your business growth and secure quality leads.

Whether you’re a small business, a roofing contractor, or just someone interested in knowing more about effective marketing practices, this is the episode you’ve been waiting for.

In this episode you’ll get applicable tips on how to set your business up for success and here are a few things you’ll learn:

1. Understand and optimize the customer journey from initial contact through sale completion.
2. Build a brand! Google loves this & it helps to build loyal customers.
3. Don’t go cheap on website hosting. You can really cripple yourself this way with things such as website performance.
4. Treat your Google Business Profile (GBP) like its own website and the most important social profile you’ll ever own.
5. Plus so much more!

Let’s get going!

Devon Hayes:
Hi. Hello. How’s it going today?

Amanda Joyce:
Well, you know, another day in paradise. Welcome to another episode.

Devon Hayes:
Yes, another episode of Trades Secrets: Contractor Marketing, your favorite contractor marketing podcast. Today’s episode, we figured we kind of try a new format, give it some lots of attention and love, but maybe a little bit less time to give you some great insights, but get you moving along on your day without having to listen through 20 or 30 minutes of podcasting.

Amanda Joyce:
Yes, exactly. So maybe we are going to rapid fire, some really good tips for you guys that’ll hopefully have a positive impact in your marketing efforts. And hopefully you’ll get a lot of value out of it, so let’s dive in.

Devon Hayes:
Welcome to Trade Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.

Amanda Joyce:
This is for you if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.

Devon Hayes:
Learn from home services industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.

Amanda Joyce:
Let’s dive into today’s trade Secret.

Okay, we could go on for hours and give you a list of 500 contractor marketing tips, but we’ve narrowed it down to 10. And the first one that we have here is critical to make sure that any of your marketing efforts are fruitful. So is your house in order? Do you understand what the customer journey is like? Let’s pretend your marketing efforts just blew up tomorrow and you started getting phone calls and leave form fills like crazy. What’s the customer journey like? Who are they interacting with boots on the ground? Is the admin picking up the phone cheerful and excited to talk to them and quick to take down their information and route them to the right salesperson? Or are there some cogs in the wheel that need to be fixed.

Devon Hayes:
No matter how great any agency’s efforts are, if your internal processes aren’t in place and streamlined and well-defined, you’re going to be pissed. And typically, you’re going to blame whoever you’re paying outside of your bubble because you’re like, "Well, hey, where’s all my leads?" And that’s where we’ve kind of, I guess, come to ask these questions in advance. What happens when somebody calls? And here’s a great example, is your admin a gatekeeper and they are preventing this marketing qualified lead from getting through to becoming a sales qualified lead to then converting?

So if this person wants to meet after business hours, what are your parameters around that? Do you have sales guys who are going to meet after 4:00 P.M? After 6:00 P.M? On weekends? Depending on what your internal processes are, you might have your P.M be your sales consultant and the project manager from start to finish, or you might have sales consultants that then pass it on to a P.M once the project begins.

So whose job is it to gate keep those leads? Do you want it to get through to your sales consultant or your project manager to qualify them and put the onus on them to book the appointment during whatever works with their schedule versus the set office hours availability? Believe it or not, this is something that we’ve run into with clients. And it’s not so much a conversion problem as there’s kind of some gatekeeping going on, and if you don’t have that in order, that could lead to some frustration.

So if your processes, that’s what we mean when we’re kind of hammering this point home, if your processes aren’t well-defined in-house, then you got to get that cleared up before you start investing in any sort of digital marketing. I mean, I would say any marketing really, but it’s something that you don’t think about when you’re a newer business because you answer the phone and you book the appointments and you’re the one on all the going and doing the inspections and checking things out and providing estimates and quotes and all that. But then as you start to grow, how is that being managed and who’s doing that? And that could be a massive problem for your business if that isn’t already streamlined and well-defined.

Amanda Joyce:
Absolutely. I mean, and another thing to keep in mind as well is we’ll run into people sometimes that the admin is quick to talk about job minimums or maybe someone calls and just wants a small repair job. It is definitely something for you to discuss internally. Certainly you don’t want to be wasting sales guys’ time driving around town to check out tiny jobs. But probably in a lot of the cases, there’s that opportunity for that upsell. So they’re going to call and they’re hoping you can just come do a patch job, but you’re going to get out there and find that there’s all kinds of wood rot and all kinds of things and it’s a much bigger opportunity. Or are you going to allow maybe the person who’s qualifying the lead in the office who will never set foot on the property to go ahead and tell them to call someone else?

So those are just things to talk about internally and decide how you’re going to handle them. We as marketers would say get their contact information so they can get on your email list, at least get the opportunity to give them a warm and fuzzy phone call from an educated salesperson over the phone that can tell them a little bit about what they should be keeping in mind.

And then if you decide they’re not a good leader, that they’re not worth the in-home inspection, that’s fine, but we’d rather you not cut them off at the knees before you’ve ever even pulled them into the fold and let them understand who you are as a company and why they should maybe use you when they do have a bigger need or why maybe now’s the time to invest in that full roof replacement or full signing replacement and that a tiny repair is just not going to do it.

Devon Hayes:
Yeah. As a customer, I can’t tell you how off-putting that would be to me personally. If I call you and I’m looking for your service and maybe my house isn’t in your normal service area, or it’s in a city that you say you service on your website but then my part of the city isn’t a place you go to, you’re just setting yourself up for some massive limitations and you’re starting to kind of not leave behind that warm fuzzy feeling. You could come out to my house figure out, "I’m a real estate agent’. I have three other investment properties and I really need your help on those." But without giving somebody a chance, a customer a chance, and having these hard and fast rules, you really could be cutting yourself off at the knees, you know?

Amanda Joyce:
And you could end up finding that it’s not worth a large marketing effort if you’re going to pay for a bunch of leads, they’re going to come in and then you’re going to qualify them and never get out there and meet them.

Devon Hayes:
Absolutely. So that’s the number one marketing tip.

Amanda Joyce:
That’s our longest rant. All these other ones are going to play into it, I promise, guys. And the next one plays directly into this tracking. Be ready to track everything because you’re not going to know what’s working if you’re not. And one of the ways that we track here that’s really critical is we use call tracking, which records those phone calls and then gives you some oversight into, "Hey, where the calls are coming from, where the quality calls are coming from," and then maybe how phone calls are being managed.

Maybe the main person that answers your phone all the time is great, but sometimes that person has to pop out and use the restroom or take a vacation. What’s happening when they’re not there? It’s a really quick way to identify holes in your system while also keeping a really close tab on what marketing efforts are working.

Devon Hayes:
Yes, absolutely. And with that tracking, that’s not just digital. You can track your efforts across sponsorships, events, all kinds of things. You just have to use the tools you already have in your tool belt. You have a website. We all know the great revival of QR codes, so you can use those on your direct mailers. If there is a banner because you sponsored a little league team, put a QR code on there and have them go to a specific landing page so you can at least track who’s coming to your site through these other efforts.

As long as you have a website, you can really track any effort. It’s not perfect because some people will just find your brand name and Google you, but that’s kind of has a larger halo effect, I would imagine. But some folks, if you have the right CTA, they are going to scan that QR code, the right call to action that is, and they are going to go directly to that landing page. So you can start to, say you’re at a festival and you have a booth there, have them do an entry for whatever a giveaway is and go to a landing page that’s just a form on your site, at least then you’re collecting their info and you can see how many visits you’re getting. So you can get an idea of the engagement from each marketing activity, not just everything you do digitally.

Amanda Joyce:
Love it.

Devon Hayes:
And that does lead into number three. You do have to have a website to do that. You’ve got to have a decent website, something modern, something up to date within the last two years, maybe three years. If it’s older, you just want to make sure it’s well maintained, that you’re doing monthly updates to it. WordPress has updates all the time. And when those happen, things can break along the way as different plugins need to be updated and things like that. So it could make for a really wonky, disjointed customer experience if they get to your site and it hasn’t been well maintained and if it isn’t an intuitive flow on your website and it’s not clear what action you want them to take and where they go to call you or fill out a form or it’s really, really slow to load.

So decent website. We’re not telling you to spend $30,000 on a website, but make sure you have some compelling content, it looks like a modern design, it’s easy to follow, easy to contact you, and compelling images if you’ve got them. Love that.

Amanda Joyce:
Yes.

Devon Hayes:
That would help convert.

Amanda Joyce:
Exactly. I mean, at the end of the day, pretty much everyone that’s listening to us is their work is so visual. I mean, even plumbers, you got to go in and maybe fix a problem and help the homeowner get their house put back together. And then plenty of our listeners are home exterior contractors, roofers, things like that. People like to see the finished product. "What am I going to get? What if I upgrade to a metal roof? What’s it going to look like? Have they done it before?" They don’t just want to get on there and feel like they’re seeing stock images and maybe images from your core manufacturers that clearly you didn’t swing that hammer. Think about it the way you would when you’re going to vet some company out. It’s your living storefront that you want to make sure that it’s really exuding exactly who you are as a company, and it doesn’t have to be super complicated. There’s a lot of cost-effective solutions out there that can get you exactly where you need to be.

Devon Hayes:
Love it. Oh, your Google business profile. So truly you should treat this as maybe its own entity, its own little website and its own social media platform and the most important social media platform you’ll operate in. People don’t engage with it, but you can post to it daily. You can upload new photos to it daily, videos of where you’re out and about and working. This is where your reviews live. You want to be in there and replying to those reviews as fast as possible. Keep that engagement up. That’s one of those little signs of trust. And we know how important engagement is thanks to the Google League. So treat your Google business profile like the most important website and social media channel that you own. Add content to it daily if you can, and that is going to take you very far.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. And I mean like we talked about all the time, Google’s a narcissist. It’s their own product. Every time they add some new section to your Google business profile that you can update, update it. They want you to update it. So they’re giving you the roadmap to appease them. Just do it. And obviously, you should be posting maybe weekly or whatever, or twice a week to your Facebook profile. Put more of the effort into the Google business profile if you’re worried about gaining rankings in the search results.

Devon Hayes:
Beautifully said.

Amanda Joyce:
Okay, next one, Google local service ads. If it’s offered-

Devon Hayes:
Number five.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, if it’s offered in your area and it’s available to you, at least test it if you’re not already. Go through the process to get the background check and all that because then you can say your Google guaranteed, and that’ll last for a full 12 calendar months or until you have to update your licensing. So you can put that badge on your website and you can turn those ads on.

Some markets we see it where the calls are $130 a pop. But in some markets we’re seeing them for 40. It definitely depends on where you are, but it’s worth testing way less complicated than Google Ads. So if you haven’t done it, look into it. If you haven’t done it in a while, maybe light it back up again and give it another shot.

Devon Hayes:
And if you do, do it. For the love of God, do not miss a phone call.

Amanda Joyce:
Don’t miss a phone call and actually listen to them. Dispute them if they’re no good. We’ve had plenty of people come on board with us where then we get handed a profile and we go look at it and we’re like, "Oh, you could have saved 30 or 40% of your investment in this over the time period you were running it" because just no one was listening to them. And if they’re not good, if someone’s calling to sell you something or ask for a job, you can dispute it and you get that money back.

Devon Hayes:
Brilliant. We touched on this one a little bit. Number six is images and video. I think if you are a podcast listener in the world of marketing podcasts, you hear how important story branding is to your company and really compelling people to feel something and feel a connection to your brand, not just… They’re buying from you, not the service specifically because there’s tons of service providers. So it’s that idea.

And what helps convey who you are before they even meet you are the images and the videos that you share online on your website, on your social profiles. And so really, especially if you have such a visual business like landscaping, remodeling, those contractors, they have so many beautiful before-and-afters, but we have one landscaper who they have really gone into the story branding vein, and I think their slogan is for you to reimagine life outside. And I love that because they’re compelling you to picture a space you already own in a new way. And they have some really great images and they do beautiful work. But images and videos, it’s just the best way to convey emotion before you get to make that human connection with someone.

Amanda Joyce:
Next one is build a brand. This was another one that really came out of… We already knew it, but Google reinforced it when we had the leak. So we know that that matters to them too. But if you’re going to spend money on marketing and planning on growing this business, your brand matters. Establishing what your brand is and continuing to reinforce it through all of your marketing efforts is critical for gaining trust with your target market and your local market as well as gaining trust with the Google gods and starting to grow your search rankings.

Devon Hayes:
Yes, those brand entity mentions off your website, they really matter and they matter more than ever now. We know the importance. We don’t know the weight of how it impacts your positioning on Google, but we know that your brand mentions not just links to your website, but your brand mentions on other websites matter. So don’t tie yourselves to something that, I don’t know, you wouldn’t want your mom to know you’re connected to that way.

So there are really low ranking sites. What’s come out is those guest blogger sites where they have a zero domain rating and you agreed to do some guest posting or something so your company has mentioned there. Maybe don’t do those anymore. You don’t want to tie your ship to some of these other ones. You want to keep your brand… And maybe you do, but just make sure that what you’re doing and know that what you’re doing and who you connect your brand with, your company name, all of that, the owners of the company, that all has an impact on your digital footprint and how customers see you.

You might have some team members that have some very polarizing views. It would be good to have them have private social profiles just because it could impact your brand. And the clickstream and how people get to you, it all has an impact now on your positioning on Google. We know now that it does. So protect your brand and build your brand and know the importance of it more than just people recognizing who you are, trusting you and wanting to work with you and being repeat customers. Understand that it will have an impact on your positioning within search engines. So it’s massively critical to build a really good brand.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, I mean, it kind of makes me think about how we all talk about how most people in our generation talk about how lucky we are that we came up just before social and everything was really popular. I’m obviously dating myself here, but when we talk about how you tell kids like, "Your online presence is going to follow you," it’s the same thing with your brand. You got to protect it like a baby and just think about it like that. I think that’ll answer most of the gray area.

Like you said, do you want your mom to know you’re associated with this? Do you want Google to associate your brand with this?

Devon Hayes:
Yeah. Oh my God. I think of those early Facebook days when you had to have a college email address and the just horrifying things you would post online.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. Like, here’s all of us just, yeah, just boozing. No one needs to see that. But at the time we thought that’s what… It didn’t happen unless you posted it

Devon Hayes:
Oh my gosh. You got to love those early 2000s.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
Yeah. Okay. So build a brand, a brand with trust. Oh my gosh. Okay, we have number eight, don’t go cheap on website hosting. We talked about this a little bit in a previous episode, but hosting truly is a service. And I think a lot of business owners think of this as a product because you probably pay for it annually and don’t think about it again. But aside from paying for your website to be stored on this server, there’s optimizing that goes on within the framework of the host that’s critical to the performance of your website. So hosting as a service is important especially when you’re in those really competitive markets.

But for you guys who are like, "What do you mean? Just what do you mean don’t go cheap on my hosting?" At the highest level, don’t go on a shared server. Just avoid it. Try to go to a private shared server is better. Most of you won’t have websites large enough where you need your very own server. That would make sense. But that would be having one picture stored on your computer. The amount of storage you have on your computer and just having one image, you don’t need all that unless you’re a massive website.

But anyways, just really, if the price tag is like $60 for the year for hosting, don’t. Don’t do that. It will cause you more headaches and more problems and performance issues and slow down your site and you will have no idea why. So that’s a techie tip. Don’t go cheap on your website hosting.

Oh yeah. Okay. So number nine, this one again… Okay, not trying to be techie. So on your Google business profile, hopefully each and every one of you have a Google Business profile, you can choose your primary business category, and then you can choose other business categories. So your primary might be like setting installation. And then maybe you also do provide roofing services on Google. It’s roofing contractors, the name of the category, then maybe you do gutter replacement as well. So that would be yet another category, which I think right now on Google it’s like gutter services, I think is what the category is, in any case.

When you are first optimizing your website, go after that primary category and until you’ve established trust and credibility for that primary category, don’t target those other categories quite yet. Just hold off until you’ve established trust. And by established trust, I mean your website is ranking either in maps or the local three pack or on the organic results for keywords associated with your primary service.

So if you’re a roofer, and your primary business category is roofing contractor, you want to rank for roofing contractor, roofers near me, roof repair, roof replacement, roof installation, roof repair service, local roofers, all of those kind of roofing terms before you start to write content and try to rank for gutter services. The gutter services, it’s much easier to rank for. So what’s going to happen is you’re going to establish trust and credibility as a gutter company over roofing, because roofing is so competitive.

So keep that in mind. Don’t try to be all things to all people exactly at the same time. Be strategic about the content and what you’re rolling out and be honest with yourself in terms of how much Google trusts you for your primary category or your primary service before you start attacking those other supporting services.

Amanda Joyce:
Bam. Okay. And this last one, we’ve touched on this throughout it, but it’s really critical that you clearly identify the goals of all of your marketing strategies. Often we’ll hear from people, they’re like, "Okay, we want to do social media." We’re like, "Okay, what’s the goal? Do you think you’re going to get sales out of it? Or is this just a brand play? Do you just want an active profile?"

As an agency, we typically do social for folks just to keep their profiles active to appease the Google gods, get that level of engagement, give some of that click stream back to the website. But if you’re going to invest in someone who’s maybe going to spend a ton of time out in the field taking pictures of your crews and of your work and posting it and all that, that’s great, but you just need to know what it is you’re hoping you get out of it. So then maybe you can reassess it in three months, six months, nine months, and decide if it’s working.

And the same thing goes for your SEO, for paid search, whatever it is, just sit down and look at your whole marketing mix and clearly define it. Maybe some of it is just a brand play and you’re willing to spend 500 bucks to 1,200 bucks a month on maybe some display and YouTube ads just because you want people in your market to remember you’re there. Awesome. Then you know how to measure the success of that. But if you’re investing heavily somewhere and you need it to pay off and drive those leads, clearly define that.

Devon Hayes:
Beautifully said. So there you go. Those are your top 10 contractor marketing tips that we have for you for 2024.

Amanda Joyce:
Thanks for listening, guys.
That was today’s trade secret. Thanks for listening.

Devon Hayes:
Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.

Amanda Joyce:
Subscribe and don’t miss our next reveal.

Devon Hayes:
Until next time.