Chapter 2: Marketing Tips for Trade Businesses
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Construction 2020: Your Job Site Reimagined
The year 2020 is looking promising for the construction industry.
In the past, marketing your trade business ended at sticking a decal to the tray of your ute, placing an ad in the local classifieds, and relying on word-of-mouth. Today, effective marketing for trade businesses is a technical job that is focussed online, and one that can transform an unknown player into a leader of the pack.
Smaller builders might dismiss online marketing as something for businesses with big clients and bigger budgets. However, online marketing doesn’t need to break the bank, and you don’t need expensive specialists to improve your own digital presence.
In this chapter of the Building a Better Trade Business eCourse, we look into a few simple marketing strategies to attract more clients and grow your business.
Modern Marketing for Builders
If you feel that your marketing needs work, the best place to start is always your customers. Ask yourself these three questions:
- How do clients currently find your business?
- How do clients find your competitors?
- How do clients try to find solutions to their problems?
If you can confidently answer these questions, you have a few fundamental pieces of information that you can use as the basis of your marketing efforts.
For example, if a majority of your clients currently find your business through print advertisements in local newspapers, it may be time to double down on your website efforts. If your competitors are attracting a lot of business through their websites, study what makes theirs different (and better) than yours.
Today, the first place that consumers go when they have a problem is online. A large part of your marketing efforts should be focused on your online presence, and more specifically, making your website easy to find on search engines like Google.
Getting Found Online
Your website is central to your marketing efforts. Its prime objective is to attract potential customers and make it easy for them to purchase your services. This may sound simple, however in a competitive marketplace, it’s difficult. Improving the visibility of your website can be achieved in multiple ways:
Producing Content
‘Content’ simply refers to the information you include on your website. This may include website pages written about your services, blog articles solving the problems of your potential clients, and in-depth eGuides which visitors may download in exchange for their contact information.
In order to attract the right people to your website, you will need to produce content that is relevant to them. Consider the following example:
Mick is making some home improvements and wants to know how to render a wall. He searches on Google, “how to render a wall” and lands on your blog post titled “The Best Way to Render a Wall”. After reading the article, Mick is impressed with your expertise and decides that it is probably safest if he calls you to do the job for him.
This example shows how by publishing content to your website that solves your customer’s problems can win you business.
“making it easy for your potential customers to find your website is quite a technical process”
Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the process of improving the visibility of your website in search engine results. For example, a business with great SEO will consistently ‘rank’ on the first page of the Google results, vastly improving the chances of potential customers visiting their website to solve their problems. On the other hand, a business with poor SEO will be buried on page 10 – essentially making them invisible to customers trying to solve certain problems.
Consider the following example:
Stephen needs a plumber. He has just moved to the area, so he does not have a go-to business yet, or friends that can recommend local options. He visits Google and searches for “reliable plumber in Campbelltown.” What does he see?
As you can see, the first four results are advertisements by various businesses. Placing ads on Google is done with Google Adwords, which uses a ‘pay-per-click’ (PPC) model, whereby your business is charged each time a customer clicks on your ad.
Further down the page, we see a map and three business names with reviews, like AB & TB Plumbing. You can easily have your business displayed like this by using the Google My Business platform, which is a quick and effective way to improve your search visibility.
Even further down the page, we see that AB & TB Plumbing appear again. Note how the words used in Stephen’s search, “reliable plumbing Campbelltown”, each appear beneath the AB and TB Plumbing website link. This section is called a ‘meta description’, and should include the keywords that you believe your potential customers will search for. In this instance, AB & TB Plumbing’s keyword phrase is ‘reliable plumbing Campbelltown’.
As you can see, making it easy for your potential customers to find your website is quite a technical process. If you’re willing to invest in professional assistance, there are a number of expert marketing agencies who specialise in growing businesses with modern marketing.
However, if you’re willing to go it alone, remember to:
- Publish content on your website that solves your potential customer’s problems.
- Improve the search visibility of your website by using SEO and zeroing in on your target keywords.
- Use Google My Business to make it easy for potential customers to contact you.
In the next chapter of the Building a Better Trade Business eCourse, we look into the technologies that builders can use to improve productivity, reduce costs and grow their business.