Here are 11 marketing tips for your construction company.
Number one is Facebook. Facebook personal, business, Facebook groups, Facebook stories. There’s a number of ways to use Facebook, but ultimately in 2020, the average American adult spent four hours a day on Facebook. It’s just where your audience is. There’s free options. There’s paid options. There’s a lot of different ways to utilize Facebook, but ultimately it’s one of the primary places you should be marketing your company.
Number two is Instagram. So Instagram also is owned by Facebook, but it operates a little bit differently. Facebook is more content rich. Instagram is more just entertainment. You want to put videos. You want to use pictures. You want to use the stories. You want to use reels. You want to use IGTV. There’s a lot of different length, formatted, and size content you can use, but ultimately on Instagram, you want to be entertaining. People use Instagram as a distraction. They’re just scrolling their feed. You’ve got to grab their attention. The stories are used for more raw and authentic video, just selfies walking around job sites where your story is more the curated, edited, fancier, better looking professional content.
Number three is TikTok. I’ve been a little on the fence about it, but ultimately what I have found with working through some of my customers who are using TikTok effectively is it’s a really good way to take a boring service, a boring product, and make it entertaining. One of the best ones is The Window Wizard. Rocky owns a window cleaning company in Fort Worth, Dallas, Texas, and ultimately he’s used TikTok to blow his brand up because he’s found a way to use the music and use the filters and use TikTok to make a very boring window washing company entertaining and fun to work with.
Number four is YouTube. Obviously you are here. You’re watching YouTube. You’re on YouTube. You use YouTube for a lot of how-tos and probably ways to do things for your business and in your business. Ultimately, a lot of people use YouTube when they’re trying to make decisions on something. So creating educational content around the decision process of your customers, ways that they can understand what makes a good contractor in your space, but really just putting out educational content that’s consistent and really targeted for your audience, right? And ultimately you want to make sure you have good titles, you have good thumbnails, you put a little bit of effort behind it, and a lot of people will get there.
YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. Obviously, it’s owned by the number one search engine, which is Google. So when people type things into the Google search, YouTube is going to come up pretty quickly and pretty high in the rankings because Google wants to drive you to the YouTube platform. So creating educational content around your problems, the problems that your customers have, the problems that you solve is a great way to build a brand and get out there more consistently.
Number five is a podcast. So I have been using the Big Stud podcast now for over two years has been my number one revenue producing activity. One of the benefits of a podcast is you don’t need a lot of equipment. It’s pretty inexpensive, if not free. There’s a lot of ways to go about it, but ultimately you can just talk into a mic and put the information out there. Also, it’s easy to bring in guests and do interviews. So you can interview influential people in your marketplace, influential people in your industry, whoever that might be. But you can also bring on other educators on your podcast for your specific audience.
Ultimately, a podcast is one of the easiest pieces of content to create. It’s literally a microphone. You can probably … Not probably. You can just talk into your phone on a voice recording and upload it to Anchor and be able to start a podcast. So I highly suggest it as a really easy way. Just get your thoughts out there, educate people, entertain people with who you are as a brand, which ultimately every company is just an extension of the personal brand of the owner, in my opinion. So starting a podcast is a great way to market your company.
Number six is networking groups like B&I or Nary. There’s a ton of them out there in different cities. But networking in person allows you to build a much stronger relationship with people, allows you to articulate who you are, what you do. It allows you to bring value to these groups, which means you get value from these groups. But ultimately people buy from who they know, like, and trust. And the best way to become known, liked, and trusted is be in person with people on a regular basis. So getting out there, getting in front of these groups, getting consistent with adding value in those environments will allow you to get more value in marketing your company in networking groups.
Number seven are lunch and learns. What I mean by a lunch and learn is either taking lunch in to let’s say a real estate office or a property management company or even hosting one in your facility for your target audience or referral partners. A great example would be if you’re a remodeling contractor and you do a lot of design build stuff, bring in customers, bring in designers, bring in architects into your office and doing a lunch and learn on the process of the remodeling and budgeting and design and what works and what doesn’t work allows you to be the authority in that space, allows you to be the educator, which makes you the expert in that space.
So doing these lunch and learns by either going to offices like real estate, like property management, or hosting your own lunch and learns brings people into your facility and allows them to see how you operate, see what you’re doing, see what’s new. Basically educating them on whatever you are an expert at and allows them to go out and be a better steward of your business and sell your value for you in the marketplace to their customers or audience wherever they’re at.
Number eight is mailers. I’m not a big fan of just generic cold mailers to an entire community. I know it works and I know some people have had success with it. I’m just not a fan of it, but it can be done. What I am a fan of, and I’ve seen a lot of people do this successfully, is taking all of your old leads, taking all of your old proposals, things that people that didn’t say yes, and mailing those people. There’s probably 50, 100, maybe 200 people over the last year, depending the size of your company, who did not hire you, but you did meet with. You did give them an experience. You did give them a proposal. You did engage with them, so that mailer is not cold. They’re going to remember your name. They’re going to remember your business. That makes them more likely to open it, and that direct mailer in that specific of an approach I think can have a lot of value.
I just learned about somebody that’s doing that more recently and they turned that into multiple six figures in business for their company over the last year. So getting more intentional with who’s getting the mailer as opposed to just broad spectrum mailing.
Number nine is door hangers. Again, being intentional with it. My advice on door hangers is use it for the immediate homes around the projects you’re already doing. Make the door hangers say something along the lines of, “Hey, we’re doing work for one of your neighbors. If you have any problems or you see anything that is frustrating, if someone parks in front of your house and you need any help, here’s our number. Also, here’s what we do.” It’s a pretty simple, but it makes it more real, makes it more local, makes you more recognizable because you’re saying, “I’m working with one of your neighbors.” People like to know that you’ve worked with somebody in their neighborhood already. It gives you that better trust factor with them in the long period.
But ultimately, again, just like canvasing and dropping door hangers with no real intent, I’m not a huge fan of. There is people that have success with that. I’m just not a fan of it. But getting intentional door hangers and be able to hang them on the houses around the houses you’re working on already would be a great way to go about doing it.
Number 10 for me is one of the best ones I’ve ever done that immediately got an ROI, and its vehicle wraps. One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve seen people have is that you have to do a full wrap to get the impact, and full wraps can be several thousand dollars. On almost every truck I’ve ever wrapped, I did a partial wrap. So I didn’t cover the whole thing. I just covered the doors and maybe the front end, but a partial wrap. If you go to your local vinyl company where or your wraps and signs company and say, “I want to do a partial wrap,” they’ll be able to help you. It’s incredibly more affordable.
But driving around town and the neighborhoods and the marketplaces that you’re in and not having your information on your vehicles I think is a miss. So marketing your company via this will help you become more recognizable because you’re in the same places on a regular basis driving around. It can also make you feel like a bigger company. And when I did my first one, people were like, “Man, I see you guys all over the place,” and we had one truck that was wrapped. So it made us seem a little bit bigger, made us seem a little bit more important, and ultimately I did a partial wrap so it wasn’t terribly expensive.
And number 11 is events. So going to events, being a part of events, going to conferences, it helps you learn from other people, but also obviously market your company. You can also hold events, like be a part of festivals or parades, anything that’s going on in your market. You want to go be visible on a regular basis in your market. One of the biggest challenges with contractors is people don’t trust us. They think that we’re fly by night or we’re not going to be around or we’re not going to take care of them or we’re not going to honor our work. So if you can be visible on a regular basis, just showing up and being at those festivals, events, things of that nature, even holding maybe an end of year event for your customer base at your facility, being around people just helps. So holding an event or being a part of events is a great way to get your brand out there on a consistent basis in front of the people that you want to do business with.
Look, there’s a ton of different ways that you can market your business. Those are just 11 ways that I’ve used pretty effectively. Check out the rest of the channel, subscribe. There’s a ton of videos here about marketing and lead generation and running your business more effectively. Ultimately, I’m Mike Claudio, owner of Winrate Consulting. I coach contractors and business owners for a living. I’ve been doing this full time for several years, and a lot of the content you see here are the lessons I help business owners implement into their companies so they can get the results they want so that they can win fast and win often.
