Why your leads suck.
Marketing is just a fancy word for the process of getting leads. Leads are just a fancy word for someone who is interested in your services. To put it simply, marketing is literally the oxygen for your business.
No customers=No business.
There are two ways that most contractors get their business:
The number one way that contractors get their work is through word of mouth. While this is a great way to get high quality and high paying clients, this is, most the time, very slow. Not only that but at the end of this article, you will see how word of mouth is simply not the same as it used to be. This is especially difficult for specialty trades in the residential industry. Sometimes it's very hard to ‘WOW’ a customer that wants something small in their home fixed, a light switch replaced, or just a hot water valve tweaked.
I remember DISTINCTLY in my first year of running my contracting business, I had closed a full house project for the “Honey” family. The job was stressful, dangerous, and very difficult to execute. It was my proudest project to date. We accomplished things that previous contractors failed to do. Needless to say during the project we were complimented the entire time, my workers got lunch made for them every day, and they kept adding in more work. At the end of the job we were paid in full plus a big tip for all my workers. If there was ever a job to get referrals from, it was this one. Great neighborhood, clients well known by the entire neighborhood, and were a very outgoing couple. One summer later, I ended up knocking on their house. The door swung open and behind it was one of the homeowners that were present during most of the project. She stood there and greeted me...but there was something wrong. She greeted me like a stranger. In fact, she didn’t remember who I was. I was gutted. My proudest project, the one that I invested the most in personally, the client did not even remember me. I asked myself, how can a customer refer to me if they didn’t even remember me? It was at that moment, in front of the house, that I realized that providing excellent service was not enough anymore.
The second most popular method that contractors acquire leads is through door-to-door marketing. It is well known that getting face to face with people in the same neighborhood you are doing a project in is one of the easiest and cost-effective methods. Even going to neighborhoods where you are not doing any work will yield massive results. This method is one of the oldest and one of the most effective ways and it is not going away any time soon. This remains so because many contractors believe that it is ‘beneath them’ to go door to door. This belief has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars because while these contractors sat at home I would spend 10-15 hours going door to door and would generate over 5+ high-quality quotes and appointments that would convert at an over 80% rate. Deploying a good door-to-door marketing team helped me multiply the results and fill up my weekends, which in turn helped me make an extra $2000 per week. However, I have met many contractors who were ready to go door to door but did not know where to begin. What should you wear? What do you say? What are the best times to go? Am I too young? Am I too old? These are all valid questions that we help answer in our case study. However, if we were here JUST to offer you methods to optimize your word of mouth and door-to-door techniques then we would be out of business fast. Despite the overwhelming success our contracting partners saw from these adjustments, they are not the reason that we are the most sought after consulting business in the trades.
Word of mouth is not the same as it used to be... Cities are denser, people are busier, and homeowners are exposed to more contractors than ever before. Gone are the days where you bump into one of your clients at the grocery store. Gone are the days where homeowners see their contractor, plumber, electrician, etc at the school fair. Door-to-door is not the same as it used to be either. People are slowly being conditioned to smile and say no to the people at the door, it is definitely not as efficient as it used to be.
Despite this, I want to clarify that word of mouth marketing and door to door are to never be replaced or removed from your business, in fact within our training, we offer ways to tweak and really maximize the efficiency of these systems. However, there is another dimension that most contractors never use; online. WHOA WHOA, before you let your brain make ANY conclusions, hear us out. The reason behind it is best compared to one of Aesop’s (Greek philosopher) fables; the Fox and the Grapes.
The story goes that there was once a Fox that was hungry and was trying to reach for some grapes to eat. The grapes were suspended very high off the ground and the Fox tries over and over to try and get to them. The grapes happen to be just far enough that eventually, he fails to ever get to them. In frustration and defeat, the Fox walks away and mutters under his breath “they were probably sour anyway.”
The term ‘sour grapes’ actually comes from THIS fable. Funny enough this is exactly the same way contractors view their online presence. In fact it is so strong, that the words ‘online marketing’ or ‘Facebook advertising’ are probably making you very uncomfortable or very dismissive.
Online marketing is the sour grapes of the industry, and the ability of this article to predict your response to the terms is proof that there is an opportunity waiting to be had, because the same reaction you had, hundreds of other contractors are having on a daily basis and doing nothing about it.
Overcoming this hurdle is THE opportunity to really gain a lead on the competition, and it is this precise problem in the industry that cited the creation of Contracting.com. The importance of an online presence can be best explained with an example and exercise in putting yourself in the shoes of your number-one client; a middle-class woman. Let us explain.
You have to think like the neighborhood gossip group. The fact is it is very rare nowadays for an entire street to have a block party more than once a year, and it's even rarer for them to discuss or recommend contractors during this time where they are sipping watered-down wine. The neighborhood gossip group is now online and on Facebook. They are sharing links and pages, and guess what, you are nowhere to be found. And in the small chance that you are, your page probably sucks. Forty-five-year-old middle-class women are very judgemental and your Facebook page stands no chance.
A recent study surveyed 485 residential contractors and asked them around who they viewed as the primary decision-maker. 55% of contractors overwhelmingly agreed that women are the primary decision-makers. The same study interviewed 490 homeowners and they found that only 8% of women saw the man as the primary decision-maker. Men don't like spending money, however, the old saying of “happy wife, happy life” trumps all rational choices.
It is these facts that have made me realize that almost all contractors don't have a good online presence, and if they did they are poorly optimized towards targeting these women, the REAL decision-makers. So ask yourself the question, if word of mouth used to work more in the past because people saw each other face to face more than today, then where are people spending their time today? The phone, the answer is the phone. The attention of your clients has shifted to their phone and you are nowhere to be seen, to them you do not exist.
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." - John F. Kennedy.
Stop ignoring this. Stop buying worthless leads from Angie's List or Homestars. Stop living in the past. This is the sign you have been looking for. Let us help you set up your own online systems, that you have 100% control of. No monthly expenses. No bullshit.
This is a problem that needs to be addressed as fast as possible and it is virtually impossible to teach you how to do this in one article. Click the TAKE ACTION button to launch a modern solution to this modern problem.