Welcome to today’s Toolbox tip!

It’s a short video tip to help you put something useful into your business, learn something useful, and perhaps help your business swim.

Social Media For A Trade Business

I know there are so many choices out there. There are lots of social media platforms you can use. There’s lots of advice. There are lots of ways you can spend your money and waste your time on social media like:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Snapchat
• Pinterest

That’s just a few and you can’t do them all. There are many people trying to tell you and sell you a service to do it for you, and often they’re biased because they have a preference or an understanding of one platform and not so much the other.

I make it my job to give unbiased advice. I’m a business coach for tradies. I don’t sell social media services so I’m not going to sell you my service unless you want to be a coaching client of mine.

What I’m trying to say to you here is this is the best place to invest your money if you’re a trade business. It’s quite different for other businesses.

Here are a couple of ways we behave as buyers:

1. The flow
2. They check you out
3. You can stimulate demand in your buyers.

Let me explain what I’m talking about…

The flow

I’ve said this before in some of my other videos but mostly when consumers or business owners or builders or architects want a trade, they know which trade they want.

• They know if they want to build a house and then they need a builder.
• They know if they want to build a fence, they need a fencer.
• If the toilet is broken, they need a plumber.

Mostly, they know which trade they need so the demand comes first, the knowledge of the trade comes second, and they go and search on Google, on their phone, or on their computer and they find you that way.

This is the flow:

• I have a need
• I know which tradie I want
• I’m going to go and look for one
• I’ll look on Google

Point 1: Spend more money on being found

And your job is to be found there. As a business coach, I would much rather spend money on being found when people search than too much of it spent on Facebook advertising or other social media. Social media is very much secondary in terms of where you should spend your money to search.

Point 2: You could put some effort into social media.

I’m going to focus on Facebook mostly because of this next behavior, what people often do when they’ve searched you or found you, or when they’ve come to you through other means. Maybe someone’s referred them to you and said, “Oh you should check out this guy, he’s a good trade”. Maybe they’ve seen some of your other marketing. Maybe you’ve caught them directly and asked for work. You might be a subcontractor to the builder. You’ve called them directly and asked for work.

They check you out

There are many ways they could have come to you, but often what they’ll do is they’ll check you out online.

• They’ll check your website out
• They’ll check out your Facebook page in particular because on your Facebook page, they can see what other people are saying about you and not only what you’re saying about yourself.

Your control of Facebook is not complete. People can say what they like. People like that. They like to go to your social media, particularly to Facebook, and see what you’re like. That’s an important customer behavior.

Recommended Reading: Is your website performing well?

You can stimulate a demand.

You can advertise on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest. Suggest to people that they might like to buy a shiny thing:

• “You should get a kitchen.”
• “It’s hot, you should get air conditioning.”
• “It’s going to be winter soon, you should service your air conditioner before winter comes and you can start using it properly for heating.”

All that sort of stuff. You can stimulate a demand. I think that has special relevance in specific situations. But mostly, I think the money comes from being found when people are searching for ‘air conditioning’, for ‘plumbing’, or whatever. Pay for adverts to stimulate a demand in certain specific circumstances when you’ve got something shiny that you think you can stimulate a demand for. I think it works for solar, for kitchens, and swimming pools – nice sexy things that people want.

People will go to your site and check you out and I think every trades business should invest in a decent Facebook page. And you should:

• Keep your Facebook page clean
• Put posts on it once a week, (it’s probably enough)
• Put pictures of job testimonials from people and pictures of happy customers smiling.

Tell them you’re doing it. Ask permission first. Tell them you’re doing it, share it with all their friends and ask them to give you reviews on Facebook.

I think these are the things, that most trades businesses should be doing with social media. You ’d be better to invest your money in search like I’ve said, but go and make that an investment in your Facebook page.

If you want to talk to me about the other places you could spend your money or how you should manage the flow and your search marketing,  get in touch.

And I’m running a workshop here in Byron Bay and if you think that might be of interest, click here and read a bit more or give me a call (0402 259 209) and ask me a few questions.

See you.