Hi Tradies, Marketing’s a big topic, isn’t it?

What marketing do you do?

More to the point, what marketing should you be doing? 

There are lots of options, aren’t there? And lots of agencies and ads telling you that their thing is the right thing.

I see them all, obviously, here’s what I can think of off the top of my head:

• SEO and Google My Business
• Google Adwords
• Facebook and social media marketing (Ads)
• Social media management
• Video marketing
• Website (of course)
• Photography and drone photography (and video) and timelapse stuff
• Email marketing
• Signage and vehicle signage (wraps) and uniforms 
• Getting reviews from Google and Facebook
• There’s HiPages, OneFlare, My Builder and all the other lead sites.
• There are agencies that will build a website and sell you the leads (like HiPages but just for you)
• You can drop leaflets
• You can run ads in the local paper or on the radio or TV, at bus stops and billboards
• You can do telemarking (ringing people up) – I call this Relationship Marketing and it’s perfectly valid, don’t laugh.
• You can do networking – informally with your network and formally with organisations like BNI 
• There’s logos and design to think about, copywriting for your ads and landing pages and website and posts 

That’s a lot of things to consider when it comes to marketing your business!

(I went down a little Facebook rabbit hole just now, scrolling to see if I’ve missed anything. I bet I have.)

Not only are there a lot of things to consider, but each marketing agency or advertiser or whatever they are will tell you that their thing is the right choice. Just like the saying: 

“When the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail.”

Now you might be expecting me to start dissing marketing businesses here but I’m not going to. Most of them are competent professionals promoting a specialist service that they specialise in. I’m friends with a bunch of them and they are often quite passionate and convincing about the benefits of their focus or specialisation. And fair enough. 

I’m passionate about mine, a big part of which is looking at the big picture and making strategic decisions before you get into the detail. 

And of course, that’s what I’m going to help you to do in this video.

You’re faced with all these options. They all cost money or time (or both). 

Your money and your time are both finite resources and you probably can’t do all of these things. You’d spread your time and money pretty thin if you tried.

So which ones should you do? Which ones will give you the best return on your investment of money and time?

Well, of course, the answer is –it depends. Of course, it does.

It depends on what trade you are and what part of the industry you’re in. It depends on what kind of customers you want to attract and where those customers ‘hang out’ and seek trade and building business to do their jobs.

So that’s your first job – to figure out who you want to attract (and why they’d want to work with you -that’s important, too). Yes, it’s part of my program, of course it is.

I’ll give some broad brush guidance here about where your main focus ought to be depending on who you want. Let’s start with maintenance trades. For you guys the need comes first, right? The property or the vehicle needs some work done on it and the person responsible for that usually knows which trade is required. 

The toilet is broken – you need a plumber, that sort of thing. So Mr Smith, in his house, can jump on his phone and search for a plumber and a location specified (his suburbs or near me or something) and find a plumber and contact them.

So, if that’s the kind of customer you want, you need to do the work and spend the money so you get found.

I call it Find Me Marketing because I’m or d*$khead and it includes SEO, Google Adwords, Google My Business and websites or landing pages. Wait a minute though, if Mr Smith is a newbie, he’s not searching on his phone, is he? He’s going to call his Property Manager and toss the problem to them.

Find Me Marketing won’t help you much here – those property managers have a plumber or plumbers they know and they call one of them. 

So you need to do Relationship Marketing to Property Managers.

If Mr Smith works in a business in a commercial property he’ll probably call the State Manager. If he works in a business that is big enough to manage their own ‘property’ he’ll probably call the plumber he knows.

So you need to be doing relationship marketing here too – to state managers and directly to businesses.

So you get the call, right?

It’s different if you do projects – landscaping, pools, fences, renovations, bathrooms, kitchens, air conditioning, sheds, houses – things that people want.

They’ll search for them in the ways I’ve described so Find Me Marketing is good. But you can also stimulate demand by running ads (Imagine how nice a pool would be) so that’s worth considering too. 

(If the thing is desirable, at least.)

And, of course, you can subcontract to builders. For builders (project trades) you can do Find Me Marketing, too. Again it depends on what kind of work you want. If you build on land releases or project houses advertising on location is good, show homes are good, and Find Me Marketing is good – all the big companies and franchise groups do these.

If you’re into fancier builds, it’s different again. Your customers are probably going to be designers or architects before they look at which builder to choose, so you need to build relationships with those guys (some of those guys).

If you want construction subcontracting work (projects, still but you’re not the lead with the end customer), then Relationship Marketing to builders is the main focus for you.

This is true for commercial and domestic work.

Back to builders – if you want developers, you can run ads and Find Me and you can network with people who can refer you. In fact, all builders can network to meet referrers like architects and designers, real estate agents, and developers. It’s part of Relationship Marketing or related to it.

You can do Relationship Marketing to people who can give you work and to people who can refer work to you.

So, I’ve covered Find Me Marketing (website, AdWords, SEO etc – used to be Yellow Pages, didn’t it?), advertising, and Relationship Marketing and I’ve kind of neglected signage and social media and branding and your website, haven’t I?

They all count. They have value, too.  

People see ads and buy things – I’m talking about the best bang for your buck and your primary focus. 

All the other things help and support your other marketing. Your brand, your vehicles and site signage and website and socials. People will check them all out so ideally do them all or most of them but put the most energy into your primary 1 or 2.

I’ve ignored word of mouth. That’s not really marketing. It’s work coming to you without much of that. The more marketing I’ve talked about here you do the more word of mouth you’ll get. So that’s a thing. 

If you want to attract more than one type of customer, you’ll have to do more of the types of marketing – remember, your resources of time and money are limited. 

As you grow your business, your resources grow too, so your choices change.

Follow this process to decide where to invest, commit yourself and go hard – marketing is a numbers game.

Do your top priority first and add the others as your resources grow. 

I’ve made a helpful guide to help you through the process. 

Put your hand up if you want it.

Jon.