How to grow your business little by little

Too busy to be marketing your business

I hear from so many trades people that say 'they are too busy to do this or too busy to do that' and that they don't have an hour a day to focus on marketing their business! Is this you and your business?

This is why so many trades and property businesses suffer from feast or famine, they only start marketing when the well is dry, there is an old saying of 'don't wait until you're thirsty to dig your well' and this applies to marketing so well.

So how do we get out of a marketing feast or famine

The best way is to set goals for the week, just small simple goals it may be work on a website page, sending out letters to potential commercial clients or even some customer service calls/ follow up calls to make sure everything is okay.

So lets take the marketing goal of sending out some letters to get commercial clients, If you set yourself a goal of sending out up to 5 letters per day to potential commercial clients at the end of the week you'd have sent out 25 letters, not a lot however over a year that's around 1300 letters! It all adds up!

Breaking down your marketing

Look at your marketing activities as a drip in a bucket

Just by doing a little bit everyday you break it down and make it manageable. Keep doing it and making small marketing goals and you'll never experience a famine! Like a drip in a bucket eventually the bucket will be filled and it's the same with marketing, it all adds up.

You do need to plan these goals too, so be sure to set a planning time during the week when you sit down and just focus on growing your business this may be on a Sunday for the week ahead.

Over time you'll see results from these little marketing activities.

To your marketing success

Paul Jennings

Marketing for Trades

How to convert more quotes to customers

A powerful marketing tool to add to your marketing toolbox

One of my favourite subjects within marketing is the one I call massive value marketing and next to no trades or property businesses are doing it as part of their marketing, so if you grasp this and do it, you'll put your business way above your competitors! 

By showing your potential customers that you give massive value, more will buy from you, If you convert more it will mean you'll save money!

What is massive value marketing

Many businesses give the old 10% off type of incentive to entice customers to buy from them or a voucher for £xx off, this is old, old marketing, frankly boring and if you give these sort of discounts it's money coming from one place - your bottom line, your profit and we're in business to make profit right?

So rather than giving 10% off, give 10% more, this way the customer gets better value, your bottom line stays intact and potentially you can actually make more money.

How does massive value marketing work

We're going to go into a bit of maths now to explain this, not my strongest skill so I'll keep it simple! The 10% more should cost you either nothing or very little.

If you give 10% off, say £100, that's £10, if your profit from £100 is £20 you've cut your profit in half. That £10 can't come from anywhere else because your business costs have remained the same.

If you give an extra service which means you may be on the job a little longer it won't physically cost you money, or lets say you buy a product for £3 that may normally cost the customer £10 to buy and you give them this product for doing business with you, you have given them 10% more but it's only cost you 3% or £3 from your bottom line.

I hope that makes sense!

From a psychological point of view the customer feels like they have got a better deal so are more likely to do business with you and in reality they have, when I used to give discounts (it didn't happen often) I in a way begrudged it and in all honesty the customer probably didn't get me at my best!

This is a much better way of giving value, you are limited on how much discount you can give a customer but on a giving more value basis you are not so limited, if it's something that would be of no or little cost to you.

Lets say you give them 3 products at a cost of £3 each to

you, it would have cost them £30 and however it's only cost you £9, therefore they've got an extra 30% and it's only cost you 9% still less than the 10% discount you may have given!

What can you do to give massive value

So if you decide to give away a product it could be something that you can buy in bulk to get a really good discount, a discount that someone buying one or two would not get.
You could give a discount from a non related business, for example if you are a builder and you've just completed an extension and loft conversion for a customer - If you knew or built a relationship with a local restaurant, they would offer you voucher of say a value of £60 but you'd pay only £30 or less, You give the voucher to the customer for a free meal for 2 to say thanks for being a customer. 
This is a real Win/Win/Win situation.

I know the last example would mainly be given at the end of a job but, do you think that's going to be a talking point when they meet friends and family.

Great massive value marketing for a plumbing and heating engineer could be installing free magna cleans.

Brilliant massive value marketing for an electrician may be a free 1/2 hour Visual condition report at time of quoting!

Massive value marketing for an interior designer could be a free portrait session for the family with a photographer in the newly decorated home.

I'm sure you can come up with many more for your business, be sure to come up with several so you can tailor it to each customer.

To your success
Paul Jennings

No one cares about your logo, except you!

Is branding important to trades and property businesses as part of your marketing?

I often talk about how no one cares about your business name, logo, brand colours etc and it's true that people are not interested in this about your company. 
When you're marketing your business whether it's with flyers, on your website or on your vans the logo should be one of the smallest elements most businesses put too much emphasis on these things, the logo will take up most of the advert or marketing material.

It's generally just us the business owner that cares about these things about our business, prospective customers just want to know that our business can do the job that they need to be done. This said branding is still important.

Why branding is important to marketing your trade or property business

Although customers don't buy your service initially because of your branding, it is part of their decision whether they are going to call you, you need to show that you're running a serious business and not a cowboy outfit, spending time and money on branding will show this and show that you as a business owner care about your business and therefore care about the customer.

Branding is more than a logo

Branding is a huge subject and it's not just for large corporate companies, sole traders looking to grow their business should also look at branding their business.

Branding is not just about your logo and the colours you've chosen it is also about how all of your marketing materials look and about your values as a business, what is important to the business and how that works for customers too, it's important to make sure that all employees and subcontractors know these values too and when interacting with the customer keep this message consistent.

How you are on social media is also important and plays part of your brand that you build, if you are negative on social media always complaining about things or swearing this is devastating to your business brand and is a sure way to make sure you never get business from it.

So what are your thoughts on branding, let me know in the comments below!

To your success

Paul Jennings

Your van sign writing

Marketing your business with your vans

Many construction business vans that I see have their sign writing wrong for getting lots of new enquiries, they normally have their logo as the biggest thing on display and their phone number one of the smallest (as in the image) , sorry if that's your van, after reading this post you may want to have your vans re-sign written.

Don't focus your van sign writing on your logo

I know you're proud of your business and logo, it's important to you, the issue is your logo is only important to you! nobody cares about your logo or other branding! I'm not saying branding isn't important, it is. However to get calls from your van, which is possibly your best and cheapest advertising tool you have so you want as many people to see it as possible.

How best to have your van sign written for marketing your trade or property business

The main set of people who are going to call you from your van marketing are people who need your service now or in the very near future, So you need to tell them what your service is and how to contact you and the bigger that information is the further away people can see it, which means more people can see it, on top of that when you are driving around it makes it easier for people to take down your 

information to call you later! The image on the left is the best way to show that information, the main parts being in large letters and at the top of the van. There is not much more to it than this.

Sign writing like this will make your business stand out from a distance

It's just a very simple way to present your information to get more business.

I also recommend having business card holders on the sides so passers by can take your information too! check out http://bizcardbox.co.uk/ to get some for your vans! (I'm not affiliated in any way with this site) the best way to see how this works for you is to only add 15 cards at a time and then count them, you'll find this is possibly the cheapest way to advertise your business.


To your success

Paul Jennings

Top 10 website basics: A checklist

Website marketing basics: A checklist for trades

Following on from my last post about the pros and cons of building your own website or hiring a web design company I thought I put together this basic checklist.

So you've got a website, Whether you built your own trade website or had it done for you check through this list to help promote your site, be aware just like trades and property businesses there are cowboy web designers who don't know how to put together a decent website, here is a list of the basics your website should have to be a great tool for marketing your business, the more questions you can answer yes to the better!

Do you have text that explains who you are and what you do and where you do it, but more importantly how you Help The Customer? Is your phone number on every page? Does your home page have a call to action such as Follow us on Twitter/call now/ email for more information? Do you have an about me page that represents your passion for your trade business? Have you clearly defined your services, pricing and guarantees with a page for each? Have you included customer reviews/ testimonials, preferably with pictures of the people or videos which would be best? Do you have 'trusted logos' - NAPIT, Gas Safe or NHBC  etc. With a page explaining what they are about. Does your website contain your keywords? Do you have a blog to show your expertise, knowledge and drive visitors to your site. Can a visitor +1 your website and follow you on Google+, Twitter and on other social media networks from your website?

So how many Yeses did you score?

0 - 3 Looks like you're just starting out. Check out the rest of my blog posts on websites.

4 - 7 You're on the right track. list what order you're going to complete the tasks and get to work the sooner it's finished the sooner you'll increase traffic.

8 - 10 Way to go. Think about taking the next step - Pay Per Click Marketing?

Once you've completed this checklist your site will be in the top 20% of websites for trades and property businesses most cannot say yes to all 10 points.

To your Success

Paul Jennings

Want to seriously grow your business? click here to find out more about my services and how they will help you.

DIY a website or use a website design company?

DIY website or not to DIY website that is the question

Over my last couple of posts I've discussed how you can make your own website for your trade or property business and in my follow up post about how to get that website

found in search with Search Engine Optimisation So the question is though, should you build your own website for marketing your construction or property business? as there are a number of pros and cons to doing it yourself as there are with using a website designer too.

As a trades person we've all seen DIY electrics, plumbing other building work done badly, and we've seen the same with websites too, I know it's not the same and there is no danger to life but there could be danger to wealth! I've seen some really bad websites where they'd have been better off not having a website at all!

Hopefully though you find my posts here useful in helping you to create your own site and even if you decide to go to a designer you'll know enough to understand what they are talking about.

Here are the good points in building your own website to market your business

• You get some flexibility: Once you've got a bit of knowledge on building your own website you can update your site and add pages when ever you choose which can save a fortune, however the trade off is that it may not look exactly how you'd like it to be as most website building software have limited capacity.
  
  Also if you use a good website design company, they should be busy and that means any changes you need could go into a queue and may take a couple of weeks.
• You can save money: This is normally the main reason you'd want to build your own website as adding pages and making changes can and normally does cost (you don't expect them to work for free right) and lots of changes means you can run up a bill.
• A feeling of achievement: It's a nice feeling when a customer says how much they liked your website and even better when you tell them that you built it yourself - of course if customers never say this then you may want to look at going with a website designer.

So there are some good reasons for having a go at building your own website, lets have a look at the reasons you may not want to;

• It could look unprofessional: This is the main reason you shouldn't DIY I've seen some really poor websites and I mean really poor in design and has none of the things I mentioned in the last posts, which means it may never get found by searchers, which could be a good thing if it does look bad!
  
  A bad website is worse than none, you'll get a bad reputation and if you do get traffic to it, it will turn off potential customers, I've been at networking meetings or spoken to other networkers when the subject of someones poor website has come up, it's just like having bad business cards.
  
• It won't work properly: When I was an electrician and called out to fault find I used to be able to find it because of my years of experience, of knowing what to do to eliminate possibilities of what the fault could be, a novice would probably not be able to do this.
  
  The same applies when DIYing a website an image may not display where you want it to, not size properly or display at all. There are things that can go wrong that can create frustrating moments and eat up your time, I've had a fair few of my own in the past.
  
• It may look like many other websites: Most DIY website building sites or sites such as Yell use templates, templates that everyone else has access to and use.
  
  Appearance matters on your site if you look like everyone else it sends a message to potential customers that you don't really care enough about your business to have a unique good looking website and you'll find if someone is looking online for an electrician or cleaning company then they are looking at many websites so are likely to come across those templates!
  
• It’s takes time: Maybe a lot of time, depending on your knowledge and skill, if you're not savvy with basic computing skills then you've got a lot to learn and it could take weeks months or years, not in having to learn the technical stuff such as HTML but good design so it looks good when people read it and also making it look good to search engines for Search Engine Optimisation.
  
  As I said in the earlier post I've been doing websites for a long time, read many books, blogs and been on marketing/ website courses/ seminars and I still only consider myself to have a basic knowledge.
  
  On top of that a website is never finished you need to keep adding to it for those of you that have been following me for a while, know that my site is always changing and having pages added. You need to do this because that's what Google like updated, current sites.

Whatever rout you decide to take, make sure you keep learning how to market your website as online marketing is one of the best ways to get new business now, if you don't take the opportunity then someone else will!

To your website success

Paul Jennings



PS if you want to read more marketing tips check out the top tips here

How to get your website for your trade or property business found

What marketing do I need to do to get my website found

Following on from my last post about building your own website there are a number of things you need to be doing and I mean need to do, to get your website seen, that's what I'm going to be covering in this post, I'm going to be talking about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short!

What the hell is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

When someone searches for a building trade or property business on a search engines, they use keywords such as Builder in, Electrician in, Interior Designer in or Architect in..... (add your local area here) this is just a very basic set of keywords and it is different for different businesses.

SEO is about designing your website so that when someone searches for your keyword terms, it is deemed worthy enough to be shown to the potential customer in search results!

SEO is adding the right words to your website and online marketing for your business for your building trade or property business, generally though if you add enough pages to your website this will happen naturally.

What are my marketing keywords

The first place to start with SEO is deciding on your marketing keywords, the best thing to do is grab some paper and brainstorm all of the words that someone may type into a search engine to find your business, as I'm an ex sparks, lets go with keywords for an electrician or electrical contractor.

First off we'll start with Electrician in..(your area)
Then you could have:

• electrical rewire 
• electrical rewiring
• electrical fault
• electrical testing
• electrical fuseboard (I know its a consumer unit, but people still call it a fuseboard)
• electrician rewire (People search this way)
• rewire house
• electrician prices
• good electrician
• lights not working

This is a tiny list your list could be very long perhaps pages but you get the idea. If you're an electrician these are your marketing keywords you need to think about having on your website. 
You can then use the Google Adwords Keword Tool which will soon be Google Keyword Planner to find more keywords, you can add competitors websites to the keyword tool to see which keywords they use too.

Google keyword tool will also suggest keywords related to your industry.

Something else the keyword tool will tell you is how much competition there is for that word on a high, medium and low basis, so out of that list above as you can imagine 'electrician' is high, 'rewire house' is medium, however 'how much does it cost to rewire a house' has low competition.

The competition is on the basis of Google Pay Per Click campaign, if you use PPC as part your construction business marketing plan then the medium and low keywords are the ones you want to think about going for as it will cost less!

However in SEO marketing on your website you want to have a mix of all of them!

What you need to add for SEO marketing

The key thing for SEO, and if there is only one key thing you take from this post it's CONTENT, content is a big thing for Google search right now and it's the best way to spread your keywords out, the best way to have content is to have a separate page for all of your services not one service page with a list.

On top of this search engines love sites that are current and constantly changing, I would add a new page to your site every week, this is why I'm a fan of building your own site, as with a website designer this can become very costly very quickly.


Make sure your keywords are in the titles of pages, headings and sub headings and throughout the page itself, so on this page in the post title I have website, trade and property business in the title, in the heading and sub headings I have Marketing, keywords and SEO along with keywords in the labels. 

Have your Keywords in your URL is a big help so even if you are a plumbing business called Quick Install ltd it's best to have a URL/domain called www.YourAreaPlumbing.co.uk or www.PlumbersInYourArea.co.uk you can search for your domain at 123-reg.co.uk

When you add images make sure that it has what is called an ALT tag, this is for 2 reasons, if the image doesn't load then people can get an idea what it is, but also search engines can't see images and so read the ALT tag.

Get good backlinks a backlink is simply a link to your website from another website, just any back link is no good, so if someone calls you asking for what is known as a reciprocal link turn it down as it'll probably be no good to your websites SEO, you need links from high ranking and quality websites and sites that have content based on your industry. 

What doesn't work

Links from forums or blog comments and link building sites, most forum sites, blog comments etc seem to attract people adding links to boost their SEO, this does not work because they generally have a 'No follow' attribute which tells search engines not to follow links, so this is a waste of time and as for things like link building sites, well Google just ignores those apparently it does the same with most directory sites!

Lots of Keywords repeated numerous times (known as keyword stuffing) on a page is also does not work and can be seen as spam by search engines and can harm your search engine results, It's best to only use your keywords 2-5 times per page.

The same goes for having every area and/or postcode that you cover listed on your website and to be honest it looks messy! It's much better to have testimonials on the site with the customers area listed.

Submitting URL to search engines you domain such as www.HertfordElectrician.co.uk is your URL and you used to have to submit these to search engines for them to be found, that has changed today search engines are a lot better and this no longer needs to be done however I would submit your site to www.dmoz.org

Human SEO mix

When adding all of this to your website you need to keep one key thing in mind and that is people will be looking at your website for your service, so it needs to be readable and make sense otherwise those people that come to your site will just leave!


There is so much more to SEO than this and I'll cover a bit more in the next post, I'll try and make it a bit shorter too! even then there is more to it, however if you do just these basic things, you'll be ahead of most of your competition in your area. 
But remember that it's an ongoing process, you can't build your site and expect to be found over night, you've got to be found by search engines and then your site has to 'prove' itself against your competitors. The whole process can take months but it is worth it in the end!



To your SEO success

Paul Jennings