8 Ways to Stand Out This Holiday Season

‘Blending In’ may be fine for cake mix, but it’s terrible for your marketing. Why? Because you’re spending money to be different, unique or to stand out from the crowd. Copycat marketing is perhaps the biggest waste of money in all of contracting.

All the institutional and manufacturer supplied ads start looking the same, and customers can’t distinguish one from another. This adds to cost while reducing the lead count.

Be bold during the Holidays with your unique edge. Get standout recognition while your competition is fighting amongst themselves, and do it for less. Here’s how…

§  Sales Letters (in a Direct Response format) should be sent out prior to December 10. Rebate and deferred payment offers work well during this season.  Do not send any sales offers between December 10 and January 12 or you’re wasting money.

§  Postcards and Self-Mailer Letters sent first-class are faster and less expensive than enveloped mail. Plus, since you’ll receive the ‘undeliverables’ back, this is a perfect once-a-year clean up of your mailing list.

§  Low-Cost Holiday Cards can do all of the above and can be sent from Thanksgiving to New Years. Send to your entire database, but do not use a sales message or the effect is ruined. These are the #1 Customer Retention pieces during the holidays.  

§  New Years Calendars can be a good idea, but limit them to only the top purchasing customers in your database. Customers get many calendars each year, so only the most attractive will make it to the wall, which means only the costliest. Be careful here.

§  Red and green streamer tape in 2” width can visibly distinguish your service vehicles from Thanksgiving forward. For less than $4 per vehicle, you can be a standout in traffic. The tech with the best decorated truck should get a little gift from Santa.

§  Your “on-hold” message should reflect the season and mood. Have separate messages for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.  You must speak to customers in the language of the season. This costs you zip.

§  Your phone greeting can also change for nothing. Use ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of the standard. Be consistent in your greeting message or you sound unprofessional.

§  Use bags of red and green ‘Kisses’ to give to all customers during the Holidays. For about 4 cents a customer, you bring a smile and greater reception to your message.

Not many contractors will make these small, nearly free changes. But, the ones who do will ‘stand apart’ from their competition. They’ll be the ones who are remembered and referred over the rest, isn't this what your marketing should do anyway? 

Were You Looking for This?

After what felt like the longest winter since Mastodons were the main snow-blowers, spring may actually arrive. I’m at my “writing window” overlooking a lake, where my workmates force me to stay put once a week until words actually appear. However,

A squadron of bumblebees keeps smashing their little pollen faces into the glass. I look around the room to see if there’s a little honeybee brothel behind me or something. Not one. So I assume they’re either trying to make the editorial or it just feels good. (I imagine there have been late-night antics when this might’ve seemed normal, or even encouraged.)

“Why we do what we do” is why I do what I do. My job is to “change behavior.” Should be your marketing’s job too: To move a customer from not calling you to calling. From leaving you to staying. From complaint to a glowing referral. Here’s how you do that.

People tend to think of marketing as some voodoo-laced experiment by hyper-creatives who cause people to start drooling as they withdraw their credit card. And basically, that IS the mission, except for one thing: The hyper-creatives have numbers to hit, which include ‘budget, time and units sold.’ If not, they find themselves a new job as, I don’t know, the next SEO expert.  

Where Marketing Fails

When a contractor hires ANY company for marketing service, buys ad time or space or does ANY promotion, the following is a very common seed of failure:

Neither the contractor nor the vendor has set clear goals or expectations. And when one or both sides do not “match up” to the undiscussed goal, things fall apart. YOU want marketing and advertising dollars to bring you fast, qualified leads, plus a great image, unshakable retention and a stream of referrals.

But that won’t happen in one ad, one time, on a shoestring budget. Contractors often give up inches from a breakthrough to try “something new.” Vendors – often too eager for a sale – don’t often explain the outcome nor the time it’ll take to reach it.

Return on Marketing Investment can include these “Behavior Changes” –

• Increase annual/seasonal lead count (online, offline, from service dept.)
• To increase searches by company name and NOT by trade. (Trade results are a crapshoot and NO ONE gets “lucky” on Google; it is orchestrated, formulaic; written about it here before.)
• Generate X% more referrals (higher closing ratio and higher ticket average)
• Increase average transaction size by X%
• Generate positive reviews from  X% of customer visits
• To generate X% of business from customer base

Just like those who create marketing, achieving your goals takes a budget, time and a realistic expectation of units sold. (The budget – which gives most contractors fits or causes paralysis – is why we’ve published a Budget Calculator every year for the past 14 years, changing according to emerging trends each year. Click to get yours.

Remember, the BIG goals of marketing and the ONLY ones you should be paying for are: 1. Get Noticed. 2. Get Customers. 3. Be Memorable.  That’s it. We get roughly 8,000 questions a week (but who’s counting!?) that begin with something like, “I was told I should , so how much should I spend on it?”  The answer?

NOT ONE DIME… unless it changes the behavior of YOUR target market to meet YOUR expectations. And those expectations are items 1-3 above, with actual numbers and dates attached. See? Simple.

The “WWIT” Factor of Wealth Diminishment

After spending 14 solid years doing ONLY contractor marketing (and 7 before that while I was pretending to learn it), you begin to notice trends. A big one is where contractors will actually follow a prescribed marketing path for a while, then want something “new, fresh, shiny” and take an abrupt detour to, as is often said, “…go in a different direction.” And a different direction they go, often toward a richly-promised return that is actually a marketing exploration that uses their Visa card for a flashlight.

It is at this point a contractor comes to the WWIT conclusion: “What was I thinking?”

“Popular” Is Not Always Profitable

Go with what works; invest in marketing trends, not fads.

We cautioned every year since 2009 that the HUGE market in Facebook was still a likely negative ROI due to the “we-hate-sales-and-selling” mentality from the top-down.  (Zuckerberg FINALLY conceded to better ad positioning since a ‘frozen’ $24 stock price was not making his life a party. It’s now hovering at $62-65.) Same with Twitter. The “goal” for social media then is NOT direct sales or leads, but lead-nurturing, relationships and referrals. Very different.

Thus, the method (in this one media) to change behavior is to be “advisory” 70% of the time (relationship) and promotional for 30% – and even then – only “introduce” an alluring topic that is linked to your site for the actual promotion. Tread lightly or get slammed socially. (This is why that ratio exists in the PowerSuite Marketing program.)

Nowhere is flippancy of media any more pronounced than in Local Listings, where daily “rule changes” put you in ongoing reaction mode to maintain your ranking. Up one day, down the next, what happened? Hard to change your market’s behavior based on rules that are adjusted behind closed doors, often for entertainment.

So we turned to places we can change behavior instead of respond to it: Online content (which pushes and maintains rank), videos, structured emails, traffic manipulation, DIRECT MAIL and any place we can “push” a message to a real, live, targeted audience. (I put Direct Mail in capital letters, since as our Coaching Members know, this media is making a HUGE comeback and getting terrific results. Use the Direct Response cards and letters as advised in last month’s coaching call.)

So, as you sit back, now one quarter of the way through the year, and begin to adjust your marketing plan, ask HOW to change the behavior in your market, at what price, and how soon?  Anything else is like those bumblebees: lots of noise, zero sting and causing a massive headache.

Adams Hudson

Print vs. Online Newsletters: Five Factors to Consider in Your Customer Mailings

Contractors who want to keep their customers understand the importance of staying in touch. After all, that’s how customers remember you, appreciate you and know to call you the next time they have a need. The tried-and-true way to keep this connection strong is the customer newsletter.

By getting your name in front of customers two to four times a year with helpful tips for the home, you’re building your relationship and your image. There’s no question about that. But the question that does keep coming up is this one: “Should our newsletter be sent through the mail or by email?” Adams Hudson, president of Hudson, Ink, a marketing firm that designs lead-generating marketing programs for contractors, points to five factors to help you evaluate:

Yes, the costs are different. Both email and print versions have the same upfront costs in concept development, article writing and product design. “From there, email edges out print in this category, obviously, because it doesn’t require physical materials and you save on printing and mailing. But some people stop at that fact alone when there are others to consider,” Hudson said.

People have to physically handle your print newsletter. Your customers have to decide what to do with your print mailing rather than leaving that decision to their inbox filters. And because there’s a chance they’ll place it on a counter or coffee table, they’re more likely to hold onto your newsletter – especially if they’ve noticed the coupons and want to save them for later use.

People are more likely to remember what they read. University researchers a few years back determined that readers who read The New York Times in print form remembered significantly more news stories as well as more points from those news stories than those who read the paper online. You can make the same case for your print newsletter.

You need a list either way. “If you’re sending newsletters to current customers, your data collection may be so superior that you have both physical and email addresses for everyone in your database. More power to you. But if you’re buying lists for certain markets, the physical addresses – with demographic breakdowns and such – tend to be better for targeting certain markets than email addresses,” Hudson said. Also, he added, email is affected by CAN-SPAM legislation, which requires you to offer everyone on your list an opt-out option. Direct mail doesn’t have that restriction.

If you want the relationships, resales, referrals and recurring revenue that come from retention marketing, visit www.customerretentionprogram.com or call 1-800-489-9099 for a free sample newsletter packet. And be sure to ask about the one factor that matters most…

You can balance both. It doesn’t necessarily have to be one or the other. You can double your retention marketing by integrating your print newsletter with an online newsletter portal.

-END-

There’s a Hole in the Bucket

Some of you may remember the ridiculous song by this title. It involves holes, buckets, and some poor lady named “Liza” who is dealing with the lazy, unmotivated and repetitive Henry, who may in fact be a current member of Congress. This song got stuck in my head and wouldn’t leave. I nearly resorted to power tools.

I do this often with songs, and wonder who else shares my sickness. For the past few weeks, it’s been Jackson Browne’s Here Come Those Tear Again. Before that it was Chris Isaac’s Wicked Game. Before that, Foo Fighters’ Times Like These. At least my inner DJ hasn’t chosen anything from Alvin and the Chipmunks or Lady – and I use that term loosely – Gaga.

Yet “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” showed up just after reading Dr. Frederick Reicheld’s latest piece on “…the most crippling problem with small business growth in America”.  The appalling numbers he shows affect home service contractors more than all but ONE other business category. 

Dangers in the Marketing Arena 

I hear a lot of so-called marketing “experts” advising contractors on all sorts of schemes. Any of these sound familiar?

•  “Buying” their way up the SEO ladder to achieve great Google rankings… that lead to a dead website. Great. Now you’ve spent a pile for traffic that CAN’T convert. Then I hear of
• “Mega posting” on FaceBook that are deviously disguised payback for “posting farms” that just exchange likes for the sake of falsely running up your audience/follower count. As long as you like disinterested strangers on your FB page, that’s great. Then you have the
• Fake video farms which “names” videos that have nothing to do with you and posts them on YouTube en masse. Also great for site traffic that has way more interest in spamming you to death than buying HVAC. And two old classics are re-emerging…
• The “targeted email” lists (do NOT do this; end of warning) and the
• “Mass postal mailing” to dead addresses with no accountability. So they promise you a “10k piece mailing for just $2,000!” which miraculously only goes to about 2500 or so, with no results, darn the luck.

Basically – and perhaps you’ve heard it before – there’s no free lunch. The money wasted chasing the lead-generation phantoms leaves contractors tired, frustrated, spent. That money could’ve gone toward something far more valuable. Proven.

I mean a “tried, tested, and proven winner” year in and year out. But many contractors COMPLETELY overlook this method because they’re out chasing ghosts, using their credit card as a flashlight.

After we looked at the numbers from “The Loyalty Effect” and researched our top-tier contractors (more than $7million in residential at 10%+ net profit) we found a common element that we too had overlooked. I could’ve kicked my own rear, but instead - -

We made a 2-Part video about it. The “Hidden Path to a Contractor Fortune” shows you the hole in the bucket. Big time. I mean, it’s leaking AS YOU READ THIS. And that ain’t water you hear: it’s cash.

This video GOES LIVE on March 11^th. We opened up about 350 seats for this, so I’d register soon. (No charge.) If you DO NOT get in, don’t worry, you’ll go on a waiting list ‘til the next airing.

When you watch these videos, I think you’ll see something toward the end of Video 1 that NO ONE has ever shown you. I was more than a little surprised.

Tell your friends. This is going to be fun, and big. Plus, once it airs maybe I can get that stupid song out of my head!

Adams Hudson