Leave it for Big Businesses
You read a lot of articles about the importance of branding yourself to gain clients. These articles are written and inspired by people who want to sell you branding services such as brochures, social media services, and public relations. The problem with personal branding is that you can spend a ton of money and earn nothing from it.
What’s a far more effective and financially smart way to grow your business?
You want to focus your business marketing on direct response activities. Direct Response means that:
- You always ask the prospect to respond to your marketing
- You can always measure the result and profitability of a campaign
With direct marketing, you have immediate feedback to see your return on investment. You invest a dollar and you immediately know if you’re getting a response. There is no wasting thousands of dollars and then praying for a result. You get the result immediately. I have done direct marketing for several companies over the last 15 years and it works – fast.
So rather than invest thousands of dollars in branding yourself, an activity that may never pay off, would it make more sense to try direct marketing for under $200 and see the results before you invest more? I will provide plenty of tips on how to create profitable direct marketing campaigns.
Professionals new to marketing make the mistake of taking their cues from big business or so-called marketing experts. But, if you’re a small company don’t market or advertise your services as big businesses do as your context is not the same. The main issues focus on the difference between “push and pull” and “branding.”
Brand Yourself After You’ve Exhausted Direct Marketing Options
If you serve a community of fixed size, you could exhaust your opportunities for direct marketing. You can only bombard the same audience a limited time before direct marketing activities become excessive and ineffective. But until you’ve exhausted your direct marketing work, there is no need to have a known identity or reputation for great success.
Make no mistake, marketing is on a sliding scale – ads don’t have to be entirely branding or direct marketing. I’m a huge proponent of content marketing, such as articles on your site and visual media. Use these marketing channels to brand your company while also displaying a call to action.
Push and Pull
Large companies use the “pull” method of marketing. General Motors runs ads to make their cars look enticing to pull you into the dealership to take a test drive. Intel advertises “Intel inside” to have you come to the computer dealer and ask for an Intel machine. This type of advertising, to be effective, requires A LOT of money. You don’t have that much. You cannot run full page ads in your daily newspaper day after day to generate sufficient business. Even if you did, it would be a very inefficient use of your money.
For your context, you want to “push” people to you. “Push” technologies include:
- Direct Response
- Print advertising
- Radio and TV
- Internet Lead Generation
- Cold calls
- Direct Mail
Notice that pull marketing is passive: the advertiser runs the ad and hopes for something to happen. Push marketing does not leave things to chance. You make direct contact with the prospect and push them into action with a time-urgent appealing offer. The cost of this marketing is lower than pull marketing and more effective.
Direct Response vs. Branding Yourself
When you attempt branding yourself with an ad in the newspaper or trade publication, the seller will always tell you that you cannot measure results directly because you don’t know how many people saw your ad and the “cumulative build up” of name recognition. This is an argument to keep you advertising and the seller making a commission.
If instead you run a direct response ad, an ad offering a free booklet or consultation, you can count the number of calls you get. You can now calculate your cost per prospect, factor in your conversion rate to clients and then calculate your cost and profit per new client to determine the profitability of this ad campaign.
Consider that direct response marketing provides a branding benefit anyway. Content Marketing and Public Relations, for example, distributed throughout the web will help prospective customers learn more about what you do and how to go about hiring trades professionals like yourself. So, while they’re engaged why not ask the prospect to take action?
Use push, not pull. Forget about branding yourself and make direct response your mantra.
Direct Response Examples
The Free Report
One of the most widely used, mentioned above, is the free report. You can use this same tactic for any business. A prominent landscape company on the East Coast named Sebert offers a free “E-Book” titled “The Essential Guide to Hiring a Commercial Landscape Contractor”. The landing page offering this free guide is used in search marketing, or other ads, to get higher conversion rates and immediately capture prospective clients. Not only does this make it more cost effective, but gives you almost immediate feedback on return on investment.
This is the way a business can grow with limited resources.
Social Media
Social media may not necessarily be the best marketing tool for every business, but should be used regardless. According to eMarketer, more than two-thirds of U.S. Internet users regularly use a social network. The way these subscribers use social media is essentially a search mechanism to find the information on products and services they’re interested in. If these users read your post you have the attention of a highly qualified audience. Using direct marketing strategy turns this into a great opportunity.
Develop a plan to connect with users often and in the most relevant places with strong content. Share your expertise with readers so they don’t feel like they’ve wasted time reading your posts. Then end with a clear call to action. Many trades companies use social media as a collage of images with remodeling ideas or recent projects. Offer more information such as a booklet, a free consultation, or at least a link to your site to read the rest of the article. And, make sure the page they arrive on has a place to leave their information.
Direct Mail
For many businesses, direct mail is the least expensive lead generation method. While costlier than email, direct mail gets a better response rate. It’s easy to see why direct mail shines. With email, you are very lucky to get 20% of your email opened. The major reason for the low open rate is the low delivery rate. Much of your email will likely be filtered out before it reaches the recipient.
As long as you design your envelope correctly, you will get 100% of your direct mail opened.
Content Marketing and Public Relations
Content marketing can be something as simple as a blog post on your website, or an elaborate distribution of articles or PR to thousands of sites throughout the Web. Done correctly this can be your greatest tool, but done poorly can be a huge money suck with little results to show. There are several recipes agencies will advise for successful content marketing strategies. All content published on the web should be optimized for SEO. But most importantly, while your audience is engaged why not ask them to take some action? Too much of content or PR will evangelize the company, and brag about recent projects, but has no direction in the end. No hard sale is needed – just give your readers a solution to the problem they’re looking to solve.
When generating content always plan for the direct marketing goal you want the user to take.
Search Engine Marketing (PPC)
Google AdWords is a complex performance based advertising system that if setup and managed properly can be very rewarding for a construction business. It can also cost your business a lot of money if it’s not managed properly. For many small businesses, investing in the time to manage an AdWords account takes too much of their time, so they run a simple ad that routes traffic directly to their homepage in hope of capturing some leads or phone calls. It’s important when tackling PPC ads you create a strategy unique to your business with direct marketing goals in mind. Drive visitors at least to a page that has lead capture and a clear call to action that explains how you can solve their problems.
Common to All Direct Marketing
Headline
If you want to get great results, you need to start with a great headline (for email, the subject line). Great headlines are not intuitive.
Let me provide an example. I sent out an email recently to a group of homeowners. The subject line:
“New Research – Remodeling Ideas that Earn You 5 Times More”
The title is compelling as it raises an extreme degree of curiosity and desire to not be left behind.
Even a phone call has a headline designed to capture the attention and curiosity of the recipient. While shocking, most phone calls open with an introduction such as,”Ms. Jones, this is Bob Haward from the XYZ Company. How are you today?” Do you think this opening generates attention and curiosity? Or does it generate loathing and impatience of receiving a cold call?
What if you opened every call so that if the recipient had interest, you immediately captured their interest and curiosity? In our business of helping trade businesses, we know that their big concern is finding new clients. So we open the call, “Joe? I understand you have an interest in meeting new clients. Is that still the case?” Do you think this headline captures recipients’ interest?
You see, branding yourself is unimportant. What’s most important is having the answer to every prospect’s question, “what’s in it for me?” When you have that answer, your name, identity, and reputation are secondary.
Envelope
Direct mail is becoming less common, but still can be highly effective when attracting high net worth clients.
Would you like to get 100% of your direct mail pieces opened? Then put NOTHING on the envelope that reveals the content. The next time you look at your mail, if you find an envelope addressed to you, from a name you do not know but a local address, would you open it? Of course! The curiosity factor is high and there is a risk in tossing the mail unopened should it be important. So many direct mailers make the mistake of telling the recipient the contents and never get their mail opened.
For example, when the envelope says “bundle phone and Internet for 30% off,” do I need to open the envelope? There is no risk in me tossing it unopened. The ignorance of some direct mailers is shocking.
Body Copy
Whether email, direct mail or a phone call, the body copy is the substance of the message. It springboards from the headline to:
- retain interest
- clarify and deepen the problem
- suggest a solution
The body copy is intriguing so that the recipient reads (or listens) to the entire message. Again, you must know copywriting to craft these words. Although I have studied several books to become a good copywriter, the one “must read” is Jeffrey Lant’s Cash Copy.
Call to Action
The call to action, to be successful must obey some rules.
First, it must be low risk or low cost. You cannot ask someone to come to your office or disclose too much information immediately. They view it as high risk to disclose their personal information, especially financial information, to a stranger. When marketing online, ask only for name and email. People view too much risk in providing name, address, phone, and email unless you have created trust by repeated contact.
