- When a customer assesses a trade they’d like to hire they look for the following. Do I trust them? Do they have experience? Do they have proof that they have done quality work? Are they in demand and established?
- The majority of these wants and questions are answers through a refferal. Thats why the majority of good business comes through refferals as you get more and more established. But how can we add another lead source that works just as well as a refferal and the lead comes to us with full expectation of how we operate?
- They come with full understanding of our processes, full expectations of how we do business and full readiness to spend money with us. They’re excited to do business with us.
- This guide will show you the way to do this “digitally” – it doesnt replace networking, serving customers well and gathering refferals. But it does add an incredible lead generating system to your arsenal for scalable, repeatable results.
Expectation Setting
Website & Branding
- Use your website as a place to highlight your work, set expectations and show a potential customer that youre, known, liked and trusted int he industry for your work.
- Your branding should reflect your personality but also provide an aire of professionalism, scale, trustworthiness and quality.
- Work with professionals to create you branding and websites that stand out from the crowd and build trust with your clients.
- A good designer will give you all the assets you need to display a strong presence. From branded stationary designs to digital assets and a stong logo for your workwear.
- Your website should be simple and cover these following things (break each one down further)
- Simple contact form with prequalifying questions
- Having leads answer more questions than simply “how can I help”, will allow you to filter out time wasters but also give you the appropriate information to be able to better serve them in your initial response
- Ideas
- Drop down of type of work looking for
- Budget section
- An area to upload any specs or draings they may have
- A box for them to put some suitable days and times to call back or a preferred method of being contacted
- Ideas
- Having leads answer more questions than simply “how can I help”, will allow you to filter out time wasters but also give you the appropriate information to be able to better serve them in your initial response
- Lots of imagery of past jobs
- It is worth hiring someone at the end of a big job to take some amazing images or to do some online learning about how to best take images with the equipment you have. The photos you show will directly correlate to the work and clients you attract.
- A page which lists and talks about the services and trades you offer
- An about us section that highlights the team and puts faces to names. Builds credibility. Use this as an opportunity to get some professional images photographed of yourself.
- Simple contact form with prequalifying questions
Photo/video & Social media content
- Documenting the process of carrying out works are essential. From before images to during phases and the final result are all just as important.
- Video is a powerful tool. Some great uses are site walkthroughs, walkthroughs of the final product, showing common issues you have found on jobs that people should know about.
- Position yourself as the expert. By highlighting problems you encountered and how they are overcome shows people you are human and also shows people that they may also have this problem, in turn driving need for your service. Warning – We do not scaremonger. An example of an effective use of this tactic would be to highlight damp that is found and you have been brought in to solve and to discuss the various ways of doing this, including simple fixes like appropriate ventilation.
- Showing people you’re willing to give value away for free surprisingly drives massive interaction and loyalty
- Set a procedure
- Every job you should have a system. You or an assistant goes around the whole job and takes before photos.
- Each phase of the job should have another round of photo and video taken and then the final result should be documented.
- Not having the time is merely an excuse. This process takes minutes each time.
- Scheduling
- Don’t feel you need to constantly post content to your social medias.
- Instead schedule a few hours once a month or once every few weeks and schedule out a series of content on a scheduling system.
- It’s quick and easy and has plenty of guides to show you how to easily do it
- Hire a professional
- Work with someone who knows what they’re doing to guide you as to what content to create, can post at the relevant times and even possible a team who can work on engaging and responding to your followers.
- Templates
- Use a system like canva or a professional to build you before and afyer templates.
- Whether it be a transition video from before to after or a side by side image.
Testimonials and reviews (automation) Project highlights
- Gathering testimonials are an important part of generating social proof for your business. Proving to people that you are legit and worthy of their money.
- Set up a process whereby at the end of each project and automatic email goes out asking for reviews and links them to a series of different platforms to do so. Instagram, facebook page, Google. Our recommendations would be to focus on Google reviews and facebook pages.
- Ensure you have Google my business set up and it looks professional. You are even able to add images of projects to this to further bolster your profile.
- Use these reviews on your website to highlight your credibility.
- Have nicely designed images of your work with the testimonial over the top of them.
- Project highlights are one of the most powerful things you can do for your website.
- Set them up like blog posts and make a process and procedure for getting them done. It makes it repeatable and consistent.
- Here’s how
- Gather your before images and write a description of the project undertaking and what the clients brief was
- Add your comments and the challenges faced initially
- sprinkle in some process photo and video with some commentary on what you were doing
- Adding an image such as at the plastering stage and adding a brief description to the image such as “We Plastered 144m2 of this large home including removal of artex ceilings and leaving room for a total of 30 spotlights carried out by our electrician. Our plastering team completed this project in Newport in just 3 days.”
- Something along the lines of the example above would deliver great SEO juice to your post when paired with everything else.
- It talks about the service, the location and offers numerical specifics to provide the reader with more understanding and further bolstering their impression of you.
- Then finally, add further text about wrapping up the project along with some after images.
- Add more ntoes of how to seo optimise this blog post
Digital Advertising
- There are thousands of avenues for advertising your small business. From constant calls from companies such as Yell, to SEO optimisation, to flyering, to paper ads all the way through to social media advertisement.
- We belive social media advertisement is the best first place to start when it comes to small business service advertisement.
- It allows you to be as broad or as defined as you like in your search for customers as-well as giving you the ability to retarget these people through many other means.
- You also have the ability to engage with people who have been to your website before or engaged with your content, turning people who know you, into people who know, like and trust you.
- Simple ways to get started are to simply boost your content posts to your local area at a few £ per day. Small drips like this have been very successful for many small businesses. Again, a great starting point. But there are huge opportunities in becoming more sophisticated with it.
- If you don’t want to learn or go through the long learning time of learning facebook ads (can I say learning any more…), hire a professional company wwho specialises in working with small business and specifically trades.
- They are able to create a full, customer journey through social advertising from cold to hot lead and give you exact measurements and returns, so you know for each £ spent, exactly how much £ you returned.
Closing remarks
- Talk about our service offering