A lot of contractors don’t know that there’s a difference between marketing and advertising. If you don’t know the difference, you’ll always be fighting an uphill battle. The fundamentals of marketing will set you up to build an advertising campaign that has a high probability of success.
Marketing Defined
When you think of or say “marketing” what does that mean to you? To most people, it’s synonymous with advertising. Clearly, that’s not the case, or I wouldn’t have written an article comparing the two. What do you think of when you say the word “market?”
The farmer’s market is a great example. So is the flea market. What, exactly, are those things? A farmer’s market is a place where people go to buy and sell the goods provided by farmer’s. A flea market is not a place for people to buy and sell fleas. It’s a place where people who want to buy and sell used goods come together.
If we extend this concept to your contracting business… it can get a little more abstract. But our marketing activities will primarily focus on defining the “place” where people who want to buy and sell your services will go. This could include lead generation websites and directories, like Home Advisor or Angie’s List, and it is recommended that you integrate these services into your marketing mix. But that is a very low-level, simple version. We can, instead, define our own market.
S.W.O.T.
Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This is a simple system you can use to figure out the most effective market for your business to focus on. On my Podcast yesterday, I whipped up a SWOT analysis for a hypothetical 2-man electrical services company operating in Springfield, VA. Their strengths included being conveniently located to a large number of population centers, and a weakness involved getting spread too far over the map and having to contend with hours stuck in traffic each day, leading to a sort of shortage in man power.
Opportunities and threats can and should include an assessment of your competition, whenever possible, but must extend beyond that, as well. For instance, one of the target service areas is known to have a high density of out-dated and potentially dangerous electrical panels. A clear opportunity, so long as we get to them before the competition (time is a threat).
If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you start with a quick hop on over to Wikipedia and read their article. It will provide some core fundamentals while providing concepts to help you apply a SWOT analysis to your own business.
Advertising
This is how we’re going to communicate to the market we’ve defined and should align with the SWOT analysis performed. This is the way that we will communicate what we are selling to the market that is buying. We took everything we knew from our market and SWOT analyses, and combined them for an advertising strategy to include:
- PPC with geotargeting
- Postcard saturation campaigns
- Facebook boosted posts and sponsored ads
We eliminated one of our threats, too, by being able to intelligently schedule these upgrades since they’re all in the same area.
The best way to get a better idea about all of this is to check out the podcast episode that aired yesterday. Throw it on while you’re driving between jobs, it’s about 38 minutes long and you’ll get to walk through the entire creative process with me. You’ll also learn how you can and should tie all of this together for effective messaging and see how implementing tracking can help you make better decisions about your ad spend.