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“12 Deadly Marketing Mistakes
By AdamUrbanski | November 8, 2009
- and How to Fix Them!”
Conversations on marketing are all too often “Academic” for contractors, working in the field appeals more to us than in the office. This article is a great resource for a glimpse at some of the patterns we are guilty of in our businesses. To help you understand, I have added personal comments in red. – HomeBuildR
Mistake #1: Lack of Marketing Mindset!
Most professionals shiver with disgust on a mere thought of having to promote and sell their service because they are confused what marketing and selling really is.
Regardless of how good you are at what you do if you can’t get enough visibility and not enough people are interested in your products and services, you’ll have a mediocre business at best and always struggle to stay afloat.
You are in business to solve other people’s problems profitably, and marketing helps you “get exposed” to more people and make them “hungry” for your solutions.
Make a commitment to become a life-long student of marketing and continually apply what you learn. Soon your business will soar.
Mistake #2: Spraying and Praying!
Poor strategic planning, lack of clearly defined target market, niche and ideal client result in confusing marketing messages and costly “hit and miss” promotional tactics that fail to deliver the desired response.
Evaluate who your best clients are and invest time, effort, and money into only those strategies that help you best reach the largest number of prospects who can potentially become your ideal clients.
The more precise and targeted your promotions become, the more successful and profitable your business will be.
A great example, sending out mailers to a zip code with out identifying your potential clients first. It makes no sense to me to send a mailer out to homeowners that already have a swimming pool in their backyard when I’m looking to build new ones.
Mistake #3: Confusing Marketing with Sales!
Before you can have a paid client you must have a prospect. And before you have a prospect you must have a lead!
Lack of effective, systematic lead generation strategies, and trying to jump from “stranger to client” keeps the business pipeline very dry for most service professionals!
Make lead generation one of the core activities of your business. The bigger you can build the database of qualified prospects the more relaxed you’ll be about the future of your business.
You’ll also become more effective in pursuing only those potential clients who are the best match for you – resulting in creating a more fulfilling business for you and better results for your clients.
Sales happen when you market well.
Mistake #4: Under- or Over-Spending!
Without knowing the value of each client there is no appropriate marketing budget. Promotional efforts are abandoned all together, or there is too much money wasted on tactics that eat up all potential profits.
Track each customer’s spending habits. Over a period of time you’ll be able to determine the value each customer represents to your business. This number is critical in your marketing efforts. Without it you never know how much you can really afford to invest in your new client acquisition strategies.
Mistake #5: Failing to Keep In Touch!
A lack of consistent contact causes valuable client relationships to suffer, and results in increased attrition and permanently lost sales.
At times we all forget that people buy when they are ready not when we need to make a sale. Developing ways to keep in touch with prospects and clients generates six-figure windfalls for me every single year.
Often my clients reveal to me that they have been reading my tips for years before ever investing a dime in one of my products.
Start an ezine. Send out a monthly postcard. Write and publish an article a month. Start a blog. Host a monthly teleseminar. Get into podcasting. Whatever your method – find a way to frequently and regularly connect with current, potential, and past clients.
Real estate agents do an excellent job with this, every year they will send out magnetic calendars for their past clients. I often amazed how many of these calendars are on refrigerators in the homes I visit.
Mistake #6: Refusing to Brand Yourself as an Expert!
A close relative to “spraying and praying.” Being a Jack (or Jane) of all trades confuses your potential clients and diminishes the perceived value of your services and products.
Analyze your strengths and the market you serve. Can you identify a specific service or product that is more popular than others you offer and that you are really good at and passionate about? Can you notice a trend that some clients tend to get better results with you than others?
If so, make a conscious effort to position yourself as an expert who offers only specific solutions to specific audience and in the upcoming months and years become better than anyone else at doing it.
Most of us prefer do deal with experts. So the time and effort you invest in positioning yourself as one will pay huge dividends; you’ll effectively differentiate yourself from others offering a similar service, and gain a competitive advantage that’s nearly impossible to beat!
Mistake #7: Engaging In Price Competition!
Failure to properly position and differentiate your services from competitors forces professionals to sell their skilled service at too low, “hours-for-dollars” rates.
Often prospects can’t tell the difference between one service provider and another and base their decision to price alone.
Unless you don’t mind being treated as a commodity and making only a fraction of the money you really could me making, you should take steps to clearly communicate you HUB (Hot Undeniable Benefits) of doing business with you.
Mistake #8: “Winging it” Sales Process!
Not understanding the proper syntax of an enrollment conversation, most professionals practice the “show up and throw up” sales method, which easily turns off even the most eager potential clients.
Develop a set of five to ten “must-have-answered” questions that illustrates your expertise and ensures you this prospect is the right type of client for you.
It’s important to remember this: While you are engaging in sales conversations about your product or service all the time, your potential clients only do it once in a while and they rely on you to guide them through this process.
Don’t disappoint them and rob them of opportunity to work with you by being lousy at closing the deal!
Mistake #9: Over-Depending On Referrals!
Not knowing the difference between getting referrals and a strategically developed word-of-mouth marketing system many professionals can’t understand why satisfied clients don’t refer them to friends and colleagues and they don’t know how to solve this problem.
Your good clients want to refer you to their friends they often don’t know how to do it. Unsure about how aggressive you’ll be in pursuing the contacts they give you, they prefer the safer option of not giving it to you at all.
Know when it’s best to approach clients about referrals (hint – it’s not at the end of your engagements!). Educate them about your follow-up process to make them at ease with your practice. Those two simple tweaks alone will make a huge difference in your “referral-ability”.
You probably wouldn’t be reading this, if you were not guilty of relying on referrals as your sole method of lead generation. It’s Shocking, how many contractors stick with referrals as their main way of getting leads, as if it were a badge of honor.
Mistake #10: Misusing Technology!
Many professionals mistakenly assume that “internet is a business”. They either refuse to get into “that business” all together and miss out on huge marketing possibilities, or try to convert their business to be 100% internet based. Both are costly mistakes.
Savvy professionals recognize new business development opportunities that internet makes possible so they make online marketing an important part of their strategy, but they don’t drop everything else.
Employ the power of online marketing to make your business easier to find, and to keep in touch with current and potential clients. But also give your promotions a healthy “multi-dimensional” appeal with offline strategies like postcards and phone calls and watch your business explode.
Mistake #11: Being a Lone Ranger and a Super Hero!
Lack of delegation skills, not having a support team, and working alone without access to a community of like-minded peers who are committed to our success diminishes the opportunity to creatively brainstorm new ideas, explore new opportunities, or uncover blind-spots.
Admittedly, lack of good delegating skills is my personal biggest vice I continue to work on. It’s also what keeps most professionals and entrepreneurs from building a more successful business.
I’m finding that better planning, reminding myself of the value of my time, and constantly improving my delegation skills is very helpful.
Also, forming my personal board of advisors (mastermind) and being able to seek their counsel when needed is very powerful tool to keeps me focused and on track to achieve my business goals.
Mistake #12: Lack of Business and Marketing Systems!
Too much creativity negatively impacts profitability. Constantly working on new one-shot strategies and reinventing the wheel results in larger than necessary workload, overwhelm, and diminished profits.
Remember that many of your business growth strategies can become more profitable as you implement them again and again and tweak and perfect them over a period of time.
Bigger payoffs can be generated from focusing on one strategy, optimizing it for best results, and systemizing and automating it than from chasing a half a dozen of ideas that never get fully implemented.
Make it one of your business goals to create systems that can be duplicated, automated, or delegated and free your time to focus on money-making aspects of your business – like improving your marketing and generating more leads.
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