Transcription
Hello, and welcome to the get GC clients podcast. My name is Aaron Cote, and I’m going to run you through how to grow a general contractor business with digital marketing. So as I said, my name is Aaron. I’ve been in the SEO industry for five, six years now, SEO being short for search engine optimization. I primarily help businesses rank higher in Google, like their websites rank higher in Google to get more clients. But I have dabbled in various forms of digital marketing. The first thing that I want to say is that we’re not living in a Yellow Page era anymore, meaning what worked in the past, or for your predecessors, isn’t guaranteed to work as good as it did then. It’s important that you keep an open mind in terms of what forms of marketing to pursue and what forms to ignore. The first form of marketing that I want to talk about is Pay Per Click ads, commonly referred to as PPC ads. And what that means is, you pay money, and an advertisement for your business pops up, whether it be for social media, or Google or Yahoo, or whatever. It’s just paying for your business to show up. And those have a pretty good return on investment. They’re a very valid form of digital marketing. The only thing to take into consideration with them is that when you stop paying for the ads, you typically stop getting results. It’s not to say that some people who saw the ad and saved your name might not call you up at a later time. But for the most part, when you stop paying for the ads, you stop getting a consistent stream of leads. So that’s a very important thing to consider – it’s pay to play. A couple of other forms of marketing that are pretty popular are email marketing and social media marketing. Email marketing is usually better for product based businesses with repeat customers. However, it can definitely be leveraged to get more contractor clients as well, it’s not going to be the best use of your time, or energy to do this. But it does have the highest return on investment in terms of time spent for leads converted. So it’s important to take that into consideration as well. But my opinion is that it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to set up an email list. So start setting up an email list, start collecting emails, and send out a periodic newsletter, maybe even with pictures of a recent project. And I mean, that way, people are still, hearing about your business, but you’re not spending tons of time and money bombarding them with emails.
So for social media, you can go really aggressive with social media, you can hire influencers, you can do product placement. In this case, you know, probably just having your brand mentioned. But I think the best way that you can harness social media is to just post pictures of your projects, you know, post before and after pictures, post videos on the job site, just make a video and say, Hey, you know, I’m here, we’re, you know, second day of the kitchen remodel, we just finished tearing this out, you know, take a look at this, this is we’re gonna be putting in, just make quick updates like that people really like behind the scenes stuff. And they really, really like before and after pictures. So you don’t have to go super crazy with social media. But you do need to be posting content regularly. If someone is interested in your business, or they get referred from a friend or whatever, one of the first things they’re going to do is look you up online, most of the times that’s on Google, so they’re gonna look at Google reviews. But there’s also a pretty decent chance that they’re gonna look you up on social media as well. So it’s important to make sure that your page is set up and you have consistent content coming out.
Then the last major form of marketing is SEO, SEO, as I said, is short for search engine optimization. And it is the process of improving websites to rank higher in Google. So if someone is looking up a kitchen remodeler near me, and let’s say that gets, maybe there’s 50 people near your town that are searching that a month, if you have your page, your website optimized for that, you can rank, you know, on the top three on Google with enough work. And you know, you might get 10 of those 50 a month, you might get 35 of those 50 a month depends on where you’re ranking. But nonetheless, you know, people who know what they want already, and they’re already sort of further on down the sales funnel, they have a higher chance of converting. So it’s important to take that in consideration to, you’re not going to be getting an exorbitant amount of traffic through SEO, but you’re going to be getting very highly qualified traffic from SEO. But yeah, a search engine optimization is a great way to grow your business long term. It allows you to build something that doesn’t go away when you stop paying for it. So like I was mentioning about ads when you stop paying for them, you stop getting results. With SEO, after it’s set up and everything is optimized, you’re pretty good for a while, at least, I mean, there can be algorithm updates where you need to change stuff around. But for the most part, once SEO is done properly, and you stop paying for it, you can still maintain your results for quite a while. So that’s another important thing to consider as well, the ROI extends past the date of, you know, not paying for it anymore. So, I mean, out of all these, I’ve done every single one of them before I picked SEO to focus on exclusively about five years ago now, it depends on your unique situation as to which one’s the best, but those ones are probably the biggest forms of digital marketing. There are TV ads, there are radio ads, there’s print ads, there’s direct mail, and there’s so many more. But for the most part, pay per click ads, email marketing, social media and SEO are probably the four biggest that I can think of when it comes to digital marketing.
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