The Importance of Marketing

Marketing—it’s how the people who want you find you.

Marketing is the key business survival skill that will help you thrive. If you're not marketing well, it's time to learn how to market your business effectively. To do that, you must require every dollar spent on marketing to account for itself. 

The Wrong Method Of Marketing

Most contractors approach marketing like a bowl of spaghetti. They think that if you just throw a lot of it at the wall, eventually, the spaghetti will stick. In other words, they throw a lot of money at marketing without a plan, and are disappointed when it doesn’t work. This is a very wasteful approach that will cost you big time in the long haul.

Instead, you need to adopt a steady, systematic approach to marketing that allows you to test and measure exactly what is happening with every dollar. This gives you the power to quickly and decisively pull money from marketing that is not profitable and move that money to marketing that is. 

Here are four steps to implementing this change in your business. 

1.   Bring help on board

By now, you are probably not surprised by this step. You need help, and this is one area you cannot afford to go alone. Find someone who specializes in marketing, and preferably businesses like yours to help you find clients, and more importantly, help clients find you. 

2.   Test your marketing pieces.

Split-test your campaigns (also called "A/B testing".) This involves creating two substantial marketing pieces with one variable in each. Try changing the offer, the call to action, or the headline first. Then distribute marketing piece A to 50% of your marketing recipients and the other 50% to marketing piece B. This is a relatively simple process with mail and the internet. Even most print media sources will allow you to run two versions of the same ad.

3. Measure your response.

Measure how well each marketing piece performs. If your ad is online, utilize technology that will automatically measure your results for you, such as Google Ads. If it's offline, you might need to get a little creative. Get a new phone number, an extension, or a response URL. If they call, record their responses and compare their responses to other callers. 

These are just a few ideas. They won't make you a marketing guru, but they will hopefully help you think better about marketing. Knowing the basic principles of marketing, in my opinion, is the first step that every business owner should take.