As a contractor, you know how to solve problems.
Rewiring an old house? No problem. Renovating an outdated kitchen? Easy-peasy. Launching an integrated marketing campaign? Well, that might be a new one.
But, like any other project, once you know how to do it, it becomes another skill in your toolbelt.
In this post, we’ll explain how to market yourself as a contractor or freelancer. We’ve gathered tips from business management expert Carl Gould, who recently shared his experience working in the trades industry. We’ll describe how to improve your marketing skills, and provide a list of tools and services you can use to grow your business.
In the Trades: The Ultimate Marketing Guide
Download12 Contractor Marketing Tips
When you’re working as a contractor, you might not have time to sit down and organize a multi-month marketing campaign – and that’s okay. Here are some things Gould says you can do right now to improve your marketing skills.
1. Respond to customers quickly.
Don’t leave your customers hanging—respond as soon as possible to maintain consistent communication. This will not only improve your relationships but also help close deals, complete payments, and keep people satisfied with your service.
This is where SMS and messaging services like Facebook Messenger come in handy. They provide instant communication channels, and they’re relatively cheap to use. In fact, Gould notes that most providers offer services that cost anywhere between $0.015 and $0.05 per message.
Pro Tip: Consider using a shared inbox or communication center to consolidate messages in one place. These tools connect communication channels, so messages coming in from different channels are all stored in one place. This helps you manage high volumes of calls and emails, and makes it easier to respond faster.
2. Start and finish on time.
One way to build a positive reputation as a local contractor is to start and finish projects on time. This demonstrates that you’re reliable and can manage multiple projects simultaneously. After all, nothing’s more frustrating to customers than a project that never gets done.
Pro Tip: Scheduling software streamlines bookings and makes it easy to see which projects are on your schedule. You also don’t have to spend as much time setting up phone calls or meetings, since these tools automatically update your calendar – and people can see when you’re available before they schedule a call.
3. Be transparent and consistent with your pricing.
If you quote a project at one price, then slowly increase it to a higher one, that’s a quick way to upset your clientele.
Gould has a great quote that we’ll borrow from his webinar:
“People will spend their money to save time.” – Carl Gould
Be upfront with your pricing and be transparent and fair if things change. Keep in mind that an existing customer is 60-70% more likely to buy from you, so charging less now might end up profiting you more in the future.
Pro Tip: Consider using a free invoice generator to streamline payments and ensure accurate pricing.
4. Have a project manager onsite.
If your staff consists of you and you alone, you will have to be at every work site you manage.
But, as you grow and take on more clientele, you’ll eventually need to hire to keep up with demand. While you should recruit qualified and trusted talent, they shouldn’t replace your role in communication. If a customer strikes a deal with you, they expect to work with you and see you on the site. At the very least, you should be available to chat as needed for each project.
Pro Tip: A customer relationship management (CRM) system can help you manage and store information about the people you’ve worked with. This tool makes it easy to contact customers and shows your past interactions with them. (More about this later.)
5. Offer a free service.
Free services can build rapport with customers almost immediately. They get to see what it’s like to work with you and what to expect going forward.
You don’t have to offer much to get your customers’ attention. Gould gave a great example of how his company would offer to hang a shelf for free at a home or business. This helped him close deals with prospects, because they could see he offered a fair and trustworthy service.
Other ideas might include:
- Free Estimates
- Quick Cleanings (e.g., snaking a drain or lint removal)
- Service Reports
6. Research your competitors.
If you want to brainstorm marketing plays, look at what competitors in your area are doing. Pull up their websites, social media pages, and local listings to get a feel for how they’re communicating with customers. Pay close attention to what’s working and where you can stand out.
Another great place to look is at customer reviews. Google competing businesses and filter the results by most or least stars. Take note of any positive or negative patterns in what customers are saying. These are the pain points that your business will solve in its marketing communication.
7. Give customers multiple ways to contact you.
There are several reasons why you should have multiple points of contact for your business. First, it helps with local SEO and making your business more discoverable online. If you have a website, Google Business Profile, and social media pages, search engines will link to your business in their search results.
Another reason is convenience – for you and the customer. If you have an email address and a phone number, the customer can choose their preferred communication channel.
Pro Tip: The more points of contact that you offer, the more work it will take to manage each one. This is where a centralized inbox can organize communications and reduce the workload for you and your team.
8. Use customer communication tools.
There are plenty of free communication tools available to your business. Here are three that we recommend.
- CRM System: A CRM is like an online contact book. It stores information on each customer and allows you to keep track of their conversations, phone calls, text messages, and other interactions with your company.
- Team Chat: Team chat is an internal communication tool that team members use to stay in contact with each other. If you pair it with a CRM, you can quickly update your coworkers on your interactions with customers.
- Shared Inbox: A shared inbox gives everyone on your team access to all incoming messages from your clientele. If you’re not around to answer an email or phone call, someone on your team can step in and respond.
9. Offer a membership, subscription, or club.
Gould also emphasizes the importance of offering a membership or club at your business. He calls it the “number one strategy of commercial business in the last 500 years.”
Subscriptions and memberships keep customers coming back to your company because they have an incentive to work with you.
Another option is to bundle services together. Rather than doing one job at a time, you can offer a deal to do multiple projects at once. This commits you to a long-term contract with the customer that should remain profitable over time.
10. Maintain an excellent reputation.
Your reputation can make or break your business. Nowadays, most listing websites display customer reviews right next to your company whenever someone searches for your business.
But, here’s the thing – people are specifically looking for negative reviews. One study found that 96% of customers look for negative reviews before doing business with you. That means just one bad review could be enough to lose a potential customer.
Pro Tip: Consider skilling up in online reputation management. You should be comfortable with responding to negative reviews and keeping an eye on local listings.
11. Take advantage of invoice marketing.
Did you know your invoices can actually double as marketing content?
Invoice marketing is the practice of adding marketing messages to your payment collection process. For example, if you send invoices via email, you can add a link to your Google Business Profile and ask for a review. Or, you can share some news about an upcoming promotion and provide an option to join your mailing list for more updates. That will give you another way to engage your customers and keep your company relevant over time.
If you want to keep things simple, you can also just leave a friendly message, thanking customer for their business:
Bonus: Check out our guide to invoices for contractors and claim a free invoice template for your business.
12. Test new tools for your business.
How much fun is it to test a new power tool for a project? It’s even better when that tool ends up saving you money by completing work in half the time.
New tools don’t just belong on your toolbelt. You should be testing marketing, sales, and customer service tools, too. This software can save you time and automate repetitive tasks at your company, like sending emails or scheduling social media content. AI tools will make you even more efficient and maximize the returns on your advertising campaigns. You’ll attract more customers, engage buyers more frequently, and close more deals while using the same amount of resources.
How to Market Yourself as a Contractor
Let’s look at six steps that you can take to market yourself as a contractor.
1. Add your business to online directories.
Nine out of every ten people own a smartphone, which means almost everybody can use their phone to discover your business. The most common way is a search engine, like Google, but there are also directory sites like Yelp, Angi, and more. Your business needs to be present on all of these sites if you want customers to find you.
There are dozens of business listing websites that you can add your company to — and keeping them updated over time is a task of its own. This is where an online listing management tool can benefit your business. It will automatically add your business to directories and keep your listings updated over time.
2. Create a website for your company.
Every business needs a website. Social media and online listings are great, but they’re limited compared to what a website can provide.
A website is your digital home for your brand. It’s another way for Google to discover your business, and it helps you convert website visitors into customers for your company. A good website can help you book appointments, send estimates, share customer reviews, and generate more brand awareness for your business.
Pro Tip: Websites are much easier to build with pre-made templates and drag-and-drop builders.
3. Set up social media accounts.
Social media is a great channel for distributing news, promotions, and content marketing for your business. People who follow you on social media are genuinely interested in your business. Keep them engaged with relevant content that entertains, educates, or informs. You should also have a distinct tone and personality that aligns with your brand values.
You can use a social media management tool to create and schedule posts for your business. This software connects to your social platforms, allowing you to post to each of them from one place. You can schedule a week’s worth of posts and review comments and engagements without leaving the app.
4. Ask for customer reviews.
Customer reviews are incredibly important for your business. Not only do they help you develop a good reputation, but they make your business easy to find online, too.
For example, let’s Google, “best contractors near me.” You might have different results based on location, but I guarantee you that your top results have plenty of good reviews, like this one:
Google shows businesses with the best reviews first. Therefore, it’s important to manage your digital reputation and respond to both positive and negative reviews. Doing so will not only make existing customers happy, but it will help you attract new ones, too.
5. Track offline marketing.
Offline marketing is what you do off the internet to promote your business. Billboards, signage, and business cards fall into this category.
You should have ways to track these efforts to see how effective they are for your business. That way, you can ensure you are using your budget efficiently and are getting the most value possible from your marketing content.
6. Adopt communication software.
As a contractor, you might not have a large or permanent team. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to communicate with coworkers and customers. You have suppliers you need to work with and partnerships with other contractors that you’ll need to manage.
Communication software can help you stay on top of both customer and non-customer communication. Shared inboxes connect your communication channels, so things like emails, texts, and voicemails are forwarded to one place. You can also use tools like web chat to talk to customers on your website and answer questions from your phone via a mobile CRM.
Online Marketing for Contractors
While we’ve already covered a few online marketing strategies for contractors, here are some other ways you can build your online presence:
- Video Marketing: YouTube is another platform where you can generate brand awareness for your business. Consider creating how-to videos, DYI projects, and challenges to share on your channel.
- Community Forums: Community forums, like Reddit, are great for interacting with potential customers in your market. Look for forums that are local to your area, and use these as opportunities to engage customers instead of directly promoting your business.
- Podcasting: Podcasts are great for generating content for your website, social media, YouTube channel, and more. You can record podcasts that share advice, tell stories, entertain, or talk about whatever else your customers are interested in.
- Blogging: Blogs are another way you can get discovered on search engines. They add more pages to your website and they help you rank for keywords related to your industry.
- Virtual Events: Virtual events like webinars can be a unique way to engage potential customers. For example, you can host a Q&A where you answer questions related to a project or show people how to do something in their homes.
Contractor Marketing Services
We know life gets busy as a contractor, and adding marketing campaigns might be another headache you’re not looking for. That’s why we’ve put together this list of tools, agencies, and services that can help you manage marketing communications.
Contractor Gorilla – Website-Building
If you don’t have a website for your business, Contractor Gorilla can build one from scratch. It has built over 3,000 websites for contractors and businesses in the trades industry. It also provides logo services, so you can completely overhaul the branding for your business.
What we like: Great for businesses trying to grow their online presence
Thryv – Communication Command Center
In addition to its marketing tools, Thryv offers a customer communication platform that’s ideal for small businesses. Its Command Center provides a shared inbox, team chat, and video call features that can streamline communication in one place. And, the basic version of these tools is provided for free (for up to five users), so you can test them out to see how they work before upgrading to any premium features or subscriptions.
What we like: A do-it-all solution that’s designed for small businesses
Blue Corona – SEO Marketing
Blue Corona is a marketing agency that completely owns the digital marketing efforts for your business. It will optimize your website for SEO, oversee your pay-per-click ads, and help run your email marketing. If you have the budget and are really looking to invest in your marketing channels, this might be the right solution for your business.
What we like: Great for growing businesses with a marketing budget
Guerilla Contractor Marketing – Website Optimization
This marketing agency focuses most of its efforts on website optimization, producing content for your business and helping you rank higher on search engines. It also offers web design and digital advertising services that can further expand your business’s reach.
What we like: Full-service content creation
Contractor Advertising – Social Media & Email
This agency is similar to the last one, but it also offers social media and email services. Its team will produce a competitor analysis of your industry and then determine which channels and content will perform best for your business. The agency can also help with paid social media campaigns, which can be a highly effective way to grow your following.
What we like: Organic and paid social media expertise
Contractor Charlie – Blog Content
Contractor Charlie provides a step-by-step walkthrough of how it will help your business. First, it optimizes your website, then manages SEO, and, finally, produces blog content for your business. This agency effectively becomes your content engine, producing new posts that can help you get discovered by search engines.
What we like: Continuous content production and optimization
General Contractor Marketing for Small Business
Marketing doesn’t have to be an all-out campaign. In fact, some of the best marketing strategies are just about paying attention to details and making customer-centric decisions. Imagine the customer’s point-of-view, and think about the experience you would want to have. Then, do everything you can to bring that vision to life.
