Alright, let’s talk about what to market. In your handyman business, probably the first thing that comes to mind is your particular service. However, there are ways to take services and create them into products, take services in products and turn them into information products, take information and services and products and turn them into packages, and basically what you get are what I call “marketing widgets.” Any time you create any product, service, or information package, any time you put that together, it’s what I refer to as a “marketing widget” because you are marketing that widget. There are certain things where, there are different places where advertising a service is the way to go. For instance, if you’re going to advertise directly in a service type of publication (like a list of people that provide services), you could go ahead and list your service in there.
If you happen to be listing something that’s more of a product, you can create your service and package it into a three-hour package, or a specific job that’s done and you know that every time you do this job, it’s always going to be between thee and four hours, so I will price it so that if I have to do four hours, it’s going to be great. And I will package it together and sell that as a product, more so than a specific service. You can also do information: – how to do your own tile floor, how to do your own kitchen upgrade, how to replace a sink, how to hang a door frame, how to do all these different things that you’re doing in your business. You can go ahead and do those, and create packages for those and information on how to do them, to get more prospects inquiring about them. So create information products to give prospects who are thinking about doing it themselves, get them on your prospect list, and then follow up with them to make sure that they have not decided to hire someone else to do it for them. It is a really good way for you to get inquires about something, and then get them on your contact list, have them know they can trust with you with the information you provide, which is good valuable information. If they decide to do it on their own, great. Now you’ve got someone on your list that may be available for another project in the future, or maybe be available for referral if someone is not going to do it themselves. But you are able to get them that information, and a certain percentage of them will actually use you to do the project, even though they initially intended to do it themselves. So those are some ideas of what to actually market your in business.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
All marketing should have headlines. Headlines are often overlooked by new people doing marketing that tend to use their business name as their headline-I think that is a huge mistake. Your headline should be some type of benefit or unique selling proposition for your particular clients. It is, in my opinion, the most important component of your marketing message. So if you’re going to test only one thing in your marketing, I would test different headlines to see which one pulls. You can run the same basic ad, copy, same offer, same call to action, same photographs, everything else, but I would change the headline to see if I could improve the response because that is going to have the biggest impact on what your response is in your marketing. So you definitely want to go and do that, and include a headline in all of your marketing.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Learn what marketing to use and how to improve it to maximize your return on investment and massively improve profitability with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
Let’s get into some specifics about marketing messages for handyman businesses. The first thing I want to talk about is the concept of unique selling proposition. A selling proposition is a marketing concept that a lot of marketing experts talk about. And I am going to try to present it related to the handyman business specifically.
Basically, what is big picture though is… it is the marketing promise that you make that if somebody buys your product or service you get this specific benefit. And ideally it is one that neither the competition nor other people can offer in their particular one. So it is something unique to you.
It might change based on what market you are targeting so your unique selling proposition that we are talking about, going and targeting the real estate agents, trying to get sellers to a preparation for their home sales, or real estate investors or people that are doing home remodeling, is going to be different than the one you’ve used from the other ones.
Another good way to think about unique selling proposition is that it could be used as a headline in your classified ad. And just using the unique selling proposition alone, with a call to action, like “call my telephone number”, people would actually respond to that. So a good way to make sure that you got a unique selling proposition is that it is formatted correctly is that if you could use that as a headline for you classified ad and that you gave a telephone number so that people would actually call that telephone number.
So what would be a unique sing proposition for a handyman business? Well one of the things you could use in your unique selling proposition is you could say – as an example of targeting real estate agents, would be – $500 dollars spent now could result in ten thousand dollars increase sale price of your property. Or trade a thousand dollars in preparation or trade a thousand dollars in a handyman work for ten thousand dollars of increase value of your price property. If you can make a fact based proposition, a unique selling proposition, that would be highly effective. If it would be something that your competition is not directly promising or directly offering and you could use that.
If are focusing on working with real estate investors you could create a unique selling proposition specific for them. You could make specific one for people looking to do their basements, for people looking to do their flooring for people looking to do remodeling of their bathroom or kitchen. Whatever it is that you need to focus on, you can make a unique selling proposition focused on that in your offer to your particular market.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright. Another M of marketing… I know there’s only three M’s but here’s another one that I think of, which is another M, is Metrics and that is the measurement side of the marketing you’re doing. What does it cost for you to have somebody click on to your website? Are you paying 50 cents a click from Google AdWords or Yahoo advertising? Or are you paying a certain amount of money for someone to come from to come from another site to you?
Are you paying per client? Or what is your cost per client? If it takes you a certain amount of money in advertising dollars on average to generate a new client what is that number? Can you improve on it?
What is your cost per impression? If you are running your ads on the site, showing your picture or banner or something like that, how much are you paying in order to have a thousand impressions done? If you get prospects or inquiries from your website, or inquiries on your telephone, from direct mail and fax… if you’re getting an inquiry, how much are you going to need to pay marketing in order to get that inquiry? Is it fifty dollars? Is it a hundred dollars? Is it ten dollars? Is it a dollar? Are you making money because you’ve got to have some type of way to generate revenue during the time that you are doing marketing? So your cost per inquiry or cost per prospect or cost per lead… these are different ways for you to measure it.
Another thing you can do is cost per visitor. If you know that, on average, you have a hundred visitors coming to your site every week, how much you had to spend in the marketing dollars to those visitors there. Then you can break them down into certain categories. Maybe my cost per visitor when I am writing articles is a certain dollar amount. Maybe my cost per visitor when doing link building with other websites is X number of dollars. And you can measure these things so that you can improve them. That is really why you have marketing metrics in place so that you know where you are and so that you know what you need to do to improve it. And then you can go and test different things in order to improve those over time.
And the last one here is cost per sale. So if it’s not the cost per client maybe it’s the cost per transaction with a client, you can break that in a number that as well. Those are some different marketing metrics that we talked about.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Learn what marketing to use and how to improve it to maximize your return on investment and massively improve profitability with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
Ok let’s talk about media. Media is the way that you get your message out to the market you’re targeting. And there is a variety of media that you can use. Classified ads, post it notes, sticky notes, flyers, websites, direct mail, newsletters… all of these things are examples of different types of media. And we are going to be covering a large variety of media here in just a few moments, probably in the next section, about what kind of media it is, how effective it is, whether is it scalable, or whether it is one step versus two step, whether it is a lazy or poor type of media.
So we will be talking a lot about those different types of strategies once we are past some of the background details. The media is how you’re going to get your marketing message out to your market. So we will be focusing a lot on talking about media in a bit.
Media is a lot about what people are going to think about when they think of “how am I going to do my marketing?” What first comes to mind: “I am going to put that on the paper”, “I am going to send that post card”, “I am going to do flyers door to door”.
A lot of times they do not think about what market they are specifically going for or what message they’re going to give a lot of times when they think about media. So that is just one part of it though.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Find out all the different marketing media and how to most effectively use it to market your handyman business in “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
Alright. Let’s talk about the next M of the three M’s of market. We already did market, let’s talk about message. Your message is what you are actually saying to the market.
If you are talking to somebody who is looking to having their kitchen remodeled, the message you may use is significantly different or should be significantly different than the message you should be using for somebody who is preparing their house for sale or that has rental property. You wouldn’t say the same things to somebody who is doing their own kitchen that you would to somebody who has a rental property. Kitchen refinishing is not going to be the same. What they are looking to get is not going to be the same. So you want to tailor your message to meet that particular market.
Which is leading me to this next concept of market to message match.
Market To Message Match
You want to make sure that your particular message that you’re using is very specific to the market that you are targeting. And why do you want to do this? Number one it is going to increase the response and it is going to make you seem specialized.
So an increase in response, if you are talking specifically to them, if you know what real estate investors want out of a handyman and you know what their concerns are and you can talk directly to them about that, that is significantly going to improve your response versus just saying “Joe handyman, call me, I do fix up.” If you actually talk specifically about the needs and the wants of a real estate investor and how that you can help them – that is going to drastically improve your response rate in that marketing, make that marketing much more cost effective much more responsive.
The other thing about it is when you start coming in and start tailoring your message to a specific market, you became a specialist. The nice thing about a specialists is that they can charge more money for the same job because they are specialized. Even though most handyman can do one particular type of task, if you say you specialize in that, you can charge more for the specialization and you can make it a specialization so you do have a specialized or at least more knowledge or more experience in doing that particular project.
So that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about market to message match.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn the best strategies for marketing your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
