The database allows you to nurture more personal relationships with a much larger number of people. If you think about without using a database, how many people can you keep in contact with on a regular basis – either via telephone or the occasional email or seeing people when you go to particular vendors or stores or anything like that? There’s only a relatively small few that you can keep in contact with.
What a database allows you to do is to establish those and maintain those personal relationships with a much larger group. You wouldn’t normally call a prospect who inquired three months ago and just chit-chat; however, what you can do is you can send them a newsletter every single month and occasionally send them an email, maybe even occasionally send them an invitation via mail for an event you’re having, maybe it’s like a customer appreciation event or maybe you’re having a barbeque at the local park and you just want to invite all your past clients and vendors – just stop in and bring a dish whatever you need to do. And just all come down for this little event you’re having. It’s a very informal thing. And just the act of the invitation endears them to you, establishes a much stronger relationship. “Hey, this guy knows, likes and trusts me, because he’s inviting me to his barbeque. Even though I’m not able to go, I’m going to remember that. I’m more likely to do business with him in the future because of that and refer him business, because I know that he takes care of his clients. I know that he’s into it for more than just the transaction.”
By using the database, you can nurture that relationship on a much larger scale than you could if you were just trying to do it manually with personal contact. You’re really focusing on this idea of know, like and trust.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Establishing relationships with your database is just a small part of the overall marketing plan you’ll need as a handyman business owner. Learn it all with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
One of the nice things about marketing into specific niches is you want to become big fish in a small pond. You want to become extremely important to your database. You want them to constantly be seeing you. If you’re doing your newsletter, if they see a classified ad with your name on it too they want another exposure to that. If they happen to see you on Craigslist or they see a newspaper article about you and your business in the paper, you want to become a big fish in a relatively small pond.
You can do that in a couple different ways. One of the ways we’re going to talk about later is niches, but another way is to do it to your internal database. You want to become the premier handyman guy in your database. You contact them more regularly than anyone else they know. So if they have a need for a handyman, they are going to call you.
You have a much better chance of doing that by focusing on a relatively small group of people, aka small pond, and you become a big fish – someone who’s very important in that small section of the marketplace.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Put the power of automated marketing systems to work for you with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
Another advantage of having a very large number of people that know, like and trust you in an internal database is you can think of it as being an army of promoters. Imagine you have 500 people on your mailing list of people that know you, they like you and they trust you – whether these are friends or family, business associates that have worked with you in the past, your suppliers and your vendors, all of the people that normally come into contact with you that they would recognize your name and recognize your face – you want to start marketing to them on a regular basis.
By marketing, I don’t necessarily mean overt like “Here sign up for my service.” It could be as simple as a newsletter – letting people know what projects you’re working on and remind them that you do these types of projects, remind them that you’ve got people that like your work, remind them that you’ve got great testimonials, occasionally offer them a coupon, insist that they send you referrals, offer to send them referrals – whatever you need to do on an ongoing basis. I’m going to talk about a lot of those strategies, but realize that by having those guys and constantly reminding them and being on their top-of-mind awareness, you’re going to have these guys regularly out there in the field looking for opportunities to refer to you.
If you send out a newsletter once a month, at least the day they get the newsletter they’re going to remember that you’re handyman and you offer a handyman service so that in any short period of time after that someone comes up to them and says, “Hey. I’ve got this project.” There’s a much better chance for them to say, “Oh, I know this guy who is a handyman who can help you with that particular project. Really good guy. He was just talking about a project that he just did that was like that, and it turned out really, really well. I saw pictures of it in the newsletter. I’ve even got a coupon for him that I’d like to share with you. Here let me go give you the coupon.”
Now that friend is helping out another friend and also helping out you, but if you didn’t send out that newsletter they may be like, “Yeah, I had a handyman that I used seven or eight months ago. He seemed like a nice guy. What was his name?” And it’s a much different transaction.
By constantly being in marketing contact with these guys, you keep them engaged and being out there as promoters. Really, really important concept; I’m trying to make sure that you pick up on this. You need to build a database; you need to market to your database consistently.
By the way, if you’re not willing to do this yourself, you can outsource most of it. You can either hire a guy locally to do it or hire a professional marketing guy like me in order to help you get this set up and help you maintain it and help you keep it going.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Do you want to learn all the strategies for marketing your handyman business, generating immediate business and also using the most effective strategies for generating a flood of on-going referrals? You need to check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
I talked to you a little bit about this concept of the feast and famine marketing cycles, where you do some marketing in order to find the next job, then you stop your marketing and let it go back down to zero, you do the work and the next thing you know you’re struggling to find work after you’re done with the next job so you have to start your marketing back up again.
You’re living through feast and famine cycles. You’re feasting while you’re doing the job; you’re getting paid and everything looks great. Then as soon as that job ends, you’re wondering, “I don’t have another client lined up. What’s going on? Why does my business keep doing this?” You keep going through these same cycles.
What your real goal here is to aim for consistent marketing. You want to get some marketing systems in place that are perpetually bringing in new prospects to your system and then you’re automatically following up with those prospects over and over again – as automatically as you possibly can or at least highly leveraged.
You want to avoid marketing to get the next client and then stopping. Consistent database marketing with consistent prospects you can grow your database helps with all this. This is what I’m trying to explain to you that is the key to why you want to have a database, to build that database. If you are into conservation in any way, database marketing is the way to go because you are conserving a lot of marketing time and a lot of marketing expense and you are building on pre-existing relationships where the resistance to working with you is extremely low because they already know, like and trust you and they are building a relationship with you over a period of time. They are much more likely to work with you and refer your business.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Learn to utilize highly leveraged marketing strategies for your handyman business in “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
I am a huge advocate of direct response marketing and I strongly recommend that handyman business owners also utilize database marketing to follow up with their leads and convert leads to prospects. Also, marketing to your database will help remind your advocates to go out and refer more business to you (which I cover in other posts on this website in far greater detail than I do here).
Why Database Marketing For Handyman Businesses?
So, why database marketing in a handyman business? According to the Direct Marketing Association, it’s 16 times more profitable to market to your house list – your internal database of people that know, like and trust you – than it is to look for new clients. If it costs you $10 in order to get a new prospect in the door, would you rather make $1 off that or would you rather make $16 off that? It’s 16 times more profitable to market to your in-house list. You want to focus on marketing to your in-house list, than focusing to the outer world. We’re going to talk a lot about that throughout “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
Until my next post,
James
What you’re really aiming to accomplish is marketing critical mass. You want to get to the point where the majority of your business comes from relationships with people that already know, like and trust you either directly or via referrals. This is all about that internal mailing list or database marketing.
How Do You Achieve Marketing Critical Mass?
You need to commit right now to building and nurturing a database of people. If you’re not willing to do that, what you’re going to end up being is that person I just described where you do a little marketing until you find a new job and then you stop your marketing, you do the job and then when the job is done, you’re like “There’s no job to do. There are no clients coming in. Now I need to start my marketing up again.” You start doing your marketing; it takes some time for that to happen. You finally get a new prospect coming in; you finally convert them to a job. You stop your marketing. You do the job. You don’t want to get into that cycle where you do some marketing in order to find work and then once your job is done you’ve got to start all over again from the beginning. Not a good way to run a business, in case you’re wondering.
So you do it by building and nurturing your database and then systematically growing that database over a period of time constantly. You don’t start and stop; you’ve constantly got a bunch of different ways in order to get new prospects coming through the door, adding them to your database and then you stay in contact with that database in highly leveraged activity – whether you’ve got two people on the list or 2,000 people on the list sending out a newsletter is the same task. You want to make sure you’re doing a highly leveraged type of activity instead of having to manually go and build all that for each new prospect.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Learn to take your handyman business to the next level with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
