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
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One of the things we’re going to be talking about in this particular course is this concept of people you’ve met versus people you have not met and the concept of building a database to market to people. How I look at marketing is there’s marketing to build your database of people that know, like and trust you and then pull new prospects and referrals out of that pool of people, but then there’s also marketing to your database to convert friends, family, suppliers, vendors, prospects to clients.
So you could be building up the database of people that know, like and trust you, but then you also need to market to that database to convert them to paying clients, establish a stronger relationship so they know you better, like you better and trust you more. But then also ask for referrals as well, but you also want to market to your database to simulate referrals and to build your client base that way.
This is by far your most responsive market. Marketing to your internal database is going to be 16 times more profitable to you than marketing to just the general public. That’s according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). They have actually gone through and done statistics, and they found out that it’s 16 times better for you, more profitable for you to market to your database – people that know, like and trust you – than to go out into the world and try to market to generate clients like that.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn the exact, step-by-step strategies for getting a powerful marketing system for your handyman business? Listen to or watch “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
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The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
Jassen: OK, now in terms of marketing that you can do – we’re going to talk about a bunch of different types of marketing that you can do but first of all what are some of the I guess the non-internet ways that people listening to the call tonight could build their handyman business effectively and inexpensively?
James: Well I think you’re talking about offline versus online type of marketing let’s talk about some very specific offline strategies and remember what we’re talking about here are ways to build your client and prospect database so even – let me take a step back and say you need to have some type of database that you’re storing all of your contacts in you can use Outlook, you can use an Excel spreadsheet if you’re on the MAC I think they call it what address book or contacts or something like that any of those types of programs where you can put all your data in and you can get all your data out in some spreadsheet looking format is what you need to do so set up yourself with an internal database where you know all your contacts are listed there you’ve got their telephone number, you’ve got their mailing address, you’ve got their email address and then you want to be building that database as much as possible so a lot of the offline marketing strategies are going to be ways for you to go out there and build that database and the top three that come to mind are number one you’ve got to join your chamber of commerce and you’ve got to be out there networking-
Jassen: Yes
James: -So you’ve got to be meeting people and one of the great ways for business owners and people that might need stuff like this is the chamber of commerce and so go out to the chamber of commerce, start meeting people, start meeting real estate agents a lot of real estate agents are chamber members and you can go meet them and you can refer them, a lot of real estate investors might be there people that own rental properties they’re good clients for you and a lot of business owners own houses and they see the value in paying someone else to do the work for them and so you want to go find those types of guys and you can do that at the chamber the other one I’d recommend you do is use like a site called meetup.com where you can just take your hobbies and your passions or maybe you want to go and attend the real estate investor group meetings or maybe you want to go attend the real estate agent group meetings or maybe you want to attend the real estate agent group meetings or maybe you want to go find one where they are talking about the homeowners or things that would be directly related to jobs you want to do and go join those groups and participate, don’t go there and think that you’re going to get business the first day, it’s not going to happen but what you will be able to do is go there, meet people, develop good relationships with them, let them know, like and trust you, give them your business card and a lot of times they’re going to give you a business card back which is really what you’re wanting to do because then you can take their contact information put it into your prospect or client database and then every single month you’re going to send out some type of newsletter or promotional material or something just to remind them over and over again that you are in that business and you can help them so the two I’ve mentioned so far chamber of commerce and meetup the third one is volunteering your time and find other charitable minded people, what’s the best thing about people that go to like these charity events Jassen?
Jassen: They’re like minded-
James: They’re like minded but the other thing about is you know they are into volunteering their time and a lot of them are going to be more likely to hire people to do work.
Jassen: Right.
James: So you want to go and focus on those types of things and you know I hear something because I’ve talked about this sort of thing with so many business owners over the years and I can already hear the objection – but, it will cost me .50 cents or .65 cents in order to get a newsletter out when I calculate in my first class postage and printing and everything like that and now I’m going to pay .60 cents per person on my list per month in order to send something out-
Jassen: Yeah
James: -it’s the cheapest marketing you’ll ever do
Jassen: Yup
James: OK, so a lot of people are going to look at “oh I can do free marketing, oh craigslist, I’m going to post on craigslist its’ free right?
Jassen: Right
James: No… yeah you’re going to get some prospects from craigslist, and you could get jobs from craigslist but really what you want to do to establish that long term relationship so you have 200 people on your list that know, like and trust you and they are constantly referring business, or they constantly have jobs for you and you want to spur on referrals and you want to encourage that, you want to encourage them to call you first to give bids and if they have any problem with anything you want them to think of you first and so that’s the type of relationship you want to establish and the way you do that is with one little mailing each month and maybe an email here and there a little personal thing, let them engage with you and I think we’re going to talk about some of those strategies here in a minute.
Jassen: Yes, yes I wanted to comment on two things you just talked about real quick one is that some of our listeners may be a little intimidated about the whole database thing, so I just wanted to say if you’re not good with computers or you don’t know how to set up even an Excel spreadsheet or something like that, go to just about any high school kid or if you’re near a college you know put a flyer up on you know the bulletin board in the student union or something like that and extremely inexpensively you can have a high school or a college kid that will be more than happy for very little money to set up something that is easy for you to use to make this happen ok.
James: And off the top of my head I’ll give you a system it’s so easy ok- go get a shoebox and anytime you get a business card throw it in the shoebox-
Jassen: Right
James: -once every two weeks or when you get 10 or 15 business cards in there call up your high school kid and have them come over for an hour and enter all the names in there for you and then once a month you have them come over for an hour and do the newsletter for you.
Jassen: Right
James: And that’s it.
Jassen: And if you’re doing an Excel spreadsheet tell him that you want to do for your newsletter a mail merge he’ll know what you’re talking about.
James: Yeah and if you need additional information I’ve got tons of stuff on how to do mail merge on the website at LearnToBeRich.com.
Jassen: Right, and now another point I wanted to make about networking with other people, you and I have both been realtors before and a lot of realtors do first time home buyer seminars or new mover seminars and mortgage brokers do these as well and it is extremely common for them when they are putting these events on to get a room full of people and trying to find other people that will speak at these little couple hour gathering because everyone else in the real estate office is going to be like “oh no… I don’t want to speak at a little first time homebuyers seminar” that is an incredible opportunity I think for handymen to get in front of a group of people and become and establish themselves as an expert in you know getting the home ready for sale or what home buyers need to look for when they are purchasing a home and those sorts of things right?
James: Sure and if you’re a handyman and you offer like an inspection service you know maybe part of your business model is that you do home inspections a lot of the handymen I know do and that could be a great service you can offer so you can go in there and you know talk to them you know here’s what you do in your business and here are 5 things you need to look at and then realize if you hired someone like me to come in it’s going to cost you like X number hundreds of dollars and we’ll go do this whole checklist for you and we usually can help you negotiate the price down based on things we find so a lot of times my service is free because you know you may pay me $450.00 but I’m going to find $2,000.00 worth of repairs that probably could be done at some point but they probably don’t need to be done right now or I may prevent you from buying a house completely if you find something really wrong but at least I can go in there and we can say look there’s $2,000.00 worth of repairs that we didn’t know about let’s reduce the price down by $2,000.00 now they’ve traded $450.00 to you as the handyman in exchange for a $2,000.00 price concession in buying the house.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want access to our full 7 hour training course? Upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” today to get instant access and take your handyman business to the next level.
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Jassen: This evening on our How to Market Your CPA Business webinar by one the nation’s leading authorities on lead generation and really helping business owners grow their businesses in specific niches. James Orr has lent his expertise to a number of industries and he is here with us tonight to talk about accountants and CPA firms.
How are you doing James?
James: I’m doing great. I have really appreciate you have me on and thank for that very nice introduction. It’s lots nicer than the last one I got from you which was a little bit over the top but I appreciate that.
Jassen: [laughter] Well, you know it’s true. Ever since I first met you, I’ve always looked at – we actually talked about this last week about individual strengths and weaknesses. We had an interesting conversation about that but I have always felt that one of your biggest strengths that you bring to the table in the business world is your ability to step into a niche industry, learn how it operates and learn some of the specifics about it and then apply your lead generation strategies to that industry.
James: Absolutely and one of the things that I have in my background is we did run a very large network of websites servicing about 1,200 different industries. So one of the benefits I get to bring to the table here is I get to see lots of data points. I’m not just talking about taking one particular business owner and doing lead generation with them. I’m able to say, “Look we were running websites, literally millions of websites for each city the nation for variety of industries and I can see what worked, what did worked.” Our strategies that worked really well and I’ve also done my own business locally as well. So I bring that to the table as well.
Jassen: That is awesome. Tonight what have on tap is we’re going to talk about a bunch of really different marketing strategies for CPA’s in particular, correct?
James: That’s correct and how I look at it is almost like little mini articles or little mini nuggets of information about to take a very particular type of marketing strategy and apply it or how to look at marketing in a certain way. So we’ll try to break them up into tracks. If you’re listening to this afterwards, if you’re listening to it on the audio, you don’t need to see the screen although we did this initially as a webinar. On the screen really are just some notes on how we did this. Basically you’re going to get everything you need from the audio and we’re going to break it down into five minute sections or however long the individual nuggets sections are so that you keep track of.
Jassen: Okay and we’ve got a bunch of those to get through so let’s dive right in.
James: Okay, great.
Jassen: Alright. So the first major area – we’re going to start with the big picture kind of area and then go in from there. So to start with, let’s look at two major marketing focuses for marketing your CPA practice.
James: Okay, when I look at this I really see there being two major categories to focus on when you’re doing marketing of any business and specifically when you’re marketing your CPA or accounting business. That is marketing, nurturing, growing and maintaining you individual clients and prospect list. So all that marketing you’re doing to internal database or internal list and then the other side of that number two would be marketing to directly grow your client and prospect list. So all the other marketing you do in order to generate immediate business and also add prospects to your cultivation, your database file for marketing to them is the second one we want to approach. So you it’s like internal marketing and then marketing to the world in order to grow your internal marketing. Those are the two categories I think of when I talk about focusing those.
Jassen: For our listeners that don’t understand the difference, can you explain the difference between your house list and your prospect list? Can you explain to our listeners what the difference there is that you’re talking about?
James: Sure. I don’t actually call them house list and prospect list. House list I would call everything inside your house. So basically anything – any name, address, telephone number, e-mail address that you have for your particular business is what I consider an in-house list. Now that could be made up of existing clients or it could be made up of people that inquired about something, requested information, requested a special report or anything like that and they’ve been added as a potential prospect.
For me I would treat those guys very much the same except for some very small relatively unique circumstances where I’m only marketing to pre-existing clients. But everyone is going to get the newsletter, everyone’s going to get the special offers, everyone’s going to get special reports. So prospects and past clients are all treated the same because you want your past clients to know, like, trust you and be really engaged on what you’ve got going on. Then you want your new prospects to know, like and trust you and really engage in the whole process and then when they’re ready, when they need an accounting service, when they need a CPA they know to go to you or when someone else they know needs an accounting service they can refer to you as well.
Jassen: Okay and then the second side of that in the marketing to grow that list, what do really see is the differences in communication that you’re sending out those two different groups?
James: For me, I’d like to look at it as trying to get people interested to request information from me. So whenever I’m marketing out to the public, I’m trying to say what can I dangle in front of somebody that’s going to make them raise their hand and say, “You know I’m interested in getting information about that,” or “I’m interested in that type of service or that type of product and I really want to get more information.” Once they get more information that’s really when you’re trying to do the conversion from prospect to client.
So for me all that external marketing, whether it’s newspapers or postcards or your websites or all these other marketing type things we’re going to be talking about. Basically if you use those to get people onto your internal list then you can use your normal newsletter and regular contact in order to help market over and over again to that list then convert them to paying clients.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book available from James Orr.
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