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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”.

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”.

Let’s talk a little bit about the three M’s of marketing. All marketing consist of these three components. It’s the market you’re targeting, the media you’re using to target them and the message you’re using to speak to that market with your media.

Market

Let’s go break each one down. So – the market. The market is who you are actually trying to get your advertisements and your marketing out to. For a handyman business you may be targeting real estate agents who will be helping you find sellers that need to prepare their houses for sale.

So, some of your marketing may be specifically for real estate agents. That could be one market for you. Another market could be real estate investors. The nice thing about real estate investors, by the way, for handyman is they tend to own more than one house. Who is a better client for you? Someone who owns more than one house or someone who owns no houses? Yeah… someone who owns more that one house. Who’s a better client? Someone who owns more than one house or someone who owns one house? Yeah… the person who owns more than one house- if they are going to use a handyman – are much better clients for you because they have a chance of giving you a lot more work.

So you either target a real estate investor who can be another marketing target, or you could target people who are having their basements refinished. You can focus on people who are looking to having their bathrooms remodeled, their kitchens remodeled, or floors replaced or painting done to the exterior of the house. Whatever it is that you are going to be focusing on in your particular business – that is the market you are targeting. Now the key thing to point out is that you can, and probably should, have multiple markets that you’re targeting. So if you want to go and one part of your business may be that you’re finishing basements. Well you can go and target that market. You can put advertisements, you can create widgets, you can create packages, you can create articles and content and things of that nature. That’s going to speak to that target and get them to raise their hand and say “I am interested in having you come out and give me a bid” or “I am interested in information of doing it myself, so I’m not sure if I’m going to be doing it myself or hire someone to do it.” So you can get people to request the information and target that market. But then you can also go and target a very completely different market and focus on that as well. So you may be doing the finishing of basements but you may also target preparing the houses to sell for real estate agents. You will have both of those markets going simultaneously, and you can market to both of those.

What we’re going to be talking about is targeting your marketing and your marketing message, so that you have a different message for when you’re talking to the people who want their basement finished versus the people like the real estate agents who may be presenting this information to their sellers. So you can have two different markets. You can also use your markets to determine going after a specific higher transaction value types of projects in your business. So, one of the things we talked about before, three things that affect the profitability of your business: it’s the number of clients, the average transaction made per client and the number of transactions that they do per year. Well if you want to focus on things so that they have a much higher dollar per transaction value, the total basements finishing or kitchen remodel or bathroom remodel, as opposed to someone calling you about their door not closing right, or some other small “honey do” like project, you can go and focus more on these bigger projects, and have a much higher dollar per transaction that is going on. So that’s one way to use markets.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want more information on “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”? Check it out now.

Most of the marketing that I teach, in fact I can’t think of an exception, is direct response marketing. You’re going to focus on getting someone to raise their hand and express an interest in your product service or a marketing widget (which we are going to talk about) specifically in response to that ad. It’s not a advertisement just to build you brand up and then hope that overtime someone is going to come and find you. That is not what we’re going for. We want them to take an immediate action and take and respond directly to that particular marketing piece and in many cases we are going to have a measuring tool included in that marketing piece so that we can find out which marketing is effective for us and which marketing is not effective for us.

Direct response allows us to measure those responses and then over time test to make improvements to that marketing so that if you keep putting ads to your classified ad section of your newspaper you’re going to be able to tell me this particular ad performs three times better than the ad I initially started with. I get three times the amount of response from doing this one and over time you’ll be able to measure the response to be able to tell me that confidently and to save for yourself money, get your cost for lead down and get your cost per client down and get the number of clients you’re getting way up for the same amount of marketing dollars.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” to take your handyman business to the next level.