You've come to the right place - Learn what actually works for Marketing your Trades Business.
In this Ultimate Guide of Marketing for Tradies:
We'll teach you How to Get More Customers and Grow Your Tradie Business by Marketing Your Tradie Business, today.
If you need professional help, we'd love to talk to you - get in touch with our SEO agency.
To run a successful trades business you will need to Generate Sales, Get More Customers; you Need to Grow Your Business, Get Leads and Be Profitable – You need to get off the tools, and you want to have the most effective Marketing for your business.
You need to learn all about Marketing for Tradies, and apart from the trade you are skilled in - this is the most critical part of your business to get right if you want to make your business successful, to grow your business, and actually be profitable.
Marketing for Tradies done well, creates trust in your marketplace, it increases the awareness of your business, and most importantly – it generates the sales and growth that you need in order to grow your tradie business in a manner that is both sustainable and repeatable.
In this Ultimate Guide: Marketing for Tradies - we’re going to get deep into the steps of Marketing Your Tradie Business, this article is going to help you figure out the jargon from the facts - and give you a strong push forward with your businesses growth, today.
The objective of Marketing for Tradies is to generate Strong Sales, Revenue and Profit for your business - we therefore need to look at this objectively and consider from a Marketing Perspective; what we’re going to do, when we’re going to do it and how we’re going to do it – and then put that into a plan for you.
We need a Marketing Plan for your Tradie Business - So let’s consider these questions as part of your Tradie Marketing Plan:
• Are you going to do offline marketing or online marketing, or a mix of both?
• Which types of Marketing are you going to do?
• How much revenue do you need to generate from Marketing activities?
• How much money will you invest in your advertising and marketing activities?
• How much time can you invest to marketing your tradie business?
• What is the fastest way for you to get new customers?
• What type of customers and jobs do you want? Can you describe your ideal customer avatar?
• Do you plan to grow your business and take on more staff?
• Do you want to dominate your region and industry with your trades business?
Going even deeper, let’s paint a picture of who you are as a business and your value proposition to define your market:
• What services do you offer?
• Who is your ideal customer?
• What pain points or challenges do they face?
• How do you solve that problem?
• What is your Unique Selling Point or Value Proposition?
• How do you add value over and beyond?
Once you have this information, you’re in a solid position to start making calculated business decisions for Marketing your Tradie Business.
Marketing your Tradie Business Offline is getting to a point where it’s mostly irrelevant these days.
Market research shows that offline advertising can be a cash trap, and will waste your precious resources and cash flow – however, there are some good offline marketing ideas where you should look at investing in offline marketing.
In our experience, offline marketing avenues that you should definitely consider as a Tradie Business are:
• Branding & Signage for Your Vehicle
• Branded Work Clothing
• Business Cards
• Corflute Signage on Job Sites
We do not recommend doing the following offline marketing options as they are typically expensive, take up a lot of time and resources, and won’t necessarily get you great results or help your business grow:
• Radio or Television Advertising
• Newspaper Advertising
• Leaflet Drops
• Posters
• Paper Directories like the Yellow Pages
You are much better off allocating funds that you had for these offline marketing activities to Online Marketing for Tradies, as you will get a better return on your investment and find customers faster, and more efficiently for your trades business.
In fact, if you look at the trending data in the chart below – you will see just how irrelevant these offline advertising methods have become. It’s time to move into the present day strategies that work, because the top 5% of your industry are already doing this.
This is Google data on actual searches for people looking for the Yellow Pages. Crazy huh?
The Yellow Pages were once such a strong business. Now look at it... Yep, times have changed.
Online Marketing is where it’s at for any Tradie Business, pretty much everyone is online these days and most of the population have a smart phone within one-metre of them at all times (people even look at their phones on the toilet, they're addicted to technology, it’s crazy!)
This means that the customers you want are looking online, searching on Google for service providers when they need a tradie such as a plumber, electrician, removalist, builder, gardener, etc.
In our experience, and based on extensive market research, these are the Online Marketing methods are where you will get the most value from online advertising:
• Websites for Tradies
• Google Ads (formerly known as Google Adwords) for Tradies
• Google My Business Listing
• Facebook for Tradies
• Basic SEO for Tradies
• Advanced SEO for Tradies
• Gumtree/Online Directories for Tradies
Sound good? So let’s get right into it for you!
You want a super clean, modern looking, easy to use, professional and mobile ready website.
If you do not have this, make this your absolute number one priority.
Your website should make your contact information prominent, a reason for customers to contact you now, it should have pictures of you and your work, explain the services you offer and tell your customers how you differentiate yourself from your competitors.
One thing that we often see missing is case studies, testimonials and a demonstrated knowledge of how you add value to your customers.
Make yourself stand out and describe the value that you add.
From a technical perspective, it’s important that your website loads fast and is mobile ready – As of 2020, Google gives bonus points to websites that have been made mobile ready, are optimised for mobile / and are mobile friendly.
The fastest and most efficient way to land new customers, leads and sales for your business online by far, is by using Google Adwords for Tradies.
Google Adwords (or Google Ads, as it is now known) is a paid advertising option on Google which allows you to show in top positions when someone searches for your trade, in your service area, within your defined customer profile.
For example, if you are an Electrician in Sydney – Google will display your business to customers who go online and search for “Electrician in Sydney” or “fix home electricals” on Google.
This means that you are only advertising to those that actually need your service immediately; and it is very effective at getting you new customers, and growing your tradie business.
We recommend Google Adwords or Google Ads (as it is now called) to all tradies established or even as a starting point; it’s fast, it’s effective, and it will get you great results.
We have plenty more information for you to read about Google Ads for Tradies in this article.
Google My Business shows your business to potential customers when they are searching for your business name or service category (like "plumbers near me") on Google, it allows customers to call you or visit your website directly from the Google Search Engine or from a smart phone.
Google My Business also allows your customers to leave a review for your services, further adding credibility to your small but growing tradie business.
Google My Business listings can help you to show up within Google Maps, an added benefit and bonus to increase and improve your businesses visibility!
We can also help you with setting this up as part of our Tradie Marketing Service. Our customers typically get a 10x improvement in results from this alone. Just Ask!
Whilst we don’t recommend advertising on Facebook for most tradies, we do believe that there is value in setting up a Facebook page for your business.
Facebook business pages are a great place to be able to show off your work, explain a little bit more about who you are, post regularly about work you have done, engage with your Facebook audience, and have another position online on which to promote your business.
Although just be mindful, your customers do not go onto Facebook to search for your services - if for example they need to fix a gas leak, they will typically jump onto Google to conduct this search and find a suitable provider.
Facebook is great for building brand authority for all types of businesses, it’s just not so great for finding you new active customers, in real-time – that’s why we always refer back to running Google Ads or SEO for Tradies.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, you’ve probably seen a lot of it online if you have been looking into building websites, growing your business or speaking to other tradies about what you should do.
The likelihood is that you've found this article from a Google search, we rank at the top for "Marketing for Tradies" in Australia - and this is the result of SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation appears to be somewhat of a “dark trade”; as in, you probably feel that no-one can clearly, concisely explain or describe exactly what it is.
That’s because there are so many aspects to Search Engine Optimisation for Tradies - there's 3 key parts to SEO:
On-Site Optimisation, is where we will work to optimise a website for keywords or relevant search terms that your customers may be searching for, it also involved making sure “meta tags”, "titles" and “site descriptions” are relevant and appropriate.
Off-Site Optimisation, is where we build authority and credibility for your website with links to your website from other websites, articles about you and your business, authorised blog content referring back to you, industry accreditations and associations for your business.
Technical Optimisation, is where we go through the technical coding, website security and server response rates – it requires software development, systems and programming knowledge in order to effectively speed up your website and associated infrastructure.
SEO is a complex beast, and takes investment, effort and time to make work and do well; but will yield impressive outcomes for businesses that want to grow and completely dominate their markets.
If you'd like to see some local SEO statistics you can look here.
We recommend SEO once you have a more established tradie business and want to dominate the market that you are in - we see Search Engine Optimisation as a medium-to-long-term investment strategy for Marketing your Tradie Business.
It can take 6 to 12 months to start seeing a return on SEO work, and there is ongoing investment from there on in – If you want to grow a multi-million dollar business in a competitive market such as Sydney – it’s definitely the right way to go about it.
SEO positions your business to be an industry leader, those that rank organically within Google will always grow into large businesses with plenty of customer demand.
If you’d like to find out more about SEO for Tradies, we've published a complete step-by-step guide.
Whilst directories don't always get you new customers, they are at least the free option here (in most cases) to post an advertisement within most Online Directories such as Gumtree, Locanto, etc.
You can post information about yourself, pictures, your trade, your prices, and general services that you offer, your phone number and contact information – but the most important part, is being able to add a link to your website on these directories.
We have created a page to help you determine the best pages to post you website to (and they are free), so get onto it - this will also help your Tradie Search Engine Optimisation too!
As your Tradie Business starts to grow you will want to form and create partnerships with similar businesses that have access to your customer pool; If you’re an electrician, you might want to network with other builders or maintenance suppliers for example.
You will also want to reach out to Real Estate Agents or Strata Management companies that have a whole bunch of apartments and rented accommodation that they look after on behalf of their clients.
There are so many businesses you could approach about your services and this is going to help you grow in the long-term, it's worth brain-storming this with your friends and family.
Could you reach out to property developers or other larger construction groups/companies for potential partnership opportunities on their overflow work?
By building partnerships, you can really start to grow your business and employ more staff to do the actual work for you.
This is how you will win.
Another great opportunity that so many tradies miss out is so silly and so simple to implement.
Simply asking your happy customers for feedback on your work, and a simple question:
"Who else you might be able to help with your service?"
How hard is that to ask? It takes 5 seconds, and could land you another job or two. Leave a business card behind, it’s easy.
Also, when is the last time you asked a happy customer to leave you a review on Google? Is it really that hard?
How do you think it looks when you have two tradies: one with lots of 5* reviews on Google, the other with no reviews – which would you pick?
Yeah, thought so – upgrade your customer service behaviours in this area and we promise you that your business will grow. That’s a fact.
Out of all the recommendations for Marketing Your Tradie Business, either if you are just starting out or looking to grow your business today -
We recommend you take action on the following:
1) Have a Modern Website, make sure your information is concise and gives your customer confidence about you, your trade and why they should pick you.
2) Use Google Ads, It’s a powerful advertising platform and it will get you results fast - we will help you with this.
3) Start doing SEO for Tradies if you want to dominate your industry and service region, ask us how.
4) Ask for Referrals and Google Reviews on every single job that you complete. It all adds up and builds your brand!
Need to find out more about Online Marketing for Tradies? Read more here!
You’re obviously reading this article because clearly you want to get the phone ringing.
Because you want to get more leads, gain more customers and build your business, right?
Sometimes tradies need a reality check.
You can’t grow your business without investing into your business marketing.
Google is the most effective way to advertise for tradie related businesses, because it’s where your customers are – and we can capture customer intent into paying customers for you. It’s a no brainer!
I want you to do something, go onto Google and search for your trade in your area:
I.e. Plumber in Melbourne or Plumber in Bondi
What comes up at the top? Who are you seeing? Are they big competitors in your industry?
These are the guys that are literally taking in all of the business at the moment, because they’ve got themselves positioned correctly.
And they've done that with Google.
If you are not achieving this for your own business, you should be very concerned – the rate of Google usage is not slowing down, and if you’re too late to the game – it’s going to cost you more in the long term, other guys would have had years on you to optimise, and that time is not on your side.
You need to invest, you need to think about the pipeline of business you need to create in order to support you for the next few years - and understand that not only are you getting results now – you will be getting better results into the future, and you're safeguarding your business that you’ve worked so hard to build.
The biggest challenge for Tradies is doing Google Ads or SEO by themselves.
It's not easy to run effective online marketing campaigns that will beat your competition and actively grow your business - it's a full time job and highly skilled.
Google is a complex platform to learn, you have to go into it on a daily basis, you have to A/B test and consistently optimise, you have to set limits on bids, you have to research the market, adjust audiences, consistently test it, and much more - it takes a lot of time and effort to get great results – which if you’re busy taking on new jobs or building sales pipeline, is taking you away from core activities of your trade that only you are the best at.
If you’re an accredited electrician, you wouldn’t expect someone with no electrical experience to wire a house – conversely, working with an accredited Google Ads and SEO specialist is going to save you time, it’s going to get you better results, and it’s going to reduce your risk of messing up.
I see so many tradies that try to do it solo and then start to see their advertising spend blow out of control, wasted clicks, substandard results and a negative impact on their business performance.
By working with Marketix, you know that you’re working with an Australian business that has multiple heads that it can apply to the solution.
Our team that have been living the Google platform for many years, that know how to solve problems for you and can dedicate time to optimising and managing your Google Campaigns.
Working with Marketix allows you to get more leads, gain more customers and build your business; whilst reducing your cost, saving you time, and taking away the pain out of doing it all by yourself.
You don't have to do it alone.
Google processes over 40,000 individual searches, every single second, in Australia.
The top 5% of businesses in your industry are already using Google to be at the top of the page.
The challenge for a small tradie business (without a dedicated marketing department) is that it's complicated to do by yourself and it will consume a lot of your time, Google is a complex platform to show at the top of Google results;
You have to learn how to use the platform, you have to know the tricks and secrets, you have to learn how to compete and market yourself, you have to know what is effective, and how to control spend without it blowing out of control.
We fix that problem for our extremely happy customers, we provide a fully managed service that makes it super easy for our clients to achieve great results for a fixed monthly cost.
Our clients don’t need to worry about Google, we will set it up for you, we will run it for you, and we will continuously optimise and manage Google for you. Hassle free.
We are getting awesome results for our existing customers, and the proof is that we generate hundreds of leads for our clients, every single day.
Just read our reviews!
Ready to learn more? We’re offering a free consultation for your business, today!
What we will discuss:
· Your current monthly revenue and marketing
· The golden revenue you want to get to
· Marketing ideas on how you can achieve your goals
· We'll put together an expert marketing blueprint for your business
By the end of this call - we will show you how to accelerate your business.
Talk to an expert and take your business to the next level. Get in touch below.
