The Customer Focus Series

Marketing…keep it up.

A lady once said to me,

“I heard you say you’re not happy unless I’m happy. WELL, I’M NOT HAPPY!”

That’s when I realized the power of marketing. She had heard and believed me when I said that! Marketing is powerful.

We charge more money than our competitors, so we must be outstanding! I made that lady happy, and I have made all of our customers happy, well, almost all of them.

Like it or not, you gotta invest in marketing.

I used to think that word of mouth would keep Jack and me busy. That should work out at any scale, but….You have to invest to increase your customer base and keep growing as a company.

Start with the low-hanging fruit. Street signs and trucks have always been the cheapest guerilla marketing in my business, so I’ve ensured we maxed that out. As a result, we now have 50 trucks with big logos on their sides and hundreds of street signs in front of homes throughout Philadelphia.

It takes money to make money. Once upon a time, there were the Yellow Pages. I started doing expensive, full-page ads, even as a relatively small contractor—we grew!

Before too long, using a phonebook to search for a contractor became obsolete, so direct mail was our heavy hitter. We sent out postcards for several years, and it was cost-effective. Direct mail became very popular in all industries. The response rate dropped steadily until we got a fraction-of-1% response rate, which became uneconomical. (If I wasn’t tracking our leads I would not have known this.)

Time to move on.

Marketing should keep up with the times. Today, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are two of the ways we make the phone ring. As a result, we’ve had to hire experts and consultants to help us appear at the top of people’s searches. It’s expensive, but worth it at this moment.

We’ve tried other types of internet marketing, including digital ads and remarketing (when an ad you have searched follows you around on other websites). However, social media, email campaigns, radio, and TV ads have proven to be successful in getting new customers for Nolan Painting. Your industry might be different.

Tracking the results is crucial. If you don’t, you’ll be like retailer, John Wanamaker, “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” So, we track results; then we have a marketing meeting once a week to review the data and see what is working.

Try different approaches, keep up with the times, and track your results. Marketing is muscle. Build muscle. See you next week.