Tradesman - Avertising

[ClearviewPropertyCare]

Hi All,

I am wondering and gathering some information on where about does everyone advertise there services/products.

I normally do this on facebook and freeindex just looking at other free options including paid ones.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Simon.P]

hi,
website and word of mouth for me. all depends on how much work you want to be honest.

 

[Thomas Harvey]

I have a client who i've been working with, we built him a website and he's getting a couple of enquiries a day through the website. We're now looking at doing facebook advertising and adwords. Looking at possibly getting up to 5-10 enquiries a day within a reasonable budget.

He's a roofer and is ranked highly for every search term to do with roofing in the local area. Just only losing traffic to the other companies paying for ads. He's decided to try and compete on adwords as one additional job is worth the extra cost.

 

[DanielGillen]

I have a few clients who are tradesmen. With them I generally follow a two pronged approach. First of all you want a main website, that's basically just a few pages with who you are, examples of your work etc.

For example: stokeexampleplumber would be the homepage and then a few more pages:
stokeexampleplumber/our-services
stokeexampleplumber/our-team
stokeexampleplumber/contact-us

Real basic 4 page website, could probably get away with making it yourself in wix or something if you wanted (although I wouldn't recommend it).

If your local area isn't too competitive, this alone should get you showing up for some relevant searches, you can put it on leaflets+business cards, people can share it with others if they want to recommend a plumber over FB messenger or whatever.

Next, I've found a lot of success focusing on creating landing pages just for advertising campaigns. So you might create the sub-domain quote.stokeexampleplumber.co.uk and on it would be a summary of what the firm offers and most importantly a details capturing form built into the page.

Then I would set up a targeted CPC campaign restricted to the local geographical area sending them to that landing page. Once someone fills out the form the details go straight to our example tradesman's email address and s/he can ring the person to follow the lead up.

If you do this properly, and put effort into refining the landing page and your adwords campaign, you can really bring the cost-per-acquisition down. The most success I had was a Gardner who was averaging a cost of £6 per lead generated and converting more than half of them into business.

They weren't rubbish jobs either, but stuff like repeat commercial grass cutting, full landscaping etc.

The point I'm trying to make is that with these traditional channels you really can use them to generate extra-business whilst maintaining profitability, you just have to do a bit more than everyone else, which most of the time is:

rubbish home page + unrefined advertising campaign

Which ends up being a money pit. You'd be better off writing your business name and phone number on 5 pound notes and leaving them around town.

Best,
Dan

 

[Simon.P]

Most areas have plenty of competition for trades nowadays. That said, i have been doing a bit of snooping around and there is one firm i came across that must be paying a fortune on adwords but the source of his site is a blatent copy of a cleaning company and he has just changed the text that you can see!

 

[bigsie]

We advertise front cover of a local magazine, and get 95% of our work from it !

 

[Matt1959]

nearly all my work comes via website which due to niche nature of my trade business sees my site top of Google most of the time. I did a stint of advertising in community mags ie those A5 glossy booklet things that come out 4 times a year and i found the quality of the enquiries dropped through the floor. Better to get focused enquiries from those that are seeking to fulfil a need rather than someone window shopping. With regard to website, make sure its sufficiently different to the competition for people to choose you rather than them. I have 200 images of past work on my site and I've lost count of the number of compliments customers have made about the work I do. So many trade sites expect to get business purely through the written word - customers are not stupid - they need to see what you can actually do to get the confidence to use you.

 

[Simon.P]

We advertise front cover of a local magazine, and get 95% of our work from it !

Do you mind me asking what, or what type of magazine that is bigsie?

 

[bigsie]

It is a free magazine delivered to over 64,000 homes advertising local businesses.
It isn't cheap, but we get a lot of work from it.

 

[Simon.P]

It is a free magazine delivered to over 64,000 homes advertising local businesses.
It isn't cheap, but we get a lot of work from it.

thanks bigsie, appreciated.

 

[Octa]

Flyering locally surely must be good for trade too?

 

[Simon.P]

Flyering locally surely must be good for trade too?

never done it to be honest, but always considered it a bit of a shot in the dark. who knows who is behind the letter box! have you, and what was the success like?

 

[DanielGillen]

You could use a phone number tracking service (or even just get a cheap mobile) and put that number on it. Any calls you get with that number you know came from the leafleting as you didn't share the number anywhere else.

Or you could put some kind of offer on the leaflets you don't share elsewhere, so again you know anyone quoting the offer is from the leaflet. Or you could just ask people how they found you.

 

[Simon.P]

Good points, thanks Dan. Personally, i would be thinking do i want to spend £500 on leaflets, or for someone to set up Google ads.

 

[Octa]

Not tried it myself yet either but it's a good medium for our home products, my industry is security so when we work in areas in the future I plan to flyer round said areas with the leaflets, with a discount quote code exclusive to the postcode.

 

[Simon.P]

Not tried it myself yet either but it's a good medium for our home products, my industry is security so when we work in areas in the future I plan to flyer round said areas with the leaflets, with a discount quote code exclusive to the postcode.

all the best with it, let us know how you get on. I have read a fair bit that says the coupon is an old but valid way of getting that phone ringing.

 

[Marcus Allen]

The only slight difference I would say is preferably don't use wix. Use another free platform if wanting to use the website for SEO purposes. If going only via PPC then Wix is not a problem. 91% of people search online for info around 75% don't go past the 1st page. Paying to get there for immediate results is probably your best bet

I'm not bad mouthing offline but more and more people are using the internet.

 

[Simply Business]

Hi @ClearviewPropertyCare, have you thought about paid ads on facebook? Heard a really good use from a window cleaner recently.

He targets it to his area and turns them on when it's a sunny day (which in his experience is when people want their windows cleaned). Great way to target people and decide on your own time-frame when to advertise.

 

[Marcus Allen]

make sure clear view property to utilise retargeting (Google it) with your Facebook ads to build and audience and get cheaper clicks on subsequent campaigns

 

[Karllacey]

I have worked in the industry for a few years and the word advertising is somewhat grey nowadays with the foundation and growth of the internet.

There are numerous things on the web marketing such as yell (Expensive and everyone does it), mass social media (everyone does it), PPC (expensive), key word manipulation directory listings (All free), youtube (free) to name a few then...

You have your traditional advertising/marketing: magazines etc which can be a money sink which is difficult to measure etc.

Of course you can turn to portal registration, the government ones - do not go for the paying ones as they feed into the same system believe it or not! but charge you for the benefit.

Then of course you can go door knocking, which involves an invasion of privacy for some people which is of course very time consuming - I always suggest hitting four houses either side when you do a secured job.

You can do a leaflet drop / royal mail have a circular letter facility (or they used to have) which is relatively inexpensive and measurable in terms of success.

You can look at gathering data / buying in databases for an email campaign but this could be frowned upon dependent on who's point of view you would look at. The meaning of 'spam' is defined only by the recipient of the email.

Lastly you can pick up the telephone - however you need to choose your fights carefully as you could be chasing a loss leader if you do not manage it right. E.G. do not call 100 people of the same type e.g. builders. split it down into 5 x 20 in different industries (the same amount of work). When you have done, you need to measure the success of each, bin the ones that are not working and mine down into the ones that are...measure, rinse and repeat.

Hope this helps....

 

[Neil Allen]

Letters and a follow up call will work, I love google but google will take you one way when you want to go another way, also local newspapers paid advertisement.

 

[RLlewellyn]

To start with, get yourself on Yell (don't use them for anything other than their basically business directory for god sake, talk about rip off!) and Yelp. Depending on your budget, I'd go for a nice cheap WordPress site and some low-bid PPC.

Some really nice guides around about PPC, you don't have to outsource it, as long as you're computer savvy and do some reading you should be fine at managing the bidding process, just make sure you're using negative keywords to keep your unwanted costs down.

 

[chris888]

We've got two websites, the 2nd one which is nearly complete.
We've submitted our sites to google, bing, listed our company in freeindex, hotfrog and around 4 or 5 local business directories,

We 've not had any solid enquiries yet but we're less than a month in on the 1st website and less than 2 weeks on the 2nd one.

What sort of time scale would people look to be ranking highly nowadays for local business searches ?

Our main site covers many different services. yourmatters dot co uk

Our 2nd site is smaller but covers only 4 services. yourcleaningmatters dot co uk

PS we've not advertised locally yet, although we do keep getting phonecalls from yell.com but @ £70/mth we will be giving that one a miss.

 

[DanielGillen]

Hi mate,

Your website isn't mobile responsive (isn't designed to load on phones) so you're going to get penalised in the Google search rankings.

I'd recommend Google Adwords to get business coming in, but you'd need a marketing budget (doesn't have to be large).

Give me a shout if you want help with the Adwords, I could create you some mobile friendly landing pages so you don't have to redo the whole site for it.

Best,
Dan

 

[deewn6]

Loads of good advice on here. I worked in local advertising for 15+ years, created hundreds of tv ads for cable tv, designed in excess of 1,500 - 2,000 local magazines ads and typeset over 150 local magazines. So I have seen lots and lots of money wasted.

But ... in working with my local website clients, such as decorators, plumbers and fencing companies I have been able to generate them enough work for little more than £50-£100 per month from my own combo of organic of SEO stuff. Had a text from a fencing company who has been spending £400 per month on Yell.com it said "No idea what you are doing with my website but keep it up"

So yeh PPC, fliers and all of that are great and it is important to do a combination of different types of marketing, tracking them all of course - but this method seems to work for my clients.

Good luck with it.

 

[James Woodyatt]

Hi

Very interested in this thread, I work for a small/medium business who operate across the UK and Wales.

Instead of localized advertising, how could we try and advertise to the masses as it were.

 

[Joshua Daniels]

Google ads aren't the way to go for tradesmen, it comes at a high cost with little return on investment. You will just get your competitors wasting your budget.

I manage a handful of local service companies, I have lots of experience with all channels of inbound marketing including PPC (adwords), SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing etc.

What I found the most profitable is local SEO, it brings the most leads, it's sustainable and it doesn't cost the earth. I have got several companies top organic rankings and also local with the Google maps. This works tremendously well for my clients, a roofer, plumber and tree surgeon have seen high success with this strategy.

Happy to provide more free advice and get you on the right track via personal message.