Proximity Marketing:How To Turn Every Job Into 2 or 3 More.
Pre-Positioning:How To Make Prospects Fall In Love With You… Before Your Sales Person Ever Shows Up.
Referrals:How To Get More Of Them Than Ever Before.
Watch Monopolize Your Marketplace CEO Rich Harshaw as he packs 3 NEW RULES of CONTRACTOR MARKETING topics into one compact, 80-minute webinar! These topics might LOOK like “old standbys,” but wait until you learn the NEW WAYS THAT ACTUALLY WORK!
Proximity Marketing
Why “3 postcards and pray” proximity marketing never works and never will work
9 steps of Super Robust Proximity Marketing… including step-by-step implementation
How to handle the dirty work without getting your hands dirty (thank you, Marketsharp!!)
Pre-Positioning Marketing
Why pre-positioning is absolutely critical if you want to maximize home improvement lead conversion
Why your current pre-positioning efforts are probably falling short of their potential, and how to fix them
Principles of “confirmation bias,” price conditioning, and reciprocity
Details on the 4 components of pre-positioning, and how to implement them all
Financial implications of pre-positioning including execution costs and expected returns
See samples of pre-positioning packages
Referral Generation
Why just “asking for referrals” doesn’t work… and never will work
A 3-step system that will instantly increase referrals by 50% to 100%
How to realistically build your referral business to at least a quarter of your business or more
Pros and cons of putting formal referral reward programs in place.
Yes, You Should Test Your Advertising & Marketing… And Here’s How To Do It.
This Is A Follow-Up To The Last Article About Testing…
Solid Advice For How To Actually DO IT.
Written by Rich Harshaw.
Want a recipe for advertising disaster? Here’s a script I’ve seen run a thousand times:
The Great Western Closet Company designs and installs custom closet organizers in upscale homes in a medium-sized city in the west. In consulting with the owner, Mike, I was convinced that direct mail could be a profitable advertising medium. Mike, however, was opposed. “We mailed over 30,000 pieces last spring, but only got six jobs from it. I lost almost $1,500 on the deal. Home improvement shows are the only reliable source of leads for this kind of company.”
Their first problem was that they didn’t send out their own mailer. Their ad was a four-color, 8½ x 11 sheet printed on the back of a boot store’s ad. The ad was sent out with several others in a ValPak-type mailer. Mike wasn’t sure which geographic areas had actually received his advertisement, and he couldn’t verify that 30,000 pieces had gone out. As for the ad itself, it contained no headline, made no compelling case for their product, and made no specific offer. There was nothing telling why their product was great, what advantages it held over the competition and the alternatives, or what benefits would come from using the product—it just said “Here it is, buy it from us for no justifiable, rational reason.”
Really, it just doesn’t work in your industry? Naturally some types of media are more suited for some industries than others. But more often than not, when I look at the AD that was actually ran in the so-called crummy media, it’s a large, steaming pile of dung—meaning of course, that it stinks. Read More
Methodical And Relentless Testing Will Save You Tons Of Money… And Heartache.
Take The Time To Scientifically Test Your Advertising
In Small Doses Before Launching A Full-Scale Blitz.
Written by Rich Harshaw.
In his classic book Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill says that one of the major causes of failure is that people “prefer to act on opinions created by guesswork or snap-judgments rather than facts.” Advertising decisions based on what you think will work rather than what the marketplace wants is the main reason advertisements don’t work—and that marketing plans fail. Your livelihood depends on your ability to determine which messages will effectively attract new customers and entice your current customers to come back for more.
You can make these determinations by putting every important marketing and advertising question to a vote by the only people whose ballots count: customers and prospects. This “voting” takes place in the form of small, inexpensive tests. An advertising test is different than a questionnaire, a survey, or a focus group. Those things don’t necessarily reflect your prospects’ willingness to put their money where their mouths are—and the results are usually skewed toward what the participants think you want to hear. Or what they think they might do. Testing, on the other hand, allows you to find out definitively which headlines, offers, prices, etc. the market will respond to—and cause them to buy—before you spend a fortune on advertising. Read More
Sometimes, Just Fessing Up Your Transgressions Can Make You Seem More Trustworthy.
Can Exposing Your Warts Improve Contractor Marketing Results?
Not Always. But Sometimes, Honesty Really IS The Best Policy.
Written by Rich Harshaw.
Imagine you run a small grocery store and have over 1,000 apples in stock that for reasons beyond your control, have gone bad—they’re rotten. You can’t afford to throw them out and take a complete loss, but the likelihood of selling them—at any price—appears to be somewhere between slim and none. What would you do?
That’s exactly the position legendary advertising man John Powers found himself in over 100 years ago. Fortunately, Powers specialized in the art of “telling the truth” in advertising. When asked to advertise mackintoshes (a name for an apple back in those days, not a computer or a phone!) which could not be disposed of, Powers had this conversation with the owner:
“What is the matter with them? Powers asked. The buyer replied: “Between you and me they are rotten. That is nothing, of course, to say in the advertising, but it is true.”
The next day came an ad stating “We have 1,200 rotten mackintoshes. They are almost worthless, but still worth the price we ask. Come and see them. If you find them worth the price we ask, then buy.” Read More
