Who’s Fault Is It When Your Marketing Doesn’t Work?

You Might Not Like The Answer.

By Rich Harshaw

My wife’s biggest pet peeve is losing things. (Stick with me for a second, and I’ll show you how this relates to marketing for contractors.)

More specifically, she hates it when other people lose things. In a thousand ways, she’s the nicest, sweetest person you’d ever want to meet. But if you can’t find a shoe, forget it. She’s got no sympathy for you.

Which is how I got in the crosshairs when her second set of car keys came up missing sometime around February or March last year. Since the keys were gone, and since she never loses anything, logic would dictate I must’ve been the one who lost them.

Then, every couple months, when she couldn’t quickly locate her main set of keys, she’d remind me how I’d been so lackadaisical in key-keeping. How could I be trusted with important things—like our six children—when I couldn’t even be trusted to keep track of a lousy set of spare keys?

So imagine my delight last Saturday when she came into the kitchen with a sheepish little grin on her face and admitted she’d found the lost keys—in one of HER jacket pockets while cleaning out the coat closet. Frankly, I was shocked; I had naturally assumed that if the keys ever did turn up and if it were her fault, she’d just toss them in the trash rather than admit she was the culprit. Bonus points to the wife for confessing.

The point is simple. When something goes wrong, our egos’ first defense is to blame somebody or something else for the failure. The same is true in business and in marketing. When something goes wrong, the tendency is to BLAME… and nine times out of ten, we tend to blame the WRONG thing.

With that in mind, I present to you, in no particular order, the top ten things you might WRONGLY blame for some of the most common general and roofing contractor marketing failures.

What You Think Went Wrong: There Are Too Many Competitors, We Can’t Stand Out
The Truth:Your Company Is Unremarkable And Boring, And Deserves Average Results
Explanation: There’s a reason Six Flags sells season passes for less than the cost of two full-day tickets… and Disney World makes a billion dollars a second. It’s because Six Flags is dirty, smelly, and worn out… and Disney World is great. Six Flags over Texas, where my family has season passes, is borderline disgusting. They have really good rides—which is about the only thing that keeps us interested. Barely. Besides that, it’s got chipped paint everywhere, nasty smells wafting about, surly employees who wear bright yellow shirts encouraging you not to litter (seriously), standing water in ditches, and a creepy old dude for a mascot. Meanwhile, Disney simply WOWS its guests at every turn.

When was the last time you were truly “WOWED” by a company? When you were so impressed that you just had to tell somebody? Let’s flip this around now—when was the last time somebody did business with you and was WOWED and just had to go tell somebody about it? If there’s nothing unique, nothing distinguishing, nothing above average, nothing worth talking about in your business, then guess what? You deserve average results and average sales and average profit. Quit thinking the problem is the marketplace or the customers or the economy—until you can truly offer a truly unique and truly outstanding experience, you’re going to be stuck with crummy results. You’ve got to innovate and make your business worthy of the lion’s share of the dollars in your industry.

What You Think Went Wrong: There Are Too Many Competitors, We Can’t Stand Out
The Truth: Your Marketing Looks Exactly Like Everyone Else’s
Explanation: Several years ago I put my home up for sale, and as a result, the home was listed on the MLS. You know what this means, right? Every single moving company on the planet started sending me postcards because they know that people who are moving are probably good prospects for moving. That’s pretty smart thinking. Except I literally received FIVE postcards from FIVE companies in one day…and that’s on top of the four I got the day before, the six I got the day before that, and the (literally) twenty-five I got in the week after that. Every single one of the postcards read approximately the same: Free Estimates, local & long distance, in business for ninety years, etc. Everyone looked approximately… THE SAME!

Guess what? It’s not just movers—it’s YOU, too! Almost all contractor marketing (HVAC, general, roofing, and all the others) is similar. All window ads look basically the same. All siding contractors use essentially the same ad. Ditto for kitchen remodelers.

If your, say, roofing marketing looks like everyone else’s, then you’re going to get a tiny fraction of the business. Writing better marketing and winning is so easy and so predictable when you use the correct formulas, like we teach at Monopolize Your Marketplace. You’ve got to create an IDENTITY so prospects can instantly tell who you are, how you’re different, and what they can expect when doing business with you. Start here and success everywhere will follow.

What You Think Went Wrong: Radio/Newspaper/Direct Mail/Etc. Just Doesn’t Work
The Truth: Maybe Your Ad Blows
Explanation: 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… all of which are huge “no-nos” in the world of contractor marketing. 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 actually ran in the so-called crummy media, it’s a large steaming pile of dung—meaning of course, that it stinks. Did you realize that by running a crummy ad and then drawing a conclusion that the MEDIA was at fault you could be costing your company substantial amounts of money and home improvement leads in the future?

What You Think Went Wrong: We Wasted $60,000 On A Campaign That Didn’t Work
The Truth: You Never Tested Your Ads First
Explanation: I once knew a man who, after twenty-five years in the retail jewelry business, retired and decided to launch a company that sold lower-end jewelry and collectibles on a nationwide basis using newspaper advertisements as his marketing medium. He would place advertisements in newspapers that looked exactly like the Franklin Mint’s. The only thing different would be his company’s name and address at the bottom of the ad.

He sharpened his pencil and figured that if his ads could pull a mere six responses out of every 10,000 placed, net profits would triple the ad cost. Only three responses out of 10,000 and he would break even. If Franklin could do it, why couldn’t he? On the strength of pro-formas and his reputation in the community, he raised over $200,000 from local investors to launch the first product, a gemstone ring. The initial ad cost over $60,000 for complete coverage in the Los Angeles Times’ Parade Magazine. Since the paper was delivered to several million homes, he figured to be extremely rich very soon.

To make a sad story short, the product bombed. He tried a different product the second time, and still another the next time. Finally, after all of his capital was depleted, he was forced to quit. His investors were not happy. How could this have happened? All he needed was a measly six responses out of 10,000.

Instead of blowing the whole budget on a couple of unproven ideas, he should have taken the time to run some tests in similar magazines with smaller circulations. These relatively inexpensive tests would have told him which ad concepts worked, which prices pulled the most orders, what kinds of terms his customers found most convenient, or anything else he needed to know before rolling out a huge, expensive campaign. Moral to this story: It’s better to find out what works and what doesn’t when there isn’t $60,000 at stake. Testing will ensure you never make a major marketing mistake again—ever.

Don’t worry, there is still plenty of blame to pass around! Look for my next blog posting where I’ll cover FIVE more blame issues, including:

• Being Lazy
• Website Issues
• Lack of Exposure
• Not Spending Enough Money
• Frequency Problems

See you then!

Free Lead Generation Audit: We’ll perform an in-depth audit of your company’s website (HVAC professionals, home improvement contractors, and everyone else is welcome) and lead generation activities. Then, we’ll spend 90 minutes on the phone with you to discuss our findings and conduct an Identity discovery session. This valuable marketing insight is worth $4,500, and is yours for FREE—if you meet the conditions.

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© 2015 – 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.