With home show season almost here, I thought I’d share some tips for boosting foot traffic to your booth.

These are ironclad methods we teach our clients to generate up to three times more leads.

And I’m giving away the farm… right here, right now. For free.

Let’s get crackin’…

Pick The Right Home Shows

The one thing you don’t want to do is set up shop at a show where tumbleweeds outnumber humans.

Do some sleuthing on any home show you’re considering. Ask the show organizer for references from the previous year’s show. Then call the references and ask about attendance, attendee responsiveness, and if they’re attending this year.

If for some reason the organizer doesn’t give you references (not a good sign), check the event’s website—you can usually find info on previous attendees there.

Pick The Right Booth Location

Location within the show determines whether your booth is bustling… or a bust.

Try to get a spot smack-dab in the middle, or near the middle on the right-hand side. Why the right side? Well, ever been to a grocery store? Most of them lay out a counter-clockwise path for customers because studies show that’s how people tend to “migrate” while shopping. Crazy!

Also, try to get a booth next to a national company. They get lots of attention, so you can piggyback off their foot traffic.

And if possible, shell out extra for a premium location. It may cost you a little more upfront, but you’re practically guaranteed to experience better results.

Integrate A Powerful Identity

Infuse your booth with your business’s identity from head to toe. Make sure you articulate who you are, why you’re better, and what people can look forward to when they hire you. Convey the message with—you guessed it—power, passion, and precision.

Also, don’t slouch on design. You want banners and backdrops that attract the eye, not repel it (or worse, get ignored).

Here’s an example of home show materials done right:

Have A Giveaway

Giveaways are massively effective for drumming up interest in your booth. They also give you a reason to follow up with people after the show.

Make the giveaway amount large enough for folks to WANT to enter. A $100 remodeling giveaway? No one cares. A $10,000 remodeling giveaway? Now we’re talking! If you’re afraid of giving away that much, just think about how many leads it will generate, as well as the fact that—depending on your margins—the giveaway will only cost you about half the face value. You’ll easily more than cover the cost of the giveaway.

Lastly, have pre-printed signup forms, or—even better—a lead-capturing program like iCapture in Market Sharp. This way, you can effortlessly keep track of your leads and won’t have to juggle a bunch of drawing slips or try to read people’s chicken-scratch writing.

Attract Attention With The “Big Bill”

Want to grab passerby attention? Stop handing out pens, candy, and trinkets. (Seriously, has a free pen ever enticed you?)

Instead, give out Big Bills. These are glossy, oversized flyers that look like money on one side and contain your identity on the other.

Example:

The denomination should be the same as your giveaway amount. (So if your giveaway is $10,000, the “bill” side should say $10,000.)

Sticking a Big Bill into someone’s line of sight and saying, “Hey, I want to give you $10,000!” as they walk by stops them in their tracks. Try it and see.

Ask People Questions

Gauge a prospect’s urgency and interest with 6 to 10 questions that start out general and become more specific. If they give you rushed answers, they’re probably not interested; however, if they engage with you, you might be talking to a future customer.

Here’s a list of questions you can use if you sell windows (adapt to other projects as necessary):

• How old is your home?
• Are the original windows still on your home?
• Is there anything specific that bugs you about your windows?
• Do you think your energy bills are too high?
• Does your home get drafty?
• Are you here actively looking for windows, or are you browsing?
• Do you know how to tell good windows from bad ones?
• How long have you been thinking about replacing your windows?
• Have you received a bid yet?

Book Appointments Right There, Right Then

Setting appointments on the spot should go without saying, but I’m amazed at how often contractors don’t do it. And if you use a CRM program like MarketSharp, there is especially no reason not to set appointments then and there—these programs make it ridiculously easy to capture, store, and organize lead info.

Also, offer leads extra incentives or an exclusive home show special for booking an appointment.

FOLLOW UP!!!

Sorry for yelling, but I need to. Contractors usually follow up well with hot leads, while letting the rest collect dust.

Fortunately, the giveaway I mentioned above provides you with an easy way to follow up with ALL of the home show leads you generated. Here’s how you do it:

• Call them and say, “We have not yet drawn our Grand Prize winner, but we have drawn several first prize winners… and I’m calling to let you’re one of them!”
• Make the prize a gift card for your company that’s worth some fraction of the Grand Prize—maybe $200 to $500.
• When you tell them they’re a winner, they’ll stop trying to find ways to get you off the phone and start fixating on the fact that they just won something.
• Once you confirm their address and tell them you’ll be sending the gift card, say, “I noticed you said on the form that if you win the Grand Prize, you’d use it for windows.”
• Ask them qualification questions about the service they chose. If you detect interest and urgency, double the gift card amount if they set an appointment then and there.
• Go to their house with your best closing game. Voilà.

Whew… that was a long one. But it was worth it. Follow these tips, and you’ll create a stampede of leads to your home show booth. Just watch.

If you need help with your home show materials, that’s why MYM is here. Get in touch with us, and we can provide you with all the materials you need to make your next home show—and every single one after that—a rousing, lead-generating success.

Head over to our Home Show page for more details.

P.S. Need advice on a thousand and one other contractor marketing topics? Tomorrow, I will dispense a marketing education on every subject you could ever possibly want to know about. This info is easily worth seven figures… and I’m giving it away for the sum total of $0.00.

Stay tuned.

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Marketing Quick Tips: Contests

By Rich Harshaw

Pretty much all remodelers hate contests.

When I bring up the topic of home improvement giveaways during seminars, I can hear the collective (non-verbal-but-clearly-evident-in-the-body-language) groan from the audience. Nobody wants to mess with them. Nobody sees the point in them. Nobody wants anything to do with them.

And I keep right on preaching that you should have one.

So before I hop into the quick tips for contest best practices, let me first overcome a few contest objections in an unconventional FAQ format:

Q: When You Say Contest, What Exactly Are You Talking About?
A: I’m talking about a one-time per year giveaway of your products or services. The amount should be big enough to make people feel like it’s worthwhile to enter. I recommend a $5,000 minimum and a $20,000 maximum. The giveaway should be used in two places: home shows (or other events) and on your website. I’ll cover those below.

Q: It Costs Too Much. That’s Not A Question, But Still.
A: Nope. First of all, most contractors have 50% margins, which means your $10,000 giveaway is really only going to cost you $5,000. Granted, that’s a lot of money. Only give it away once per year, and allocate the cost to your marketing budget. If you escrow money monthly to cover it, you could pull this off for about $400 a month.

Q: Won’t This Just Generate Trash Leads?
A: Some, yes. But it will also generate tons construction and home improvement leads you never would have gotten otherwise. You just have to position it right.

Q: Won’t This Just Jam Me Up At The Home Show?
A: The main benefit of the giveaway at the home show is as a mechanism to stop traffic, start conversations, and follow up with people after the show. Definitely worth the extra work involved.

Now onto the quick tips:
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Marketing Quick Tips: Billboards

By Rich Harshaw

If you read my blog posting about Wall Drug, then you know I’m a fan of the billboard.

But you don’t have to have 115 billboards in a fifty-mile stretch of road for them to be a meaningful contributor to your marketing plan. With a little research and a good, creative message, billboards can work for medium to larger-sized remodeling companies. Here are few tips for incorporating billboards into contractor marketing:

Tip 1: To Billboard Or Not To Billboard: Don’t start thinking about the specifics of your billboard campaign until you’ve first carefully evaluated whether or not billboards even make sense for your marketing situation.

Billboards, almost by definition, are more of a branding/farming activity than a direct response one. With the exception of directional billboards (exit here for a restaurant, hotel, etc.), billboards should be part of a larger marketing campaign that will serve to extend your brand’s reach and nudge people to remember what they already know about you from exposure to your other advertising. Radio and billboard go well together since both are experienced (primarily) while driving. The key here is to educate people about your company and identity (brand promise) in other media so they already know who you are, what you stand for, and why you’re a good choice to buy from. Then the billboard does its job by triggering that pre-existing information in their brain.
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Sometimes Trying To Figure Out WHERE To Spend Your Money Is The Hardest Part of Home Improvement Marketing…

Marketing Quick Tips: Budgeting

By Rich Harshaw

New year, new opportunities.

From an advertising and marketing perspective, it’s a good idea to check your budget every January to make sure you’ve got a good plan going into the new year. Here are some quick pointers to help make sure you’re putting your money in the right buckets:

Tip 1: Buying Your Leads: The most fundamental and important budgeting principle is actually a mindset—the mindset that you must spend money to buy your home improvement, plumbing, or roofing leads.

I learned this the hard way several years ago when working with an $8 million home improvement company that had about a $100,000 a month marketing budget. My job was to work with the owner to allocate the money and make many of the various media buys. After a couple of months, the owner got me on a call and was mad—he was reviewing his numbers and saw that his leads were down and sales were down… and the reason was simple: I hadn’t spent all his budget. The money I thought I was “saving” him in advertising was actually COSTING him big time. He not-so-patiently explained to me that he has to BUY EVERY SINGLE HOME IMPROVEMENT LEAD HE GETS.
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