by tradesmeninsights | Nov 16, 2016 | Marketing Tips, Tradesmen Insights
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
When trying to gain new contractors, “the ready, fire, aim” mentality doesn’t work. Neither does “a wing and prayer” method.
Developing new customers is entirely different from trying to sell more stuff to your existing ones. Marketing needs to work closely with sales in not only developing a message, but a plan on delivering it. You also need to take into consideration that a lot of new contractors won’t identify themselves until they’ve done some homework on your company.
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by tradesmeninsights | Feb 2, 2016 | Marketing Tools, Marketing Trends, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
As manufacturers we all know how important keeping in contact with our customers is. Email is one of the easiest and most effective way to do that and unfortunately for those of you who sell through a distribution process it’s hard to get the ultimate end user’s name no less try to start a relationship with them.
That’s why it’s important to begin building your own database of both current and potential contractors. If you’re fortunate enough to make products that require a warranty card that certainly is a place to start. Other outbound marketing activities should include incentives for contractors to give up their contact info so you can start a dialog with them.
Give them something of value that would help them in their everyday activities, such as:
- mobile app
- some sort of calculator to help them estimate projects
- white paper
- a series of how-to videos
- industry research on new and upcoming trends
- checklists on detailed processes
- case study
- tool kit (cheat sheets, checklists, videos, e-books)
Do you know that the average office worker checks their email 30 times an hour? Can you imagine what the stats are for contractors out in the field?
The point is that emails are very acceptable ways of communicating with each other. The key is to have relevant and timely info for your prospect.
Heidi Cohen gives us several reasons why email trumps social media:
- Email provides directly measurable ROI – You know immediately how many opened and read your message.
- Email is content format agnostic – It’s user-friendly and you can use text, images, videos, audio, PDFs.
- Email can deliver both long and short content – Content can vary from a link to several pages in length.
- You can control delivery of emails – Whether it’s now or delayed.
- Emails can be read on anything – Smart phones, tablets, laptops, no apps required.
- Emails build customer relationships – Once someone allows you to communicate with them, it represents a certain level of trust.
With all the marketing trends and new things over the last several years, email still seems to be the “workhorse” for most people’s marketing efforts. Recent research from Gigaom reports that over 75% of smart phone users check their emails on their phones. What I find remarkable, if you look at the chart below, 5 years ago paid search, SEO and digital ads would have been at the top of the list. Oh, how the more things change, the more they remain the same.
So what are you doing to grow your own email list?
Here are some other posts you might find useful:
Benchmark Report on Email Marketing Sheds Light on Top Priorities for B-to-B Marketers
5 Tips on Improving Your Email Marketing to Professional Tradesmen
Email Marketing: How Are You Using it to Reach the Professional Tradesmen
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 20, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Traditional Marketing
I have this running conversation with clients about which is better, a traditional direct mail program or an e-blast. It’s a tough question to answer and I’m not too sure there is only one answer.
There are challenges for using both methods and we have seen it become more and more difficult to get emails delivered even if we use opt-in lists from trade publications and have them send it out under their name.
I think that when reaching out to our target market, the professional tradesman, you have just as good if not better of a chance of reaching them with the traditional snail mail.
We recently did a sampling program for a client who wanted to focus more on the electronic side of things and wanted to use more, if not most, in this media. They assumed that direct mail was a thing of the past and was too costly (neither of which are true). We convinced them to give both a try and the results were surprising.
The DM portion of the program outperformed on average 3 to 1 over the e-blasts. We used the same criteria for both lists and did both within 2 weeks of each other. We’re doing a second test using the same message and list parameters and it will be interesting to see if it still holds true.
We’ve all used both of these marketing tools. My question to you is have you found one better than the other in reaching contractors or the professional tradesman?
