It’s the first of the year and here at DIY Contractor Marketing we know a lot of you out there have big growth goals that you want to hit and we want to give you the knowledge you need to help you reach those goals. In this blog were going to give you growth hacks that you can implement in your business in 2019 for explosive business and customer growth.

First, you want to start by improving what you already have – a website. If you don’t have a website, you need to get one ASAP- check out the rest of our website for help on this. First and foremost you are going to want to improve your website conversion rate. When going through your own website try to act as though you are a potential customer seeing it for the first time. Go through with a fine-toothed comb and ask yourself “If I knew nothing about myself, would I convert?”

Here are some quick tips on how to get someone to convert faster and grow your business:

Load Speed:

Typically, if a website takes longer than 5 seconds to load consumers will bounce out of your website. If you reflect on your internet searches we’re sure you can recognize this. A fast loading speed is critical in keeping potential customers on your site. Aside from that, website load speed is a ranking factor for Google. If your page loads slowly and isn’t seen as user-friendly, you will get knocked down in Google’s search results.

Clear and Concise Messaging:

A lot of businesses in their home-page have a lot of jumbled messaging. They may have blog posts and other things, but what you really want to have on your site is clear and concise messaging- especially on your home page. Your home page should act as a big sales page. Essentially it should have three things: what you offer, how’s it going to make your customers life better, and how can they purchase it. As for a call to action, nothing is worse than when you’re comparing competitors and you find one you really like and they don’t have a clear call to action. Either they don’t have one, don’t have one that can be found easily, or it is a small phone number or inquiry form hidden in a corner somewhere. If you want to convert customers you need to make your call to action clear and in plain sight. Ideally, you will have 2-3 call to action buttons placed strategically in different places on your site. This includes placing a clear call to action at the bottom of every blog post and miscellaneous site pages.

Display Past Successful Projects:

Definitely display past projects on your site. Make sure you (or someone else) are taking the time to take photos, and videos if applicable, of projects and have them displayed prominently on your site. In addition you should also be including happy customer testimonials. Potential clients want to see that you’ve worked with customers in the past and that they’ve been satisfied and happy with the work you provided.

Join Networking Groups:  

Now, a lot of you out there may be resistant about doing this. Networking is truly one of the best ways to grow your business quickly. Of all the online marketing we’ve done for clients, if someone had to grow their business today or very quickly, one of the best things they can do is just get out in the public. A lot of times what a potential customer needs in order to do business with you is they need to know they can trust you. Establishing that relationship purely via the internet can be very challenging. Some examples of the networking groups you could engage in are your local chamber of commerce, BNI (Business Network International), your local rotary or simply going to a website like meetup.com and searching for your industry or industries that are similar. You could potentially get clients from these when you get out there and meet people, give out your business card, etc.

Improve Your Online Reputation:

When was the last time you Googled your business? If you haven’t done that before, then as soon as you’re done reading this blog Google yourself and you may find something that you didn’t know is stopping customers from converting. An example of this could be that there’s a fake fraud report, maybe someone went to an obscure home service site that you didn’t set up and then left you a one star review, or maybe you haven’t paid attention to your Google Business listing and you’ve got negative reviews piled up, or you haven’t responded to negative reviews in an attempt to eradicate them. So really you need to be guarding your online reputation. Take a look at it and see what you can do to try and improve it in any way possible.

Streamline The Sales Process:

One of our favorite hacks to share with contractors is how to use online tools to try to streamline the sales process. If you really want to grow your business, it’s not gonna work to just have contracts written here and there and occasionally get them signed. You need an actual checklist and process to get these contracts to the client, get them signed, billed, and their balance paid. You then need to get all of that info into QuickBooks and organized for the tax man at the end of the year. One of our favorite online tools is a thing called PandaDoc. PandaDoc is an online document program that you can create agreements and contracts for different clients on. It works great and keeps everything available to you at all times. Another company favorite is FreshBooks. A lot of our billing goes through FreshBooks – it covers everything that you need for the billing processes, follow-ups, automatic billing, and more. You can also integrate FreshBooks with QuickBooks to really streamline the whole process. So you’ve got PandaDoc where your client will actually receive/view the agreement. You send that to the client via email, they sign it and you get a notification back saying the contract was viewed/signed and you automatically have it in your possession. One of the best parts of this process is it reduces the chances of losing a piece of paper causing you to look bad and scrambling to find/get the info needed to move forward.

Utilize Targeted Local Ad Campaign(s):

The reason that local ads work so well is that you can really dial in on who your potential customer base is. There are a lot of different ways you can identify/pick your target audience, but to keep it simple we’ll say this – if you went out there and really thought about who you’re doing the most business with, you could narrow it down into a pretty small range. It is probably people that are anywhere from 35 to 70 years old, and likely someone that lives within five miles of where you do business. Essentially you figure out who your customer is, the geography they’re coming from and then you run a Facebook ad, a Google PPC ad, or even a website banner ad to the specific group of people. What’s so powerful about a targeted campaign is your ad spend is a lot lower. Because you have narrowed down, and know who your target market is, you’re not just advertising to everyone. Your advertising to a specific person that has the highest chance of converting to a potential customer.

For more info on how to grow your Contracting business click here