Marketing 101 Mini-Course

I want to share some solid, cheap, fundamental, and quick marketing tactics you can use immediately to grow your business. These tactics are a great way to diversify your marketing and make your business weatherproof during challenging economies or slow seasons. In the beginning, it is common for the owner to perform these, but as the business grows, a position will be made and filled for someone to handle these efforts.

1. Word of Mouth
Many people have grown their businesses to 7 figures simply through word of mouth.

You can never do without word of mouth whether you are starting your business or are well-established. Walt Disney said, “Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.”

When you incorporate all the ways to generate word of mouth and referrals, you can quickly gain traction and start growing your business.

Consider notifying your family and friends of your business and asking them for a referral. You can do this by making frequent social posts and by offering a referral spiff.

Consider joining a business networking group that offers an environment of shared referrals. Be sure to join growing thriving groups, though, because joining the wrong group will prove worthless.

2. Social Post Raffle
Many have found great success in spreading their name out there simply by creating a raffle on social media that requires a user to engage with a post and share it to be entered to win some prize. The prize can be a Smart TV, Kayak, Headphones, or any creative prize that will get people engaged.

An example post could say something like, “Want to win (PRIZE)? Well, ABC Contracting is giving a (PRIZE) to the winner of our (SEASONAL) Raffle. Simply Like & Share this post to automatically be entered.” Feel free to add your terms at the bottom of the post and include plenty of spacing.

This tactic will create a lot of buzz around your post, and that will help spread your name organically and quickly.

3. Yard Signs
Yard signs are incredibly cheap and easy to get designed. When you use them strategically and responsibly, they can help grow your leads.

How you can use them is when performing a job for a customer, you can ask the customer if they would allow you to plant a yard sign during the project. Once approved and planted, that sign will now make neighbors aware of your company name, and by them seeing that their neighbor hired you then, that will automatically add trust to your brand. More often than not, when seeing issues in one home in a neighborhood, there are similar or worse issues in neighboring homes.

Another way you can use yard signs is by planting them in rural intersections against or near other objects that won’t be getting mowed. If you plant yard signs in an urban or well-landscaped area, your yard sign won’t last very long, and you may get fined. Having yard signs throughout your service area will create brand awareness and eventually reach people needing your services.

4. Clover Effect
The clover effect is a well-known tactic with home service providers, but very few implement it religiously.

Implementing the clover effect is simply placing some literature or marketing collateral at the neighboring houses, i.e., the two houses to either side of your customer and the one house across the street. Your literature should speak to the fact that you just serviced their neighbor and believe they may have similar issues.

This tactic is a great way to turn a single job into another and another.

5. D2D
Door-to-door sales or canvassing is a great way to stir up some business quickly, and most of the time, it doesn’t require any upfront investment.

If you canvass an area with a high need for your services, you can hire a team of commission-based sales reps to perform the D2D sales. Or, if you are a pro at D2D sales, go for it.

Many large businesses have relied solely on this tactic alone and have made 7-8 figure businesses from it.

The only drawback is that people are less welcoming as time goes on, conversions have been dropping for D2D sales, and it is hard to maintain the motivation personally and corporately.

6. Local Neighborhood Magazine
Many business owners are unaware of the opportunity within a local magazine mailing. In most markets, there are local issues that create, design, and mail magazines to the better class of zip codes in a market.
By advertising in a local magazine, you get instant exposure to qualified homeowners and can generate numerous leads monthly from this source alone.

I recommend running this tactic for at least 3 months before determining whether it is a winner. Many times with brand awareness media like TV, radio, billboard, magazine, or digital ads, it may take 3 months of exposure for prospects to begin to trust and become familiar with your brand.

Many businesses make the wrong decision by trialing a tactic for only a month or two and then quitting before it has sufficient time to build trust and momentum with the target market.

Conclusion
This advice is just a high-level discussion about marketing tactics you can deploy quickly and easily for your business. They will serve your business well by increasing brand awareness and leads and diversifying your marketing strategy.

Let me know how these work out for you. I am excited to hear the results.