5 Great Ways Contractors Can Promote Their Business

No matter your target market or specialty, every contractor needs marketing to grow their business.

While you may already be using some popular marketing techniques, expanding your marketing efforts and adopting new advertising tactics is almost always a good idea.

These are five strategies that contractors use to promote their business — and how they can help you reach new clients.

1. Revisit Your Website

Your website is the hub of your online marketing and promotion strategies. Because online marketing has become so important, a good website is often necessary for good advertising.

The business website is often the first place that potential customers will look when researching your business. They’ll use this website to find information on your services, hours, contact details and location.

If this information is hard to find — or if your website doesn’t communicate why visitors should choose your business over the competition — customers may look elsewhere.

A good website should include a few things — information about your business and its services, a navigation header or sidebar that makes information easy to find and compelling calls-to-action that encourage visitors to get in touch.

Best practices like an uncluttered design, streamlined navigation and fast loading times will support these key elements.

Many websites also include testimonials, reviews, case studies and blog content relevant to your business. These site elements help show off your team’s expertise and previous work.

Reviewing the current state of your website can help you identify gaps or oversights in your current site design. Enlisting the help of a marketing agency or web designer can provide additional insight into what your site may be missing.

2. Start a Referral Program

Word-of-mouth marketing can be invaluable for contractors — but generating word-of-mouth marketing intentionally can be challenging.

Referral programs can encourage your past customers to talk about your business, spreading the word about the work you’ve done.

Whenever you complete a job, offer customers an incentive to talk with friends and family about your business. For each referral they write, you can provide a gift certificate, a discount on future work or a similar incentive.

You can also reach out to past customers to advertise your new referral program and highlight the incentives offered.

Over time, this tactic can allow you to take advantage of the personal and professional networks that your clients have. One future client may easily lead to several jobs with different customers if you have a good referral program in place.

3. Consider Account-Based Marketing

Rather than market towards a broad target audience or group, you create marketing campaigns tailored towards high-paying clients.

These account-based marketing campaigns can sometimes be a great way to build stronger client-contractor relationships, as well.

These marketing campaigns can double as outreach programs that keep your business in touch with previous clients, keeping them up to date on your business and inviting them to share information about their current or potential construction needs.

Combined with other client relationship-building practices, like prioritizing transparency and availability for top clients, you can use account-based marketing to build much stronger business partnerships.

4. Use Testimonials and Reviews

When it comes to researching a brand, consumers put a lot of stock in the opinions of others, including the opinions of complete strangers.

For this reason, testimonials and reviews from previous clients can be a powerful tool for contractors wanting to make their business seem more professional, trustworthy and experienced.

After a job, consider soliciting a testimonial or review from your client. Ask them for a bit of information on the job and their experience that you can use on your website.

You can host this information in a testimonials or reviews section. Potential customers may use these testimonials when deciding whether or not to work with your company.

You can also encourage clients to leave positive reviews on your business’s Google listing or elsewhere on the web.

Instead of testimonials and reviews, some businesses rely on carefully-written case studies. These are articles, sometimes with photos, illustrations or diagrams, that go into detail about a job you’ve completed in the past.

A case study typically begins with background information about your client and the problem they needed to solve. Then, you explain how your business solved the problem — completing a renovation or building a new structure, for example — using your unique combination of skills and experience.

At the end of the case study, you describe the client’s reaction and response, sometimes with direct quotes, and possibly explain how you’ll use the experience from the job going forward.

These case studies allow you to highlight past work and show off your approach to construction and renovation. A case study can be a useful marketing tool for convincing clients who have researched your business but remain on the fence.

5. Try Advertising in Local and Business Publications

While online marketing has become extremely important for businesses, print marketing isn’t useless. A well-placed advertisement in a local paper or publication can extend your business’s reach and help you find new audiences — particularly audiences that don’t use the internet for research.

Searching for local publications that have a classified section or section relevant to your business is a good place to start with print advertising. Once you’ve found a publication that caters to your target audience, you can get in touch with the publication and begin designing your print advertisements.

Like your site, a good advertisement should include basic information on your business, what makes your company unique and how potential customers can get in touch.

You may also try advertising in construction or contracting trade publications. There’s a wide variety of these magazines available, and new publications are being launched all the time.

While the readership of these magazines is mostly other contractors and construction professionals, they can also be a good place for advertising your business — especially if you offer subcontracting, consulting or other services that construction businesses may need.

These Contractor Marketing Strategies Can Help You Find New Clients

The right marketing strategy is essential for any contractor — especially contractors that want to grow their business and secure repeat work.

Using these techniques, you can expand your audience, reach new clients and build stronger relationships with business partners.