A contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. And welcome to the Hammer and Grind podcast, the podcast built for contractors to help maximize profits and get you off the tools before burnout or bankruptcy happens. I'm your host, Brad Hebner. And I'm here to help you on your journey to self-mastery. Make sure you check us out on our social media platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast and you'll be able to find me there. Consider joining my free Facebook group called the Contract Your Profit Blueprint. I created this free group to give you as much information as possible to help you in your business. I go live in there once a week, tons of content to help you in your business. If you want to accelerate the success, consider joining my paid coaching group called The Profit Club. In there is a great community of contractors all willing to share information and help each other succeed, as well as hundreds of hours of training, coaching calls, everything you need to accelerate your business. If you want to learn more about that, you can find out more information on hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. Or just send me a message and I'll be happy to share that with you. Now, let's get on to the show. All right, welcome to the podcast. We got a good show today. Today, we're talking about the 33 ways to market your business. These are, in my opinion, the only ways you can market your business. Although there may be some little outliers that I've never even heard of or thought of. But if you listen to this podcast, by the end of the podcast, you will have learned. 33 different ways to market your business. And if you do all of these or most of these or some of these, there's no reason that you should not have leads coming in on a regular basis. So let's get started on this. And by the way, if you want this complete list, I even break it down based on kind of the pros and cons of each area. You can go to my free Facebook group, the Contractor Profit Blueprint. That is the only way you're going to get the copy of this. You got to join my free Facebook group and there's a post in there that you can get access to this list of all the different ways that you can market your business. One of the reasons why I'm doing this podcast is because as things are starting to slow down, I get a lot of calls and messages from contractors trying to figure out how to get the phone to ring. And so some of these are... going to be long-term strategies. Some of these are going to be things that will get the phone to ring today or tomorrow. Some of them are outbound that will get you jobs. It's a mix of all of these. I have put these somewhat in order of what I feel like is most important, but they may not be in the exact order. So keep that in mind. So let's get started. Number one, the most important, in my opinion, the most important thing that you should have. is a Google listing for your business. To me, this is a non-negotiable. I get people all the time say, hey, my phone's not ringing. I need some help. I say, do you have a Google listing? No. Okay, you've already shot yourself in the foot. That's the first thing you should have is a Google listing. Why? Because Google is still the number one search engine for anybody looking for anything. They go to Google and they search for contractors near me. home improvement contractor near me, remodeler near me, roofer my city. That's what they do. And if you don't have a very basic Google listing, I don't know what you're doing, to be honest. So you have to have a listing and you have to optimize that listing. What does that mean? It means you have to make sure that it links to your website. You have to make sure that it has your hours on there, that it has your phone number and your email. It has to have everything about your business on that website. I mean, on that listing. You have to have this, guys. It's a non-negotiable. Number two, and I have it after the Google listing, is a website. You have to have a basic website. I can't believe how many contractors don't have a website. They go on Google to find a contractor and then Google shows them your website. It shows them their listing and then it shows a link to your website. What do you think people are doing? How do you think they're finding out about you? How are they social proofing you? How are they finding out about what you do? They're going to your website. You have to have a website. This is really another non-negotiable. Number three is reviews. You have to have reviews, guys. This is the new pre-qualification method by everybody, including yourself. When you go to Amazon and buy something, what do you do? You look at the reviews. You see this item here. It's $10 and it has 3,000 reviews. And this item over here is $8. It's the exact same item and it has 10 reviews. You're going to buy the one that's $2 more because it has 3,000 reviews that prove that this is a legitimate item. You have to have reviews. There's lots of different ways that you can automate this. I use a software called NiceJob. For $75 a month, you can't beat it. When I signed up for NiceJob, within one year, I had added over 150 reviews. And on my business listing, I had over 200 reviews. You know how much the closest competitor to me had? 15. I had 200 and something reviews. My competitor had 15. Who do you think they called first? It doesn't mean I'm getting the job, but who do you think they called first? They called me first every time. Reviews are a non-negotiable. And here's the thing about reviews. You have to keep getting them. You can't just go out, collect 30 reviews, and then say, I'm good, I'm done. No, you have to keep on getting reviews because people look at the frequency. If the last review that you had was from five years ago, that doesn't tell me anything about your business. In the last five years, you may have gone downhill, doing terrible work and don't care anymore. But if I have one from last week, A five-star review from Cindy last week that said, Brad and his team did a great job. Highly recommend them. That's frequency. There's such a thing as called frequency bias. So the more frequent the reviews are, the more biased they will be towards you to want to at least give you a call. So you have to have consistent and continuous reviews. And one little tip on reviews, make sure you respond to every single review. If someone leaves you a review, you respond to it. Good or bad, you should respond to every single review. It shows that you're an active owner in the business. The next one is vehicle wraps. I get a lot of pushback on this, and I really don't understand why. But vehicle wraps are mobile billboards for your business, and they're way, way more effective than billboards. Mobile billboards or vehicle wraps are right in front of people's eyes. It's moving. Why do you think people stand outside on the sidewalk with those signs and they twirl them back and forth that says, you know, furniture place going out of business,60% off? Why wouldn't they just stick a sign in the yard, in the ground and say, hey, have that? Because moving catches your eye. As your vehicle is going down the street, it catches people's eyes. So you need to have vehicle wraps and you need to have ones that are loud and bold. And this is the part I get so much pushback. Yeah, but Brad, those are tacky. I don't like those ones that have all kinds of stuff on there. They're real tacky and I just don't like them. Well, who gives a crap what you like? This is not about you guys. This is not about what you like. It's about what works. Vehicle wraps work. They get your attention. When I started my business, I had a little bitty vinyl stickers on the door, about three feet wide, two inch little stickers. I had that truck for three years, the first three years in business. Not one single phone call, not one single phone call said, I saw your truck. That truck gets totaled. I have to get a new one. I get a new truck and I said, I'm going to wrap this thing. No, really the only, it was by an accident, to be honest. The only reason why I wrapped it was because I could only find a black truck in my price range that was in decent shape. And so I bought it and I wrapped it to look white. So my truck, when you looked at it wrapped, it looked like a white truck with graphics on it. It was actually a black truck, but it was bold. The name was down the entire side of the truck. I had different colors on there to get your attention. And then my phone started ringing off the hook. I see your truck. I saw your trucks, plural. I see your trucks all over town. Little did they know I only had one truck and that was me driving all over town. That's back when I was doing free estimates. People see that and they associate that with a successful business. I would get compliments all the time from people. Your truck looks really nice. It looks like a professional outfit. That's why I called you. It got my attention. So if you want to get a white vehicle and just put your name on the side, Smith Construction, in six-inch letters, that's fine. That's not going to get anybody's attention. So are you in the business of trying to be successful and get people's attention so you can make money and have the lifestyle that you want? Or are you in the business of, I don't want it to be loud and bold because I don't like it. This ain't about you. It's about what works. So if you don't like that, that's fine. But don't complain that the phone's not ringing. That's all I'm saying about that. You got me fired up this morning already. I got to calm down. Take a deep breath, Brad. Okay. I'm calm down now. Calm down. The next one, social media. Now, this is kind of a universal. This can be TikTok. It can be Facebook, Instagram, whatever social media is popping right now. Right now, it's TikTok. You want to be on that. Now, one thing that I always did in my business, every single time a new social media platform came out, I would go and I would grab my business name. Regardless, if I would... even going to log into that platform again, I would go out and I would grab the username. Why would I do that? Because I don't want anyone else grabbing my business name or my username. And I don't know that if six months or six years from now, that platform is going to become the next hot thing. So at the very least, I have that name on lockdown and nobody else can have it. There's lots of platforms that I've signed up for and never done anything with, but I still have the name. But you have to find out where your clients are at. Where are your clients hanging out at? Everybody's on TikTok right now. But that doesn't mean that your clients are on there. Your clients may be on Facebook or they may be on Instagram. You got to find out where they're at and then you have to go there and then you have to post regular organic posts, do live videos. Live videos work really well on Facebook, by the way. Facebook's still valuable. Still a valuable source. The next one is blogs. Now, this one does require some effort. I'm not going to lie. This is going to require some effort. However, if you put blogs on your website, it will generate tons of SEO and organic reach for your business. If you write blogs the correct way, you write them in a way that answers the most common questions that you get asked. There is a book that I recommend you should read called They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. And the whole premise is that your clients have the same questions over and over again. They're always asking the same questions depending on what your industry you're in. How much does this cost? How long is it going to take? What's the best type of X? What do I need to be worried about? Blah, blah, blah. Whatever the questions that they're asking you over and over again, you answer those questions in a blog post and you put it on your website. There's so many benefits to this. If I'm on a call with a client and they want a bathroom remodel and they go, what's the best type of shower door? What's the difference? I know there's framed and there's semi-framed and there's frameless. I don't know what the difference is and all that. I can simply say, hey, John, great question. I can dive deep into that right now if you want. It might be for the sake of time, when we get off this call, I can just email you over an article that I wrote that explains all of this. And usually like, oh yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great. They want to know the answer, but that doesn't mean they want to know it right then on the sales call. And I can just email that over. And then they click on that. It goes to my website. They read that article. And any good blog website will recommend more articles. And so what do they do then? They start reading more articles. And what does that happen? What happens to your clients when they read a bunch of your stuff? They become believers. That's how you provide value. Not only that, when you send that article and someone clicks on it and goes to your website, Google, remember a friend Google from above? They think, oh, this is a popular article. I should show this more often. So it's a triple benefit to having a blog. It does require some time, but it's well worth it. Next one is networking groups, B &I. I was in B &I for the first five years of my business. And I credit B &I to staying in business. Because when I first started, I had no connections, no network, nothing. And I was able to get enough business through that to stay in business. I also found my accountant through there. I found my insurance agent through there. I found all kinds of people in that group. Because with B &I, you only have one of each. type of business in there. And so there's no competition. So B &I is a great one. There's other types of networking event, you know, groups and stuff out there. But B &I, in my opinion, Business Network International is the most, is the best of all of them. The next one, call referral sources. This could include realtors, interior designers, architects, whoever in your industry are the type of people that would recommend you. And so you just call them up, introduce yourself. Just be like, hey, I'm calling an interior designer. I'm a bathroom modeler. I'm calling an interior designer. I call up Tyler. Hey, Tyler, this is Brad with Brad's Construction. I just wanted to reach out to you. I'm always looking to add new professionals to my network so that if I ever need an interior designer, I have someone I can call. Could you tell me a little bit about your services and what you offer? Now, here's the trick on this. And this is the trick for anything in life, by the way. When you do things like this, you do it as an outbound effort. I'm not calling these people because I'm asking them to help me. I'm calling them and asking them how I can help them. Why am I doing this? Because everybody calls and asks and says, what's in it for me? What's in it for me? How can you help me? I'm a contractor. Give me leads. How can you help me? So this is one of those things where you put it out there into the universe and through reciprocity, the universe may give it back to you. It's not a guarantee, but if you don't do it, it's a guarantee you're not ever going to get that. So you call them up, say, I'm just trying to add to my networking list. I just want to find out about you, what you do, see if there's anything I can do for you. A lot of times we have jobs where they need an interior designer. And I don't currently have an interior designer that I can recommend. And so you're calling them from the perspective of how you're going to help them. And what usually happens is, not always, but usually, oh, yeah, thanks for calling, Brad. We're always looking to add contractors to our list too because sometimes our contractors that we like to use are busy and we need to get someone else. So can I get your information too? If you simply call around and ask people, how you can help them and you want to add them to your list of network, your network list of professionals, they will be more than happy to give you their information. And then you could always follow that up a week later, two weeks later, send them a thank you card, a donut, a box or whatever. If you want to go down that road, you can definitely cultivate those relationships. Next thing on the list is call your previous clients and check in. This is such an easy task yet nobody wants to do it. Most people don't like doing outbound. Contractors don't like doing outbound stuff. We just want to sit in our rocking chair, watch the football game, and want all the leads to come to us. That's obviously a stereotype. Not everybody wants to do that. I don't like watching sports. I don't sit in a recliner. I don't even own a recliner. But there are some people that are like that, have that mentality, which is everyone should come to me. Part of business is outbound. You have to go out and find leads and make connections. So when you call up your previous clients and check in, Hey, Tiffany, I was just calling to check in. I know we did a job for you last year, a bathroom remodel. I just wanted to check in and see how everything was going with it. They're going to be shocked. Oh, wow. Yeah, Brad, thanks for calling. It's funny that you called because actually we were just talking, John and I were just talking about doing the other bathroom and we were planning on calling you. So it's actually kind of funny. You must have. your ears must have been burning. That happens. That stuff happens. So call them up and just check in. Don't call them up and say, hey, I'm looking for work. Do you got any work? Don't do that. Just call them and check in. Now, the second part to that is when you call your previous clients, if you offer some type of warranty, call them 11 months,10 months,11 months out. Say you offer a 12-month workmanship warranty. Call them at 11 months. Hey, Paula, just calling to let you know this is Brad with Brad's Construction, just letting you know that your 12-month warranty is coming up. We're at 11 months, and we just wanted to schedule our visit to come out and check everything and make sure that there's nothing going on so we can take care of it before the warranty expires. Again, nobody does this. You doing that simply will blow their mind. Holy crap, you're proactively checking to see if there's anything wrong with my project. Nobody ever does that. That in and of itself can potentially trigger more work. You know what? The work you did, the bathroom you did was great. We actually have no problems with it, but I'm glad you called because we want to do something else. Or the benefit to doing this is that if there is something that needs to be fixed, go fix it. And then while you're there, you may find some other things. Hey, Paula, we got that thing taken care of. You shouldn't have any more problems with that. But I did notice... There was a little bit of water stains underneath the toilet. Has that been there very long? Is that something that's been there a while? No, I didn't even notice that. Where do you mean? Well, right here. See how the grout joint's kind of discovered underneath the toilet? I don't know for sure, but that's usually an indicator that the toilet's been leaking. Oh, wow. Yeah, can you check that out? Yeah, absolutely. We can check that out. A lot of just going out to their house will trigger. other work that needs to be done. Plus, it's just good service. I mean, there's nothing wrong with offering good service, guys. This is another reason why you need to charge more, by the way, because when you charge more, you can afford financially to go out and fix these things. Plus, it gives you more time to be able to do these. Next one is business cards. Now, I personally haven't given out a business card in about five years because... I just don't buy a-ass for business cards. But back in the day, they used to say you should hand out five business cards a day. And that principle still applies today. You don't have to physically hand someone a business card, but you should be introducing yourself to five new people every day and have some type of elevator pitch about what you do somehow to get in front of them. It's just good. It's just good business. A lot of these things are grassroots things that have been around for hundreds and thousands of years. And they fall off because they're not sexy. It's not easy and it's not sexy. People want easy and sexy, but sometimes it's the old school hard way of doing things that actually is the secret behind people's success. The other one is door hangers. Now, door hangers are like direct mail, but there's a couple ways you can use door hangers. One, you can just... print up a generic door hanger and then go and hang them on doors. You could hire a college kid, put numbers on the tags for each kid. And if they get a sale, they get a bonus, pay them an hourly wage to go hang door hangers. And then if they get a sale from it, they get a commission, blah, blah, blah. There's lots of ways you can do that. But what I'm specifically talking about with door hangers is having... If you're working on someone's house, it's having a door hanger that basically says, hey, please excuse our mess. We're working on your neighbor's house. And if there's any debris or vehicles or anything that gets in the way or affects your house or property, please let us know immediately so we can take care of it for you. We want to be good stewards of your property as well. And you just hang them on the, we call it a five-pack or there's lots of different names for it. A five-pack, five-by-five or whatever. And you just go to the houses next door and the three across the street, if there are houses, and you hang these on their doors. And that just is, it's you being good service, not only for your neighbors, because if there is a piece of trash that blows in their yard, I want to know about it so I can fix it. But also the client that you're working for provides value to them because now they know that you're also conscious of the neighbors. You're taking care of their neighbors too. And of course, the neighbors are going to call their neighbor and say, hey, what's going on? What's going on over there? I saw the guys working. Do you recommend them? We're wanting to get a bathroom remodeled on too. Do you recommend them? So it can trigger future work. That's door hangers. Newsletter. A newsletter is very useful. I had a newsletter that went out every month. It was a pain in the butt to do. It doesn't have to be a pain in the butt, but for me, it was. I had like five different sections. service spotlight where we spotlighted one specific service, previous projects. We had pictures of previous projects. I would always add in some new technology, some new kitchen gadget that cuts up apples for you or something, just some new gadget from the desk of Brad. I had five different sections on this newsletter. I'd send it out once a month. And almost every single month, I would get one or two jobs from that newsletter. They would just reply to it. Hey, Brad, thanks for sending us over. Perfect timing. We need to get you back on the schedule to do X. We got a new project for you. So newsletters would generate one to two jobs every month. And depending on what you do, like if you're doing $50,000 jobs, one to two jobs a month, that's pretty good. Another one is a referral incentive program. I don't have referrals on this list. And you may say, well, that's dumb, Brad, because referrals are the best. Yes, they are. Referrals are the best leads that you can get. However, there's no way to market yourself to a referral, meaning I can't make somebody refer me to someone else. There's no way to systematize that. There's no way to scale that. It's just whenever someone tells someone about me, I get that benefit. But I can't make people do that. The only way you can potentially get people to do that is by having a referral incentive program. I tried it, did not work, did not like it. But there are some people that have had success with it. And these can be, you know, if you refer us, we'll give you a $100 referral fee, or we'll give you a $100 gift card, or we'll, you know, get you a gift card to your favorite restaurant, whatever it might be, you can have some type of referral incentive program that's going to hopefully incentivize them to refer you. I'm not a big fan of it, just to be honest. It's kind of like manipulating people, but there are people that have had very good success putting together a referral incentive program. Next one is other contractors. A lot of times we don't think that other contractors can be a valuable source, but they can. If you're a landscaper, for example, you might want to partner with, you know, or, you know, network with concrete finishers or other lawn care professionals that don't do landscaping or deck builders or someone along those nines where if someone gets a brand new deck built. A lot of times they may want the landscaping done around it as well. And if the deck builder doesn't do landscaping, he has to refer somebody. Why can't it be you? If someone gets a new driveway installed, sometimes the landscaping gets screwed up in the process and it has to be fixed. Or there's a new driveway design and the landscaping has to be redone. They have to have somebody that they can refer. So find people that are in similar kind of areas of what you do and partner with them. You know, if you're a landscaper, it may not be as beneficial to say network with an electrician, but that doesn't mean that electrician wouldn't be a good source. Maybe the electrician does generators, installs generators, whole house generators. A lot of times there's pad work that has to be done and then there's landscaping that has to be moved or put around it. They put a big, ugly generator in the backyard, and they want to put some shrubs around it to kind of hide that. Again, electrician may need to refer a landscaper. So partner with them, other contractors. Suppliers. Suppliers are a great source. If you go to the tile store, those people have customers that come in and ask them, hey, do you have a good plumber? Do you have a good electrician? Do you have a good tile setter? Do you know a good remodeler? Do you know a good rougher? Those places that sell the materials to contractors and to the open public, those people can be good sources. Bring them some donuts, befriend them, find out what type of customers are coming in there. Guys, all of these things work when you provide value first. When your output is more than your inputs, you will almost always win. You have to have more output than input. So when you're talking to your suppliers and other contractors, how can you add value to them? And in return, they will feel compelled. They will feel compelled to give you work back because you've helped them out. The next one is yard signs. Now, I'm not a huge fan of yard signs, but they can work. I would recommend only using yard signs if it's in a high foot traffic area. If you're in a neighborhood with sidewalks and people walk their dogs and jog and run and all that. that's going to be a good source for yard signs. If you are out in the country on a road and there's just one house every two miles and you put a yard sign out there, no one's ever going to see it. They're going to be driving down the road 50 miles per hour. There's no way in hell they can read that on the sign. They're just going to drive by it and not see it. So in that capacity, it really doesn't work well. But if you're in neighborhoods, it can work and be very beneficial, especially... If you're like a service provider, like Cut Grass, or you do heating and air or something like that, where you're a service, if you have five customers on one street and you have yard signs on every one of those five customers, someone driving down the road is going to be like, oh, there's Brad's AC. Oh, there's another one. Brad's AC. Oh, Brad's AC. Brad's AC. Brad's AC. And it just keeps going over and over. Wow, this guy. must be good because there's five people just on our street that are using them. So in that capacity, yard signs work really well and they can work. Now I want to take a quick break from the show here to talk to you about my brand new program, the Sales Accelerator. This is sales-only focused training. I've went into my profit club, my premium coaching group. I've performed a lobotomy on the... course and I extracted out the sales only portion from that course and created a new program specifically for sales to help contractors with their sales process. We're going to teach you how to never do another free estimate. We're going to teach you how to pre-qualify people over the phone before you ever leave your house or office. And when you do go out there, you're going to get paid. They're going to pay you to come out there to give them an estimate or do a consultation with them. When I first learned how to sell over the phone. It was a game changer. For me, it saved on average 15 hours a week. 15 hours a week of my time was saved by learning how to pre-qualify people over the phone, providing value through effective communication, and then following up with good production on the back end. This was a game changer for me and my business. And so I'm offering this as a standalone. course and training that you can sign up for. I've made it very affordable for contractors so they can get the training they need, start selling jobs at a 50% gross profit, and really start making a difference in their business and enabling them to live the kind of lifestyle that we all want to live. The whole reason why we started a business. So check out the Sales Accelerator. You can go to ContractorsSalesAccelerator. com. You can also click on the link in the show notes and find out more information about that. Now, the next thing I want to talk about is Facebook groups. You can go to local Facebook groups. Almost every city in the world has some kind of local Facebook group. It's where, you know, My City Landscaping Group or something like that. My City Small Job Handyman Group. My City... local roofers or something to that capacity. And it's a group for people that are looking for different things, or it may not even be a construction specific group. It can just be like Eastside, you know, my city, Eastside, my city community. But inside that group and that community, people are asking, Hey, I live on the Eastside. Does anybody have a lawn care service? We need a new lawn care service. So people are always asking for recommendations for those types of services. And so if you join those groups, sometimes you have to live in that area or they won't let you join. But join as many of those groups as you can and just start providing value. Again, more outflow equals more inflow. It doesn't go the other way around. So if someone gets on there and says, hey, I'm looking for a roofer. Does anybody know a roofer they can recommend? And you're like, I can do it. I can do it. I'll give you a free estimate. That may work. It's possible it could work. But if somebody's talking about, hey, I had a shingle that blew off, I'm trying to do it myself because I can't get anybody out here to fix it. Does anybody know what I need to do? And you being a roofer says, yeah, John, I can help you. Here's what you're going to need. You're going to need some silicone, a flat bar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're just providing value without actually trying to sell them. Hey, I can come out there and fix that for you. If you just provide value on a regular basis, eventually, over a period of time, people will start to see that you are a trusted and reliable source of providing value. And then when they need someone to actually hire, they're going to see you as someone in that group that's providing value. It's a long-term play. Just because you help somebody fix their own shingle one time does not mean that 15 people are going to be calling you the next day to get a roof. replacement. It's a long-term value add, but it does work. The next one is kind of a new concept. It hasn't been fully vetted, but you can create your own Facebook group where you're in charge. And so if you are a roofer, you can start a group on local roofers or something like that. If you're a landscaper, you can start a group on landscape design. It's people that are wanting to have landscaping or like doing landscaping themselves. They may be interested in having design ideas. And so you can create your own group and then now you control the narrative. You control everything that happens in there. You become the expert of the group because you own it. And then you can start to share information and then people will see that you are the one being helpful and they will potentially hire you. This is what I do with the contractor profit group. It's a free group. You come in, I give you all kinds of value. When you're ready to step up your game and get some coaching, I'm there to help you out. Same concept. All right. We're almost, well, we're a little over halfway through. A lot of ways to market your business, guys. There's really no reason not to have your phone ringing off the hook. The next one is door knocking. Straight up door knocking. Not a huge fan. It does work for roofers and home improvement people, especially during storms. You go door knock. I've done it before where I've drove down the road. Saw a piece of fascia hanging off the house. I had a little note. Stopped my truck. Got out. Hey, Saul, you had a piece of fascia hanging off the house there. I could fix that for you if you want. I could do it for about $250. Let me know if you want us to take care of it. Sometimes they call. Sometimes they don't. But door knocking is very similar. Just going down the road and knocking on the doors. It's helpful if you can see something wrong from outside. That's helpful. It could just be straight up door knocking and just asking people if they need work done. Not a fan of it. I used to do door knocking. I used to be a door-to-door salesman way back in the day for the local cable company. So I'm just not a fan of it. It does work, but not for everyone. The next one is a sponsor a realtor lunch. So a lot of real estate companies will do like a monthly lunch and you can come in and sponsor it. Really, for them, it's just a way to get a free lunch. But occasionally, sometimes, they need services. And if you're really good at promoting your services, you pay for their lunch. You come in for 30 minutes, an hour, whatever. Give them a spiel about your business and what you do. And you may pick up some referral sources there. Remember, when you're talking and networking with people, you're not looking for leads. You're looking for lead sources. So, yes, I want to lead. But I'm not going to a realtor luncheon and saying, hey, send me your leads. I'm trying to cultivate a relationship with a referral or I mean a realtor or multiple realtors that are going to continually send me leads on a regular basis. So I'm not looking for the one lead. I'm looking for a source of leads. Next one is direct mail. This is kind of similar to door hanger. Direct mail is going to have a low conversion rate, but they're still effective. One thing to keep in mind with direct mail is that It may take 7 to 10 pieces of direct mail to even get a conversion on that. But it does work. One strategy you can use, which I really like, is targeted direct mail. And that's similar to the door hangers. If I'm working in a neighborhood on one street, and I'd say it's a really nice neighborhood that I want to work in, and I'm going to be there working for a month, people are going to see my trucks parked outside. I can do a targeted direct mail campaign to just the houses on that street. Just the people that are going to see my truck or maybe just that neighborhood. And there's software like SendJim, SendJim. com. They've changed the name of it, but you can still find it through SendJim. com. You can go in there and just put in like one house. You could just send one postcard to one house. You can send it to a whole neighborhood. You can send it to an area like a zip code or area code or whatever. You can get really specific on that. And that can work out very well if you're working in a neighborhood. Another one you can do is host your own networking event. Now, this takes a lot of work. And it may not really result in anything. But I do know some people that do this on a regular basis and have very good success. But you can put on your own networking event or training event or something like that. One thing that comes to mind is you could do a training for single mothers. Maybe it's a training for single moms and you teach them how to do basic repairs around their house because a lot of times single moms are financially strapped a little bit. And so if you can teach them how to fix a leaky faucet or how to repair drywall or how to do different things, and you could have like a two-hour, three, four-hour workshop on a Saturday morning, maybe even provide daycare during that. And you may charge for that too, by the way. It can be like a $40. you know, charge to come in or do it for free. Totally up to you. But you can do your own type of networking event. It can be for kids, it can be for whatever you want, but you just get people interested in what you're doing. And that's more of a give back. Remember, the more you give, the more you get. The next one is lead gen sites, which I absolutely despise. Thumbtack, Angie's List, TaskRabbit, stuff like that. They all suck, meaning they all just want your money. They don't care about actually providing a good value for their clients. They just want your money. Yes, they can work, and that's why I put them in here. But it's a very strategic strategy you have to use with those types. You have to be able to respond to leads immediately and have somebody that can go out and do the repairs and stuff immediately. You have to have that availability to do that. If you get a lead from Thumbtack and you call them back three days later, you're not getting that job. You got to be able to do that. And it can be expensive, but it can also be profitable if you do it right. That's more of a numbers-based. You got to do a lot of them. The next one is what I'm doing right now. It's a podcast. Now, this does, again, takes a lot of effort. But you can create podcasts around hobbies. It doesn't have to be what you do work-wise. It can be other things or it can be about your industry. But if you're a roofer... I don't know too many people that are going to want to listen to a podcast, like customers that are going to want to listen to a podcast about roofing. Right? It's probably not going to happen. But if you're in different industries, like maybe you're in the landscaping industry and you do a podcast on green, like how to have a healthy landscape. Well, people that like doing their own landscaping, they may listen to that podcast. So it really depends on what you do. But a lot of times, and if you listen to Gary Vaynerchuk, He tells you that you should start a podcast about your hobby. So if you start something about your hobby, maybe you like doing, maybe you like skydiving. Maybe you're a landscaper and you love to skydive and you talk, you do a podcast about skydiving. Well, just through popularity and just through connections, you can eventually get work through that. Now this is lower on the list because it takes a lot of work. Trust me. I'm 91. This is episode 91, I believe. It takes a lot of work to put on a podcast. Next one, YouTube. Make videos and share them on YouTube. That's it. Especially if you follow the blog, it's similar to the blogs, except you host it on YouTube. And then you can link from that, you know, from your website to YouTube. You can also embed videos on your website. So if you create a video on YouTube about how to, you know, the best time of year to transplant a rose, a rose bush. And you do a video on that and you throw it on your website or I'm sorry, on YouTube with a video, you can get all kinds of organic people finding that. But also you can embed that on your website. You can also, there's all kinds of services, guys, where you can take a video and have it transcribed into words and then put that on your website as a blog post. So you can even put, you can embed the video on a blog below that, have it all completely transcribed and all those words now become SEO friendly. and people searching for how to transplant a rosebush, what's the best time of the year to transplant a rosebush, that will trigger the SEO on your website, and they will find your website, and they will find that video. And then they may become a customer of yours. Some of those things like YouTube and such are more macro, meaning they're not so much local, but that stuff can still come back to you, especially if you become very popular on YouTube. Then you'll have people reaching out to you, like people in other states reaching out to you. Hey, I know you, one that comes to mind is RR Buildings. Kyle Stubbenhorse, he does tons of social media. He builds post-frame buildings, very popular. He's had people reach out to him in other states and like, hey, come to my states and build me a po barn. So like that can't, I mean, again, those are long-term type things, but they can't turn into something. Next, we got magazines. We got about six more left. We got magazines, print media, print media, in my opinion, is pretty much dead. However, that being said, sometimes in your local town, there may be a high profile magazine that still caters to like high net worth demographic and they could be a good play for you. You could be able to put an article in there about your business and get business from it. There's one in our town. That's kind of a high-end magazine and a lot of higher network individuals still read that magazine. And so if you want to get in front of those people, it can be feasible. A lot of these are going to be not guarantees. You may spend $500,000 to get an article in a magazine and it may or may not generate anything. So the rest of these are really kind of my low man on the totem pole. These are not ones that I ever did. because they just didn't really work. However, you don't know unless you test it. Try and test it and see what happens. The next one is billboards. The thing about billboards is most people are not going to drive down the road, see a billboard, then call you immediately. That's not what's going to happen for most people. They're going to see a billboard and it's just going to reinforce in their brain about your brand. And this is a branding strategy. Now, if you have the money, you have the resources. There's one guy local to where I'm at. He's an attorney. His name is The Hammer. That's his nickname. He's a, what do you call those? Injury attorneys. And he has, I think, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. He has, I don't even know, like maybe 30,40 billboards all over the place. So you can drive down the interstate. If you're where I'm at, you drive down 64, like you're going to Kentucky, you may pass eight billboards with his name on there. Right? And he's branding it as the hammer. And then you drive into Kentucky on the same road and there's five more. Then you end up going in Ohio and there's three more. Like you can't not see that. But he spends an absorbent amount. Last time I heard, I don't even know if this is true. I heard at one time he was spending $80,000 a month on billboards. But the reason why he's doing that is because it works. So if you think you're going to spend $1,500, $2,000 a month on one billboard in a busy area and that's going to generate business, probably not going to. It's more of a larger marketing strategy. The next thing is going to be TV. If you have the budget, you can drive sales through TV. I would recommend if you're going to run commercials on TV that it's during like reality TV shows and soap opera style shows. You're going to want to capture the stay at home wife type people that are watching TV during the day because those people typically have money. They don't work because their husbands make a lot of money. And so you want to get in front of them during those what they would predominantly be watching. Don't send me any hate mail. That's just reality of what those type of people are. Okay. So. Don't tell me I'm sexist and bigot and all that stuff. The next one is radio. Pretty self-explanatory. Would not recommend radio. I don't know very many people listen to radio anymore. Last three here, we got a bus bench. Same with billboards. If your target demographic rides the bus, might be worth it. If the bench is in a really high-profile area, it may be enough to catch somebody's attention. The other one is drop bags. Drop bags are like what other professionals have. So again, like realtors. When someone buys a house from them, a new homeowner, a realtor may give them a gift bag or a drop bag, which just has all kinds of things in there. Hey, new homeowner, here's a coupon for having your carpets cleaned. Here's a coupon for get one room painted for free, whatever. They have those types of bags and you could have something in there as well. That's just a matter of connecting again with different people, networking with them. and seeing what they have. It can also be, I did one one time. I did a promotion during a home show that we had with a professional organizer, Amy Payne. She was on the podcast. You can go back and listen to that podcast. But she and I did a promotion where if someone hired her, I had a $50 coupon. And if someone hired me, she had like a $50 free consultation or whatever it was. And so we had these coupons printed. on one card front and back. So one card was mine. One side was hers. And then we just handed these out at the home show. And then later on, we handed them out. Somebody hired them. Hey, here's a professional organizer. Here's a coupon to get a discount. So that's kind of the same with drop bags. And then lastly, your local promotional books, coupon books and all that. Not a huge fan at all. Not at all. I've paid for these. Most of them never worked out. But sometimes you'll have a golf community. You'll have a golf course in a neighborhood. And then that neighborhood puts out a golf magazine that has a couple of articles. And then it's like 57 pages of ads. So it's like 10 pages of articles,57 pages of ads. And they're just selling you on how great it is. Because you're going to get in front of 15,000 people in this neighborhood. They're all high profile people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Bunch of sales BS. And then you pay $400 to get in this booklet and never see a lead come from it. But that is a way that you can promote your business. So this is it, guys. That's 33 different ways to market your business. I don't know any others. If you know a different way and you want to share that... send me a message. Reach out to me. Send me a message. Say, Hey, Brad, here's one you didn't cover. I think it works really well for me. You might want to check it out. Send me a message and I may do another future one that incorporates some untraditional types of marketing. But I racked my brain around this and produced, I think, the most comprehensive list. And so if you want to get access to this list, along with my notes about each one, go to my free Facebook group. The Contractor Profit Blueprint. Just search for it or go to the show notes. Click on the link and you can get access to this document as well as all the other free training that I offer in there. So guys, I appreciate you tuning in today, listening to the podcast. I hope this was helpful. Do me a favor, share it with someone else. Go review it. Leave me a like, whatever platform you're on. Leave me a review. It helps me to know if I'm doing a good job and if I need to keep doing it or if I... If I'm not doing a good job, maybe I just need to shut the doors down. You tell me. Let me know. Give me some feedback and let me know. And also, if you know anybody who would be a good person to interview, it doesn't have to be an industry expert. It can just be a contractor who's had really good success in their business. That can be you, actually. If you want to be on my show, if you know someone that can be a good interview on the show, please let me know. You can email me. text me, whatever, just get ahold of me and let me know. Nathan France, who was on a couple of weeks ago, he was a recommendation from someone else. So I greatly appreciated that. And I want to do a lot more interviews this year coming up 2023 to try and get a really good, solid understanding of business from a lot of different people. So if you could help me do that, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in, guys. You can find me on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast. And until next time, you know what to do. Be the best version of you.
