Attracting the Right Eyeballs

Brand awareness is a major key to getting the right people to look at your business. But many contractors overlook its power and fail to invest the effort into building their brand.

Don’t be invisible in your market, or indistinguishable from your competitors. Your number one job as an operator of your home improvement business is to build your brand. The rest will follow, because effective branding leads to a full pipeline of qualified prospects who need your services.

We recently hosted a webinar where our special guest Tom Reber discussed the importance of building your brand as an essential key to business growth for your home improvement company.

Understanding What Brand Means

Let’s start with the obvious question: what exactly is brand, anyway? At the most basic level, brand is what people think and feel about your business when they see your company’s name, hear your tagline or jingle, or when they see your company logo.

You can establish your brand by choosing a logo, tagline, visual color scheme, and tone of voice for your communications, and maintaining consistency in how you present yourself. They key is to make the presentation of your brand synonymous with how you want to be perceived.

Ideally, your brand will signify trust, quality, and value in the consumer’s mind. You can learn more about building your brand by downloading our essential guide.

Targeting Your Audience

Are the people you’re trying to reach in need of cosmetic repairs? Are their projects primarily emergency jobs, or need-based? Or are they typically looking for discretionary improvements to make their home more livable or increase its resale value? Getting a handle on this will help you craft the right brand awareness messaging, getting the attention of the right kind of leads.

Once you know the general demographics of your ideal leads (age range, income level, location) you can start to develop the messaging that will appeal to their specific goals, challenges, desires, and dreams. Focusing on the end results of your services, rather than the specifics of how you get the job done, can help you connect better with your audience on an emotional level.

You can use a variety of methods to make those connections, including a blog on your website, email marketing, social media posts, newsletters, and much more. Learn about it in our brand guide, which you can get here.

How Much Effort Should Go into Branding?

This goes back to having a solid grasp of your numbers, which we discussed here. You won’t know how much energy to put into building your brand unless you know exactly how many leads you need to bring in for your business to thrive. Knowing these numbers helps you determine how much brand building you need to do, and also sets guardrails for your time so you can focus on other things in your business.

To know how many leads you need, you have to do the math and calculate your close rate against your job cost and profit margin. We go over all that in detail at the above-linked blog post. The bottom line is, to keep your leads coming, through the busy times and the lean months, you need to be building and marketing your brand year-round.

“There are two things that I believe happen every day of the year as a business owner. Number one is you’re building your brand — you’re doing some sort of marketing. And number two, you’re recruiting every day of the year. When you do that, you will ring the cash register every day of the year.” – Tom Reber

In the end, building your brand will strengthen the relationship of trust you have with the public. That means stronger name recognition, better reputation, more referrals, and more revenue.

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Want more context? Here’s a transcription of the relevant portion of the webinar.

So now we’re gonna move a bit into what I call “get eyeballs.”

So, the first thing you need here is you must have confidence in the numbers. You have to know why you charge what you charge. You have to know your break-even point. You need to know what you’re producing your work at. You should be job costing every single project that you do, you know, as soon as you can after it’s completed.

The second thing that’s gonna help you be an uncommon contractor is getting the right eyeballs, okay? That’s building your brand, that’s marketing. Most struggle because they underestimate how many leads that they need.

How many contractors do you know — maybe you’re one of ’em — that the summer’s going great, the busy season’s going great, the weather starts to change, and now you’re on, you’re in a famine during those slow winter months. That’s because when contractors get seduced by all the work that they have coming in and they think they’re on Easy Street, and they fail to continue to build their brand, market their business, build relationships, invest in a marketing strategy, and implement it every day of the year, okay?

There are two things that I believe happen every day of the year as a business owner. Number one is you’re building your brand — you’re doing some sort of marketing. And number two, you’re recruiting every day of the year. When you do that, you will ring the cash register every day of the year.

So how many leads do you need? Do you know how many leads you need right now, this month, that you’re watching this? How many leads do you need to break even — just to break even? All right? This is found by taking your revenue goal divided by your average job size, equals number of jobs needed.

You’ve put a lot of time into your craft — imagine if you put a quarter of the time you learned, you put into learning that craft, into learning how to really, truly build your business, you would be on fire in a good way. All right?

The first place we look is where’s your gross profit? And how could we raise that? Cuz that’s an instant raise for you right now — building your brand.

Transcript from the 6/15/2023 “Winning the Contractor Fight” webinar with Tom Reber.