On a podcast I was listening to recently, the host talked about not giving equal weight to all your marketing channels. And he used the analogy of college – you should have a major, minor and electives.
The major channel is where you spend the most time and is the greatest source of sales for you. You work on this channel almost every day.
The minor channel is where might do work once or twice a week and it produces a decent number of leads and revenue.
The electives channel offers a variety of opportunities and it’s a place to experiment. You make small investments of money and time to see if they can get you some leads. But they aren’t part of your regular ongoing marketing.
There might not be a silver bullet that gets you all the leads you want from one tactic for your business, but there could be one that gets you 15, one that gets you six, and a couple more that get you smattering of leads.
With the channels comes strategy and within the strategy are the tactics. I’ve put together some tactics that may help you figure out your major and minor marketing channels.
In the list below are traditional marketing tactics and some more guerilla tactics. You must figure out what works best for you and gets you the most leads.
- Website Conversion Optimization
Make sure all your forms of communications are working well on your website, Facebook, and Google Business Profile. That way you won’t miss any potential leads. Test these at the beginning of each week.It doesn’t do any good to get traffic to your site if it doesn’t encourage visitors to do something – call you, join a chat session, sign up for your newsletter, buy something, or fill out a contact form, etc.
I have a client who added a chat box to his website late last year. We tried a different one but didn’t get very many leads. When we switched to the new one, he’s been averaging 5-10 chats per week.
- Optimize your main product/service for the search engines
Create individual pages for each of your service/product pages. You create a keyword theme for each page and treat it as if it’s a mini website. And then create a content silo using blogging categories to point to your service/product pages. Doing this helps with SEO and conversions. - Google Ads for your main service/product categories
Google Ads is basically a numbers game. For example, if you have a net profit of $1,500 on a service, how much would you be willing to pay to get a sale (Cost of Acquisition)? Once you nail down your ads, budget, and bidding strategy, you can rely on Google Ads to get you a consistent number of leads every month. - Google Ads for your secondary service/product categories
Secondary categories are often less expensive since the competition is less fierce and it may be a good way to get your foot in the door.Damon does interior and kitchen cabinet painting. He also offers drywall repair. If he gets a drywall repair lead, he’ll do the repair himself so he can spend time in a person’s home and get to know them. He uses that time to try to upsell them on painting project.
- Google Business Profile
A lot of small businesses don’t have advantage of their Google Business Profile. When done correctly and work on regularly, you can show up for several keywords in the 3-pack in the search engine results. There are a lot of factors to get you in the 3-pack, but having a well-optimized Google Business Profile is the largest factor according to White Spark and their annual survey on Local Search Ranking Factors. - Facebook Personal
Every so often talk about the different projects you are doing on your personal Facebook page. Show your friends what you did that day or a project you finished. Even though you might not get sales from your friends, there’s a good chance they will recommend you to friends who need your kind of work.I regularly share about my woodworking projects on my personal Facebook page. Some friends saw my work and commissioned me to build a live edge table for their vacation home in Arizona. They were thrilled with the results.
- Facebook Business
Tell your followers about your projects every chance you get. Share that you have an opening in your schedule or are booking out for later this this year. You want to communicate your availability. One thing I’d caution you is to not sell all the time. I don’t want people to unfollow you because you only sell, sell, sell. Offer advice and show your expertise. - Facebook Ads and post boosting
To get more visibility, boost your post to people in your area who would be good candidates for your services/products. Send them to a place on your website where you can share about your services/products and have a way to get a conversion. And you can do the same thing with Facebook ads. It will take some learning but I’ve companies that have gotten good return on investment with them. - Ask your customer to share about your product/service on their personal Facebook page
Tell your client you rely on word of mouth to get the right clients and them to share about the project you did for them on their Facebook page. Normally their friends are the type of people who will are willing to pay for services such as yours. You’ll want to coach your client on what to say to get maximum effect. And ask them to include pictures. - Email Newsletter
Do all you can to keep adding people to your database. This can be prospects, clients, people you’ve done quotes for, partners, friends, etc. Send out a newsletter on a regular basis to keep in front of people as often as possible. Share about successes and completed projects and tell them you are available for work. - Nextdoor Advertising
Go to https://business.nextdoor.com/ to see the different opportunities for marketing your company locally. You can do paid ads and free posts. You need to be verified to do posts. There are several options to verify your business. One of the values of Nextdoor is that it’s normally very local and people are always willing to recommend companies they are happy with. - Nextdoor Posts
You can go on Nextdoor on a regular basis and see if there’s a post related to your business and then respond with your contact information. Or pay someone to go in once a day for a half hour and recommend you. I don’t see any way to do alerts, so you’ll have to just scroll through the posts to see if anything is pertinent to your business. - Share about your work in social settings
You don’t have to be salesy in social situations — just talk about what you do for a living.I was at a party for my swim team and was talking about my furniture business to a new acquaintance. He told me he had a piece of furniture that needed repair. This came from me simply sharing what I did for fun. I’m supposed to give them a call soon to look at a table he’s having trouble with.
- LinkedIn Post
Use the relationships you have on LinkedIn to sell your products/services. LinkedIn is normally B2B, but your connections have needs for services and products, too, on a personal basis. If they don’t need your services, maybe they’ll recommend you to their friends. - LinkedIn Ads
Learn how to do LinkedIn advertising to start getting leads for products/services. I haven’t done a lot with this but am looking forward to learning more to help my business.
Pick two of these strategies you can start implementing today and put them in your calendar to repeat on a regular basis. If you have the budget, hire out someone to help you implement these tactics.
