Today’s business professionals always need to know how to promote their skills, products, services, and trustworthiness to get solid business and keep on par with competition, if not pull ahead. A lot of funding every year goes toward researching exactly how businesses, big and small, can make themselves heard and raise awareness of what they sell, but some strategies are basic and familiar while still effective, and contractor marketing is no different. Contractor marketing usually involves selling services and promoting them through advertising, and in today’s digital world, that often means web design and web development takes center stage, although traditional routes such as television ads, magazine ads, and billboards are still viable. Marketing services for contractors are out there, and contractor marketing teams can take advantage of outsourced help to get maximum results.

The Power of Ads

Marketing can make or break any business, and in the competitive world of contractor marketing, this is no different. In some ways, marketing for contractors can borrow trends and strategies from broader advertising ideas. For example, a report from SalesForce marketing Cloud has shown that some 84% of customers will “like” or “love” it when a business responds to those customers on social media such as Facebook, Blogspot, or Twitter. Social media is enormous for many purposes, and while personal correspondence is common, businesses can and have used this power to promote their products and images alike for years. In a sense, a business’s social media page acts as a hybrid between a regular person’s profile and a traditional company website, giving it the strengths of both. This also enables companies to give fast responses to customer questions, comments, and complaints much faster and more easily than through e-mails, and the company’s page can also make its own social media posts such as promoting sales or packaged deals, posting public opinion polls, and on occasion, even making casual, conversational statements to make customers feel more at ease with the company.

Contractor marketing on the Internet can also take notes from how businesses perform well or badly with customers on the Web. Customers are often impatient in today’s fast world, and this reflects in their behavior and spending habits. In fact, it has been determined that 40% of people will leave a web page (business or not) if it takes more than three seconds to load, and if the web page itself loads but the images fail to load, or if videos fail to play, a similar scenario may play out. And e-mails and company social media profiles should keep popular mobile devices such as smart phones in mind; it has been demonstrated that some 80% of e-mail recipients may delete an email that is not optimized for mobile device use.

Digital marketing on a traditional website or a social media page also involves more basic concepts for advertising. Contractor marketing can make a web site’s design easy to navigate and well organized, and images should be large and clearly illustrate a contractor company’s services and work culture alike, and videos should do the same (and probably be on the shorter side). Bullet point information or short paragraphs can quickly explain to today’s impatient customers how and why a contractor’s services are necessary and important to hire, as well as provide easily found contact information such as a business phone number, physical address, email address, and, if applicable, Twitter account contact information or Facebook page links. Older potential customers are probably more likely to find the contractor’s advertisements through traditional methods and regular web pages, while younger customers such as Millenials and more tech-oriented Gen Xers will easily come across the contractor company’s name and services on digital hubs like Twitter, Facebook, and Blogspot, and more. Anywhere the contractor company sets up its presence, its services and work culture should be clear and appealing right away.