It’s the new formula for successful contractor marketing if you want to create a lead generation machine of your own.

In fact, a new study done by Marketing Sherpa says the 36% of small businesses are not using social media to enhance their SEO efforts. For companies with less than 100 people, over 70% are using social media to drive SEO rank to their website landing pages. The question is, how are you doing with this important new tactic.

The reason why using social media to drive SEO is so critical for smaller businesses is they have an advantage here. Being smaller, they are likely to be much more agile that larger businesses and can win quickly. Of course, all this does not mean much if you don’t have a site that converts visitors,but that is another post.

So, what does a social media marketing program look like for a small business? Here is an outline to start with:

• Determine your keywords and phrases that you used for your landing pages and make sure you map them consistently (back to the appropriate landing page) throughout your distributed social media content.
• For social media SEO, a great place to start is bookmarking your website landing pages in web 2.0 social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Furl, Delicious and others. Use 25-30 bookmarking sites for each page and make sure you use your keywords in descriptions.
• Register your website in key local, regional and national directories so you get the links and search juice. Use your keywords and phrases in your descriptions and titles.
• Distribute 5-6 articles per month and distribute them to article directories like ezine, article alley and other high value article directories. Make sure you use your keywords and phrases in title of articles and have enough keywords density in the copy.

When most people think about social media they think Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. While these social media sites are great and can add huge value to your contractor lead generation efforts, you may not get the SEO bang for the buck that you will with the first steps above. Get the basics done first and then you can expand your social media program to these other sites. You can even get really sophisticated and do a link wheel that will put your SEO efforts on steroids.

Want to learn more about this strategy, get our free ebook “Surefire Social 20 Day DIY Social Media Guide”. We have a special contractor edition just for you.

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We all know that the social media world can be a very intimidating place when it comes to finding prospective customers. Having a Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profile is a great step toward social media lead generation, but what good are these profiles if you don’t know how to use them to your advantage?

Think of the social media community as a prime place to make connections, build trust and generate contractor leads for your business. Give your target audience the type of information they are going to be able to take with them…make it worth their while.

Here are some ways to spark up a great online convo. That will help establish some long-lasting, quality contractor leads:

Facebook. Assuming your business has a rockin’ Facebook Business Page, spend your time driving the Facebook community back to your page.  Try this: Get on Facebook and use the search bar (the white bar at the top of the page) and search for phrases like: “Home Improvement” and “Home Renovations,” or browse for any type of “DIY” page where homeowners are asking questions or engaging in conversation. Join in and provide your expertise and let them know that your businesses Facebook page has to offer.

Twitter. Not only does Twitter offer you a huge community to sink your business marketing skills into, but they offer incredible search capabilities. Jump on search.twitter.com and search Twitter users by geographic location. Engage with people in your local area (i.e. people who will need your services). Concentrating on building relationships and the leads will come pouring in.

LinkedIn. I really cannot say enough good things about LinkedIn’s Groups section. Although, LinkedIn is more accommodating to individuals than businesses, the Groups section provides for some fantastic, networking opportunities. Join a few groups, some in the contractor niche, and some for homeowners exchanging home improvement ideas. Become apart of the conversation and soon you will have made some new online connections and generated some pretty solid leads for your business.

So, next time you are browsing around Facebook, sending a tweet, or accepting a LinkedIn connection, think about these three key ways to building relationships and generating contractor leads for your business.

Social Media falls into a larger umbrella called “Inbound Marketing.” Traditional marketing is 1) canvassing/cold calls/ telemarketing 2) print marketing such as magazines or newspapers 3) radio advertising 4) TV advertising 5) outdoor advertising. These traditional marketing techniques would be labeled as “Outbound Marketing.”

Just a few years ago, successful contractors could use these familiar, traditional marketing tactics and dominate a market. The problem with outbound marketing today is: consumers have DVRs so they do not watch TV commercials; consumers have iPods or satellite radio so I don’t listen to radio commercials; consumers subscriptions rates to magazines and newspapers are near extinction; and consumers have learned to ignore “interruption marketing” such as telemarketing through services like caller ID.

Successful contractors of the future will learn to adopt these new “inbound marketing” techniques to generate a consistent flow of inbound leads. As we discussed in previous posts, social media alone is not going to move the needle. Three “pillars” of Internet marketing in today’s environment are; 1) and properly structured website, 2) distributed content including social media and web 2.0 sites, and 3) ongoing Local Search Engine Optimization including both on page and off page tactics.

That said, using Social Media is an important new tactic that will give you leverage to compete with bigger businesses, and with bigger budgets. Here is how:

Create Profiles on Social Media Sites: Although there are many social network sites it is best to get your feet wet on 1) Facebook 2) Twitter and 3) LinkedIn.

Facebook:
Create a Fan Page for your business. You will need a personal profile first. Click on this link http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and follow the setup instructions.

Twitter:
Create an account by navigating to https://twitter.com/signup. Follow the instructions to setup your account.

LinkedIn:
Create a personal account and a company page. To create a personal account go to https://www.linkedin.com/secure/register?trk=hb_join and enter in the appropriate fields. To create a company page make sure you have your personal account created and verified and then click on this link http://www.linkedin.com/companies?didentcompy=.

What’s Next

Send an email out to your mailing list and let them know about your cool new social media pages and ask them to follow and friend you. Give people good, helpful in formation. Maybe try some coupons or specials that you can promote to get your new followers sending your page to friends.

In general listen and be helpful. See what your target audience is talking about, and then after you understand add value by sharing your thoughts. Below are a few specific examples:

Twitter:
You have 140 characters. Be short and link back to more information on your website or blog (your link bait). By linking back to your website you create traffic and allow your site to be indexed by search engines. Both are good.

Facebook:
Pose questions. Share resources that your target audience would find of value. Think of your Facebook Fan Page like a forum.

LinkedIn:
Answer questions posted by your target audience. This will give you “expertise” which is rewarded with green stars in the category your answer was selected as the best answer. Link your blog to your company page. By adding your blog to your company page your LinkedIn page will share your latest blog post with the professional community.

Connect with us on Facebook and Twitter. You can do it by just clicking on the icons on the right.

We have some other free resources for you if you are interested in learning more. Check out our videos at www.surefiresocial.com/contractor-leads.

How is social media working for your contracting business?

Contractor marketing has changed. We know traditional lead generation channels are not working like they used to. We also know short-term solutions like buying leads or the SEO flavor of the day will not create the lasting, dominant brand image and constant flow of leads that will build true wealth.

We are about to give you the keys to your local market. Use these carefully, be authentic and consistent and trust me, you will have the most successful home contracting business in you market. This is powerful stuff.

Follow these 7 principles to own your market by transforming your “brand” and company for success in the consumer/social Web:

1.   Find your Purpose

Social media is a great, cost effective way to create authority and engage your potential customers while they are searching for solutions. Social media is NOT about creating a presence or profile based on your old-brand (non-Web 2.0) positioning in the blogosphere, Twitter and other social web channels.  The new world order demands new levels of engagement from companies and brands. An external marketing position of yesteryear—will guarantee your company or brand will be a loser in the social Web. The new reality of online customer conversation means brands will need a strongly defined sense of self—an organization’s “purpose,” in order to succeed. This is counter-intuitive to companies and brands. Contractors often base their brand positioning or USP based on services they provide. No differentiation there!

Understanding who you are, what you truly believe in, and what benefits you offer to your customer is the foundation of a successful social media strategy and story. SEO intelligence and systemic listening and analysis are critical, but if all you focus purely on is what customers are telling you, you risk losing sight of who you are, what you believe in and what will drive your organization forward.

2.   Defining the Conversation

After redefining your companies purpose, you should spark and define the conversation in your contracting service niche. This is a key component of gaining a competitive advantage. When you effectively start redefining the conversation and engaging your customers to participate in the conversation—you can own the industry.  If you define and then dominate the conversation in your industry, you are also positioned to be the problem solver in your industry…

3.   Become a Problem Solver

Search has become the way people look for the solutions to their problems. Reposition your brand message and marketing based on Keyword research to solve the pain points your target customers are searching for solutions for. Becoming a problem solver also lends itself to becoming a Trust Agent….

4.   Become the Trust Agent in your Local Market (before your competitor does!)

Are you a trust agent? The number one thing the Internet does is spot liars and fake-authenticity. Almost hourly we are bombarded by micro-sites screaming they have the solutions to our problems with no credibility, expertise and fake credentials. According to the authors Trust Agents, a New York Times best-seller in two days, we have a pervasive “trust deficit” plaguing human interactions in the information age.

There is simply too much information, too many opinions and not enough sources of authority to tell us what is true from what is junk.

Gaining trust by doing the right thing consistently is how it is done in interpersonal relationships, but gaining trust in the social Web is harder.

Establish authority by authoring articles and participating in real-time conversation in your industry through blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media channels. Build a relationship with your potential customers and leverage all new technologies that now give you a two-way conversation with your customers and clients.

Make sure your authored articles and blog postings are congruent with your company or brand position. Create an archetype-based humanized story that reflects your company’s purpose and brand. Tell your story, don’t “sell” your product.

Act NOW. Your competitor can quickly dominate the new distributed web space in your industry and establish themselves as the “authority” or trust agent in your market.

5.   Perception is Reality

In an increasingly transparent world, a customer’s perception still defines their reality.  The social Web gives contractors of any size untold power to reach their market for little cash. However, you are now competing for attention, directly (and indirectly), with the Anderson, Owens Corning, Tiffany & Co, and Apple brands, (yes they’ve set the standard and people do judge a book by its cover!) in your industry. You have one chance to make a good impression visually. Too many companies blow it.

Does your website look like it was launched five years ago? Is your headshot so bad even your mother cringed when she saw it? Or does it make you look like a war criminal from Nazi Germany? What does your “brand visual” communicate non-verbally about your company’s purpose? Authentic and congruent visual elements of your brand are critical to differentiating your company in the sea of brands and companies that are shouting their authority and trust.

6.   Master the Marketing Mix.

Traditional media platforms still work when strategically integrated with your online media and marketing efforts. The digital media is transforming business marketing, but traditional channels like TV, Radio, print and direct mail still have power and establish authority.  The key is using your offline media to drive target customers to online lead capture opportunities so you can follow up. Don’t just “rent” the eyeballs you buy, own them by getting the lead!

7. Implement a Complete Internet Marketing Plan

Building an Internet marketing platform is more that a great website or a Facebook Fan page or the latest SEO tactic.  Internet marketing power comes from the combination of a properly structured website with distributed content and ongoing SEO that encompasses both on page and off page content and keyword adjustments throughout a campaign.

This is a lot of information. If you want to learn more about how to implement a program like this step by step, check out the video at Surefire Social Contractor Edition.

Social media is a great new tool to generate contractor leads. So many contractors get hung up on the long list of things they should be joining and doing that they never start doing anything. Let’s change that right now. We put together 3 easy to implement tactics that will help you immediately get leads and close sales.

1) Follow up with Prospects

Use social media  as a way to follow-up with prospects you meet. Say you go to a Home and Garden Show and engage with a prospect that wants you to follow-up. Your probably thinking you will call and leave a voice mail. What if instead you found them on Facebook or LinkedIn, asked to be connected, asked to be connected to them, and then shared an information rich article  (or video) that contained tips about the very thing you chatted about at the Home and Garden Show. Then offer to give them a free inspection of their home project…because now they think you are a nice guy and an expert in the field!

2) Easily stay in touch and encourage customers

Staying in touch with your customer base is always a challenge, and is costing you money! Many businesses are using email-marketing programs to follow up on leads, and some of the more ambitious have newsletters to keep in regular contact. But social media can make these regular customer touches much more natural, fun and productive.

Staying in front of your customers and continuing to educate and up-sell them is a key ingredient to building a successful contracting business in today’s marketing environment. I wrote a book called Disrupted that goes into more specifics on this strategy. This is an area where social media tools can excel.

A blog is a great place to put out a steady stream of useful information and success stories. Encourage your customers and prospects to subscribe and comment. You’ll be surprised how this can lead to further engagement. Recording video testimonials from customers and uploading them to YouTube to embed on your site (and Web 2.0 pages like Facebook) can create great marketing content and remind your customer why they do business with you. Use your Facebook Fan pages as a way to implement a client community around a specific subject (e.g energy efficiency, local real estate or the high school sports team) and offer education and networking opportunities online with non-competitive businesses

3) Keep up on home contracting services industry

Keeping up with what’s happening in the home contracting services industry and your local market is a task that is essential these days. New products and services are always emerging that you might not otherwise be aware of because you are not distributing that product line or they have not hit your local market yet. But you need to be able to be an expert because you potential clients are searching to research their projects before they even contact you. So, keeping up with what key industry players are doing including, competitors, industry journalists and manufacturers is critical to building your businesses authority in it’s niche.

Here’s the good news, new, easy to use monitoring services and tools make this an easy task. Subscribing to blogs written by manufacturers, competitors and journalists and viewing new content by way of a tool such as Google Reader allows you to scan the day’s content in one place. Setting up Google Alerts and custom Twitter Searches (Surefire Social Contractor members video)  or checking out paid monitoring services such as Radian6 or Trackur allows you to receive daily email reports on the important mentions of industry terms and people so you are up to the minute in the know.

As you implement these ideas, make sure you are using the information you are getting back about/from potential partners and customers to comment and engage with them on their own blogs, Facebook pages and other social media outlets. You’ll be surprised how making that extra effort will get you visibility to your market and important influencers you could have never dreamed of networking with otherwise.

Now just go do this stuff and let us know how it’s worked for you.

Web 2.0 refers to interaction and that means interacting with potential customers who might be future contracting leads.

Generating contractor leads using traditional methods of newspaper, yellow pages, video and radio advertisements is expensive. There are still plenty of good contacts and sales leads to be found using these outlets. However, in today’s connected world many people look first to the internet for their real world needs. Think about your own personal information search pattern. The good news about advertising on the web is that costs per lead can be about half of advertising in the yellow pages. Why not reallocate funds from some of these waning tactics, and do what works best now?

Think about the last time you used the yellow pages, or responded to a newspaper advertisement buried in the classified section of your local newspaper. Do you even get the newspaper delivered during the week? Is your phonebook buried in a junk drawer, or gathering dust on a shelf? Your personal habits are not different from the habits of your current or future customers. Yet, most businesses still pour money into these dying print outlets. Most smart business people after examining the costs of traditional advertising will come to the conclusion that some or most of this money can be redirected to more effective, advanced internet based advertising. Maintaining presence, posting events and articles can be easily handled in a few hours per day at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. The cost per lead will drop as your business is able to take better advantage of this new 24/7 contractor lead source.

The hottest tickets in web advertising are Web 2.0 or Social Media sites. If we look at the development of content on the Internet, the first generation of sites, and many sites today, primarily display the content of the site’s owner. News outlets, weather outlets are composed of owner generated content that people browse and view. Web 2.0 refers to sites that have more customer posted or generated content than owner content. YouTube, Facebook and MySpace are composed of almost entirely user uploaded content, and the comments of other customers, browsers and fans.

The most compelling aspect of Social Media sites is that a well placed event, video or post can generate a “buzz” within that social network. This has a cascading effect where the post takes on a life of its own, at no additional cost or time investment by the promoter. This duplicates the effect of the traditional small town word of mouth advertising, which is one of the most effective ways to generate leads for contracting work. This will have the affect of driving potential customers to your site, increasing the number of customers into your sales funnel. Your site will need to impress these new leads, and as any contractor or tradesman knows, personal endorsements and glowing reviews from your existing customers are like money in the bank.

Chris Marentis is the Founder of GenNext Media and Marketing, and is an expert in online lead generation for contractors. His Surefire Social system is becoming a well-established system for contractor lead generation and increased profits.

Every marketer knows that the key to long-term success is building a relationship with your customers. Each time we make contact with a customer or prospect is an opportunity to grow and enhance that relationship, and to solidify a reputation.

Unfortunately, traditional media offers only a “start and stop” ability to stay in contact with customers and prospects. A television spot captures attention for 30 seconds, but can quickly be forgotten. A direct mail piece is opened, read and perhaps even saved, but just as readily finds its way into the trash bin. Today’s newspaper ad is tomorrow’s birdcage liner.

The process of building the relationship becomes a series of blips, forcing marketers to start over again and again. A costly and time consuming process that requires us to be intrusive and inefficient.

Internet marketing, however, offers the advantage of never disappearing or fading away. Because of the enormous breadth and depth of the world wide web, anything and everything you post on-line stays there forever. More important, all this information can be searched and found at any time.

This presents a fantastic opportunity for marketers. Instead of pitching the same story over and over again, we can build a more complete and compelling picture of the products and services we are trying to sell. The entire narrative is preserved and works to point new customers to you, 24/7/365.

This opportunity also comes with a burden. The information you put on-line must be sufficiently persuasive and helpful to stand up to scrutiny over a longer period. This applies to everything from web sites to blogs, Facebook pages to Tweets. The content becomes more critical than ever because it is always available to anybody with a web browser.

(So you might want to rethink the idea of putting the 20-something kid in the mailroom – the one with the piercings and tattoos – in charge of your social media effort. Just because somebody knows how to Tweet and use Facebook does not automatically make them qualified as an effective marketer.)

More attention than ever must be paid to the story you are telling. Your reputation does not ride on a single, soon-forgotten commercial or direct mail piece, but on the cumulative effects of all the information you post. You must be prepared to tell a better story, over a longer period of time, to take full advantage of the power inherent in the web.

Surefire Coaching Corner

Bob Sheehan is the founder of Coastline Advertising and a Surefire Social Certified Coach. As an advertising executive with broad experience in advertising and marketing, Bob is focused on generating actual measurable results for clients in a wide array of businesses. Bob has become a leader in contractor coaching by catering to the needs and wants of our clients.

Social media marketing works…it’s just hard to know what part is working best. With literally unlimited opportunities to participate and use social media, you need to know what is effective to dial in your efforts and become more efficient over time. You need to be focused, and spend time wisely or social media marketing can quickly become a time sink. This is about leads and conversion, not making friends! (more…)