How Important Is "Seen Around Town" Marketing?

How Signs and Trucks Can Help Grow a Business

A few years ago, I start­ed work­ing with a paint­ing con­trac­tor who got very few leads from his trucks and yard signs. He prob­a­bly aver­aged a cou­ple per month at most. At the time, he had an annu­al rev­enue of just under $1.5 mil­lion. I believe his lack of Seen Around Town leads were real­ly due to sev­er­al rea­sons: his truck let­ter­ing and yard signs were hit-and-miss, his crews were not con­sis­tent­ly putting up job signs, and his com­pa­ny vehi­cles had a bor­ing logo that just did­n’t stand out. It was­n’t memorable. In just a cou­ple of years, my client rebrand­ed and began let­ter­ing all their vehi­cles. They also made it manda­to­ry to put yard signs out on all jobs. When I looked over their leads this past year (2017), they were aver­ag­ing clos­er to 10 and some­times 15 leads a month from Seen Around Town, and their rev­enue in their mar­ket grew to over $4M in just a cou­ple years. Their local name and brand aware­ness aware­ness grew tremen­dous­ly in a very short time!

Make It Mandatory

[cap­tion id=“attachment_3861” align=“alignnone” width=“744”] Over 30 years of yard signs rep­re­sent­ed (we’re just miss­ing a cou­ple!)[/​caption] I am sur­prised by the num­ber of con­trac­tors who do not take Seen Around Town mar­ket­ing seri­ous­ly. It is one of the least expen­sive ways to mar­ket your con­tract­ing busi­ness. When one of my cus­tomers marks a lead source for Seen Around Town it nor­mal­ly includes a prospect who saw a truck, yard sign, or some type of brand­ing to make them remem­ber and con­tact them for a bid. If you com­mit to just get­ting your vehi­cles let­tered and yard signs on every job, you’ll see an uptick in leads! When it comes to yard signs, this needs to be manda­to­ry. You have to make sure your crews put signs up. This is an easy thing to over­look — I see it all the time! One of the things I ask my cus­tomers often is, ​“How are your guys doing putting up yard signs this month?” I nor­mal­ly get this response: ​“It’s still hit-and-miss and could be better…I’ll turn up the heat this month.” The Inter­net is still very strong, and I know it is easy to rely heav­i­ly on the web to grow your con­tract­ing busi­ness. Just don’t for­sake some of the age-old mar­ket­ing tech­niques of keep­ing your brand front and cen­ter in your core market.