Stay The Course with Your Brand

Once upon a time, con­trac­tors lived in an ide­al world where doing qual­i­ty work and treat­ing peo­ple right were the only nec­es­sary mar­ket­ing tools… but that fairy­tale is long past. San­ta Clause isn’t real, and con­trac­tors need to main­tain a qual­i­ty rep­u­ta­tion, a vis­i­ble brand, a con­tin­u­ous mar­ket­ing cam­paign and spike their web­site text with just the right key­words to be found online. In the past decade, start­up com­pa­nies have explod­ed onto the web-mar­ket­ing scene, mak­ing mil­lions of dol­lars in Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) with lit­tle out-of-pock­et expense. Estab­lished con­trac­tors with excel­lent local rep­u­ta­tions are los­ing sales to new com­pe­ti­tion with names like ​“San Diego Best Painter” or ​“Nashville Remod­el­ing Com­pa­ny.” Their web­sites are clut­tered with spam­my, awk­ward text such as, ​“We are the best Louisville Remod­el­ing Con­trac­tor in the Louisville KY area!” and ​“Have you ever called a Colum­bus MD area house paint­ing con­trac­tor to have your Colum­bus MD house paint­ed?” These com­pa­nies don’t work to devel­op a respectable brand or invest in long­time cus­tomers — they just want the phone to ring. Despite the tem­po­rary suc­cess of these kinds of com­pa­nies, it is impor­tant to resist the temp­ta­tion to hop on this web­wag­on. While poor­ly writ­ten copy with key­word-dri­ven text is dom­i­nat­ing the top web search­es, cus­tomers can dis­tin­guish between a rep­utable con­trac­tor and a flashy mar­keter with no sub­stance. Avoid cheap SEO com­pa­nies that will please the search engines but turn off your clients with watered-down, gener­ic, cut-and-paste con­tent. Stay with Your Brand Unfor­tu­nate­ly, to get qual­i­ty rank­ings on the search engines today, you do need key­words. If you are a paint­ing con­trac­tor, you need the words ​“House Paint­ing Com­pa­ny” and ​“Paint­ing Con­trac­tor” to appear on your site, as well as the names of your tar­get local­i­ties. But don’t change your brand and name. If your com­pa­ny name is Franklin Broth­ers Remod­el­ing, keep that name. Stay the course. Just make sure your online mar­ket­ing is done well. Hire a qual­i­ty web design­er, a good search engine com­pa­ny and a cre­ative, pro­fes­sion­al writer. Get those key­words worked into your copy in a nat­ur­al, human man­ner. Don’t go cheap, friends. Com­pa­nies call every day try­ing to sell you on the idea that your com­pa­ny can be #1 on Google, Yahoo, and Bling. Ignore these offers. Mar­ket­ing 101: be con­sis­tent on and offline. Make sure your web­site and web mar­ket­ing describe who you real­ly are as a com­pa­ny. Home­own­ers and busi­ness­es are wis­ing up to the fact that the con­trac­tors with funky lit­tle web­sites and trashy text are here today to sell you a job, but who knows where they will be when you have a prob­lem or need more work. Show them that you are com­mit­ted to doing things right, and that you are in their com­mu­ni­ty to stay. Your Feed­back What ways are you brand­ing online? What is work­ing for you? Do you ask con­sumers what they thought about your web­site: what they liked, did not like? Are you find­ing them to be real picky when they research online? How have you main­tained a con­sis­tent brand on and offline. Love to hear your thoughts on this topic.