Your Marketing Plan

This is the plan we suggest skilled trades companies in Arlington, TX and surrounding cities follow. I’ve been doing marketing for big companies and small companies. I’ve seen what works and what is a waste of money. In this post, I’m going to give you the steps you should take to be sure your marketing works for your company.

If you are a Carpenter, Electrician, HVAC Company, Roofing Company, Car Repair Company, Painting Company in Arlington, TX, or a surrounding city you should follow these steps to create a great online presence and marketing plan.

Step 1: Get A Clear Message

If you confuse, you lose. That’s what Don Miller over at StoryBrand says. It really is the truth. Stop confusing people with cute jargon and just tell them directly what it is you do. If you Clean and Maintain Pools for Families in Arlington… then say exactly that.

As a small local business, you can’t afford to be cute. Let the big guys waste their money being cute. You have to be clear, you only have a few seconds to get someone’s attention and engage them. You can grab their attention with a one-liner. It is the most succinct way to tell a full story about what you do. The formula for a one-liner is: Problem, Solution, and Result.

It looks and sounds like this: We know below surface plumbing issues can be a mystery. At ABC Plumbing we have our see-through technology, so we can pinpoint the problem and get your house back to normal ASAP. Did you catch all of the parts:

Here is a podcast that deals with One-Liners and Taglines

The bottom line is, you MUST have a clear message. If you don’t just stop reading. The rest of the steps won’t help.

How do you get a clear message?

Use the StoryBrand Messaging Framework. You can learn more about the framework on this blog post and you can buy an annual membership to take the course for just $275. This is a real steal… their live marketing workshop is $997, and the material in the online course is basically the same thing.

Step 2: Your Website

Your website is where the rubber meets the road. You need one. You need a good one. You need one that looks good, loads fast, and is easy for prospective clients to use. You get all of that with our Skilled Trades Web Package. Our website packages for Arlington TX Skilled Trades come with these pages:

• Home
• About us
• Services
• Contact Us

Step 3: Directories

Step 4: Google My Business

For small businesses that are local this is the holy grail. No joke. If you want to succeed in local business online, you abso-freakin-lutely must have an awesome Google My Business page. Think about this from Google’s perspective. They want to serve up the best local companies for their search customers. The only way they can do that is

Step 5: Email Marketing

Email is still the King. Everyone has to have an email. Even the young folks who don’t like email, have to have an email to sign up for the other services they’d rather use. Nonetheless, the people you want to reach are homeowners and business owners and those people have emails and they check their email. So, you should be building your email list, like NOW!!

If done right, your email list can also be called the “money-machine”. Seriously, have a tax bill you need to pay… email the list and announce a sale. Have an unexpected tuition bill show up? Email the list and announce a new promotion. Cha-ching! Seriously. Get started collecting emails now. Here are some great tools you can use to start collecting emails. ActiveCampaign – I really like this one because they have a really strong free plan that includes everything you need to get going. Now, as you start to collect a lot of emails you have to pay them, and at that point it makes sense to pay for the service because it’s really good. If you don’t like ActiveCampaign then check out Mailerlite.

Step 6: Social Media

If you’re like me, you’re not crazy about Social Media, but if you’re in local business it is kind of a necessity. I recommend you set up a business page on Facebook, LinkedIn, and as mentioned above you better be sure you have your Google My Business set up.

What should you post about?

There really is an endless number of things to post about. You can use the StoryBrand 7 Part Framework to start with. If you create your BrandScript you’ll have seven different categories to write social posts from:

1. What your customer wants.
2. What external problem is keeping them from getting it?
3. How is that external problem making your customer feel?
4. Why is it just plain wrong that you customer is dealing with this problem. Think philosophically here… You deserve…
5. Post from an empathetic place and speak with authority about how you can help
6. Give your customers a clear plan on how to get out of the situation they are in
7. Talk about what life will be like after they’ve done business with you, AND also talk about what life will be like if they don’t do business with you.

There you go… there are seven different categories to post from.

Step 7: Content Generation

Content generation should be relevant content that is targeted to the audience you want to reach. You also have to be smart about content generation and generate content that can be repurposed. For example, a podcast that you create about roofing tips could also be used to create a YouTube video, a LinkedIn Audio Snippet, as well a blog post for your website. That blog post or podcast could be distributed to your email list in an email. See what I mean? One podcast just generated four different pieces of content.

Another category of content is a webinar. Depending on your skill… webinars are a great way to educate your audience and build credibility and likability that leads to a purchase.

Step 8: Paid Advertising

Paid ads come later. Of course, you can start right away, but I don’t suggest it. If you’ve done all of the other steps, you’ll have created a good amount of buzz and content and chances are… people will have already heard about you and your services. There are different types of advertising you can do that I’ve seen work for local business.

• Google Ads – If you’ve got the cash flow Google Ads can work. You need a good Ads Manager to make sure you’re spending money wisely and you’re getting the right kind of traffic.
• Facebook Ads – Facebook, so far has been great for laser targeting the people you want to get in front of. With many of the new privacy moves by Apple and some state legislatures this may continue to get harder to do. Up til now, Facebook ads have performed well for local business. Again, you need to have a good ads manager who can help you spend wisely.

To get great results on these platforms you need a decent-sized budget, a good ad manager, and patience. I recommend at the very least, $500 per month in ad spend, and you should pay a good ad manager at least a few hundred dollars per month to help you run the ads. I recommend you stay with it for at least 3 months. That is enough time for the algorithm to do it’s job and send the right traffic to your site.

Step 9: Start Now

You will look up 12 months from now and wish you’d started. Get started now. You’ll be glad you did. You know what they say… the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.