Modern Marketing for Tradies

When was the last time you checked the White Pages or your local paper to find a company? And when was the last time you even held either of these items? Most likely a long time ago. Your customers are the same. Print marketing is a thing of the past, so putting your time and money into advertising through these avenues is simply a waste. Your focus now needs to be about taking your marketing online. Here are a few steps you can take to up your business’s marketing game.

List Your Business on Google

Where’s the first place you go to when you’re looking for an item or service? Google. And this is the first place that you should consider starting your new marketing campaign. Google My Business is an app that helps you easily list your business on Google Search and Maps. Best of all, it’s free. The app allows you to add in businesses hours, contact details, your location, photos, and lets customers leave reviews. This can be managed and updated easily through your app, and will make it easy for people to find your business!

Use Social Media To Your Advantage

Social media pages are free, only take a few seconds to create, and can instantly put you in touch with thousands of users in your local area. Maximize on this potential by setting up a Facebook, Instagram and Twitter account (at the very least) for your business. This way, past, current and future customers can stay in the loop about what’s happening with the business, and get in contact with you immediately if they would like to find out more information. Facebook also allows users to leave reviews and ratings on a company. Be sure to ask happy customers to leave a glowing comment so that when people stumble across your page, they’re impressed and are left wanting to try your services for themselves.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

If your company is listed on Google, and you’re finding that business is still going a little slow, consider investing a bit of money into PPC advertising. There are two main ways we suggest doing this:
‍1. Google Ads - Choose from a Search, Display, Video or App ad, and get started. For trades businesses, we recommend using Search Ads as this is likely to be the most cost and time effective. Within the ad, you can target individuals within a certain radius from your business, measure the success of the campaign, and adjust your budget with ease. For Search Ads, Google will display your company’s ad at the top of the search page when someone is looking for a business similar to or matching your specifics, and will only charge each time the ad is clicked on. Read more on it here.

‍2. Facebook Ads - Once you have a Facebook page set up, it’s super simple to set up advertising campaigns through the site. Facebook automatically collects information on what its users are searching for. When you set up an ad, they use this info to target where it will go. So for example, if someone has been searching for a plumber in Sydney, and you own a plumbing business in Sydney, it’s likely that your ad will pop up in their timeline. This could just be for general posts on your page, or you could also use Facebook’s ‘Offers’ tool to create discounts for customers coming from the app, and then place an ad on this so it gains attention from a wider audience. Facebook will also give you a rough estimate of what the cost will be to reach what potential audience on every ad, so it’s very easy to judge before posting how effective your PPC campaign will be. Read more on it here. In short, traditional marketing methods are a thing of the past - make sure your business doesn’t become one also!

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