Contractor Marketing Ideas for 2025

Audio Transcription

Mark Lamberth:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Contractor Grow Show, put on by my company Rokket Science. My name is Mark, and I am your host. In this episode, I want to talk about contractor marketing ideas for 2025. So here we’re in December of 2024, and it’s a great time to be planning this month, next month for how much growth your contracting business is going to have in the next year. So if you’re a kitchen or bath remodeler, a sub, or a roofer, or anybody in the trades, it’s a good time to plan for the next year. And I just want to say that if you don’t have a plan for growth, there’s a great chance it’s not really going to happen as much as you want and as well as you want. Okay? I mean, we grow our businesses by referrals. We can only kind of max out our referral base only so much.

Mark Lamberth:
Our referral base gives us a lot of business, but it’s limited. And if we want to grow the business, we really need to plan ultimately to sell to strangers. We need to go out into the marketplace and find people that are looking for your contracting business but have never heard of you before. And as I’ve said some other episodes, when you go out to the marketplace and start working with strangers, there’s some promise and opportunity, but there’s also a problem with that. When you have built a business by referrals, it’s easy to close. You have all of that trust kind of built into the process. And when you go out into the marketplace and start dealing with web traffic, folks that find you on Google, SEO or paid search or YouTube, Facebook, when you go out and advertise to get new business, it’s a whole different ball game.

Mark Lamberth:
I mean, the folks that you’re talking to, they have no loyalty. They may be price shopping at some level, it’s going to be more difficult to close those people. You’re going to have to have a process for selling them. You’re going to have a lot of folks that you may win the bid, you may have the best bid or quote for them, but then you’re dealing with just the inertia of someone not moving ahead with getting a huge kitchen remodel or a new home or a new roofing job. The biggest competitor that we have in sales is actually not our competition. It’s doing nothing at all, right? And if you’ve been in sales for a while, you know that. So today I want to talk about really the three areas that I see contractors struggle with the most. And we’re a digital marketing agency here. We’re rocket science.com. We work specifically with remodelers, and we have seen over the last many years that contractors typically struggle with three main issues. One is that their website is subpar. So you go out to your job sites with nice clean trucks. You wouldn’t go out there with them covered in mud. You wouldn’t go out with a damaged truck that had just been in an accident. It would create a bad impression for those prospects or for your clients.

Mark Lamberth:
But your website does look like a wreck truck in most cases. I mean, I’m talking like 80% of the great builders websites that I see. They in no way reflect the quality of the work that is happening. And so what happens is, I mean, everyone that’s going to spend more than $5,000 with you is definitely going to your website. I mean, don’t you? Right? And so they’re going to go to your website and when they go there, they still may call you and they still may do business with you, but it’s more like they’re doing it despite how crummy your website is. Okay? I mean, a rundown website doesn’t help you convert sales. And a beautiful, well-designed website, it absolutely helps you convert sales. There’s no question about it. The second area that I see contractors struggle in is responding to leads quickly. Now, I’m going to talk about this some, and that’s really what this episode is about.

Mark Lamberth:
But if you don’t answer calls when they come in as they come in and you don’t respond to any web forms, emails within at least an hour, if not ideally five minutes, certainly a web chat feature on your website, it’s going to need to be responded to, right? Then. If you don’t do that, you’re breaking down trust. You’re actually killing trust. And the third piece here that I see contractors struggle with is getting traffic to their website. So when you build a website, people don’t just show up there. I mean, that was an idea that we all had back when, oh, I build a website and then I’m going to grow my business that way. If you want to grow outside of the referral base, you’re going to need to pay for traffic. And look, the reality is that you always pay for a prospect, even if you’re getting them by referral, okay?

Want to have conversation about your business?

Mark Lamberth:
You always pay for getting a new customer. If you get them by a referral, then that means you have done amazing workout in the workplace and you’ve really taken care of your customers. That’s work. But I’m really talking about outside again, of the referral network. I mean any kind of SEO, I mean, if you even do that yourself and do content writing, you’re going to pay for that with your time, Facebook posts, any type of traffic, YouTube, video creation, talking about your business. I recommend that you do all of that, but understand that you’re going, that we always pay to get a new customer. There’s some costs. And the question is, what’s the lowest cost? What’s the most efficient way to get there? How can you get the highest ROI on your marketing spend? That’s really what we’re all about, and that’s what ultimately you want to get the highest ROI on your marketing spend.

Mark Lamberth:
So those are the three areas, the website, the response to leads and the traffic. So in today’s episode, I really want to unpack the second one. So there’s kind of a disconnect with contractors. When people call into their office and they can’t get to the phone, they say, well, I’ll just get back to ’em in a day or 24 hours. I’ll try to get back to them later on. Today, when your prospects call you during business hours and you don’t answer the phone when they call or somebody on your team, answer the phone, right? When they call, then a few things happen. They’re going to go down to the very next competitor and they’re going to call them. And that competitor may or may not answer, and if they don’t, they’re going to go down to the very next competitor after that. And when somebody answers the phone, they’re going to ask for a quote.

Mark Lamberth:
They’re going to ask what’s involved in doing that business together? They’re going to, I mean, if that contractor is snappy and on it, they’re going to set up a quote right away, okay, set up an appointment at the house to come take a look at your property, do your remodel, and you’re thinking, well, I’m going to call them back later on today. I’m going to call ’em back tomorrow. Well, when you call ’em back tomorrow, they’re not going to return your call. And the reason why they don’t return your call is because a few things. One is they’ve already gotten it taken care of, even if they haven’t already gotten that quote from somebody else, they’ve already started a relationship with them and they’re busy. I mean, they already talked to this guy for 20, 30 minutes on the phone. They don’t want to have another one of those conversations. And so you’ve actually removed yourself from first in line, and now you’ve placed yourself fourth in line. Now you’re in a competitive bidding war with these other people if you do even get the chance to quote that job. But worse than that problem is the fact that you have really lost trust with that customer, and that’s why they’re not going to call you back. They called you during business hours. They expected you to answer when you didn’t. They think that the business is out of business, that you’re not really on it. You’re not organized.

Mark Lamberth:
Again, there’s no sort of loyalty or trust. I mean, maybe you’ve got a ton of reviews. Maybe they love what your website looks like in the photos. You may be able to talk with them, but there’s a great chance that you’re not going to be able to, so what’s called for here is to put someone in place who’s going to answer the phones every day. And if you’re the CEO, it certainly shouldn’t be you. And I mean, if you have 10, 15 people in your office right now or on your team, you may already have this handled and that’s fantastic. You want to instruct your team that you need to answer every single call that comes through. And if you’re not able to, you need to call them back immediately. There’s some automations that you can put in place potentially to get a notification that that call came in.

Mark Lamberth:
It’s going to trigger an email to go back out to them or a text, which is going to help a lot because when they call you, you don’t answer, but they get a text right away that says, Hey, I’m not available, but I’ll give you a call in four hours or I’ll give you a call tomorrow. That’s going to help quite a lot. So there’s ways to set that up, and if you want any help with that, let me know. But you want to instruct your office that we need to respond to these emails. We need to respond to these messages that came through the website. We certainly need to respond to any missed calls. We need to answer the calls when they come in every single time. If you do this, it’s very likely, and if you haven’t been doing this and you start, there’s a likelihood that there’s 15 to 20% of top line revenue that can be harvested right away.

Another podcast I recommend is with Andy Bowyer, who renovated historic homes in Chicago.

Mark Lamberth:
I’m talking about you may be able to increase you growth 15 to 20% next year. I mean, this sounds crazy just by answering your phone, if you haven’t been doing this, I recommend you set this up and figure this out and get this in place. There’s a few different ways to take care of this. I mean, one is with someone on your team that can answer the phone. Another is with an answering service. Someone like Pat Live, which is, it’s an answering service in Florida, they’re great. I’ve worked with them for 20 years now, and you’ll set up your scripts with them. Now, I mean, they’re not going to be able to quote the job, and they’re not even necessarily going to be able to set up a calendar appointment for you unless they’ve got your calendar and you give them access to that and tell ’em, fill it up whenever you want.

Mark Lamberth:
That can be a little tricky, kind of the scheduling, but even them answering the phone, and I mean they certainly answer it every single time that someone calls 24 hours a day, they’ll send you an email of the sort of transcript of the call, not really the transcript, more like the answer to the questions that you want them to ask. You want to ask sorting and kind of segmenting questions ultimately to figure out the value of this lead. If it’s someone that wants a $10,000 flooring job versus $150,000 or $350,000 remodel or new build, you may want to know that. And so you can set up the questions with Pat Live. They’ll answer those. They’ll send them over. You can get the email on your phone. I mean, it’s incredible. I’ve used them a ton and recommended them a ton, and our clients have viewed them as well.

Mark Lamberth:
We also offer an answering service here. So here at Rocket Science, we are rolling out a service really where we’re going to be not exactly answering live calls, but doing all of the other response backs to prospects that are needed. So if a web form is coming through, we’ll actually live, get on and answer that, respond to that customer. Again, I mean, we don’t have all of the details. We don’t know exactly how things are done, but we’re certainly going to move that prospect down the sales pipeline by responding to them taking care of that web chat. Also, if they get in touch via email, if they call Google my business and you’re not able to answer that call, we’re going to call them back. And so in that scenario, we have a sort of a package that we offer, a program where we take care of a couple of hundred calls for you per month, and that can be a complete game changer.

Mark Lamberth:
So I wanted to actually open up, I showed, I put together a little list here of reasons why contractors need to answer the phone during work hours, and I want to go through this. And so we talked about trust, speed builds trust, an immediate response that shows professionalism here in the online world these days, there’s been a few things that have happened. One is there’s been explosive growth of opportunity. I mean, we can do sales in our sleep with our websites. We can, I mean, just whatever unlimited, infinite benefits that the web has brought us. Okay, that’s fantastic. However, there’s been kind of a crisis of trust that’s been created because with the proliferation of great people doing good work, also, there’s bad actors all over the place. We know that we’ve all been scammed. We’ve all had bad purchases, buyer’s remorse from things that we bought online.
As a side note – Ami at Roofer Chicks is really good at all this. Take a look at her podcast later when you have time.

Mark Lamberth:
And so that has led us to really kind of a crisis of trust where we just don’t trust what we see online. And so answering calls immediately, it builds trust, and we really need to show that professionalism for someone to want to do business with us. Number two, higher conversion rates. So we want to answer those calls because they’re going to literally increase the conversion rate that you have. So if your conversion rate right now is say 30, 35%, 40% for quotes that you do, literally answering the phone is going to raise the conversion rate on those quotes, and it could be three, five, 8% just by answering the phones. Number three is that it demonstrates efficiency in organization. You really need to show that you’re organized when you’re going to come out to someone’s house. I mean, the difference between running a job well and running it poorly between materials, showing up on time, the way that you take care of your clients, your customers in their home, right?

Mark Lamberth:
The speed with which you get the job done. When you nail that timeline, how clean you keep everything, that all actually gets reflected at the very beginning of the relationship when someone calls you and bam, you answer that call Number four is it’s going to minimize lead loss. So I mean, we have clients that are paying many, many thousands of dollars to us to do really high-end SEO work. We also have clients that are paying less than a thousand dollars and a number of those in the mid a hundred thousands. Folks are trying to get up to a million bucks, but you’re paying for those leads, whether it’s SEO, whether it’s PPC, if you’re paying for leads, spending two, three, $4,000 on Google ads per month. When those leads come in, you need to capture them all. You may be spending 50, 75, a hundred dollars for a single lead, and you don’t want to waste that money and you’re going, like we talked about, you’re going to waste it if you don’t answer that phone, they call your competitor.

Mark Lamberth:
Competitor does answer the phone. Number five is it improves customer retention or customer satisfaction rather. So customers, we say the quick service creates a positive experience. It reduces anxiety when you are available by phone to answer any kind of problems that are coming up during the job, before the job, and you kind of set that up from the very beginning of the relationship. It really is going to put the customers at ease. I mean, they’re spending $250,000 with you for this remodel. That’s a lot of money, obviously. And so we need to really take care of their emotions as well as we can. We want to kind of personalize attention to them. We want to love on them. We want to them updated with everything. So we want to do everything that we can to make our customers as happy as possible, right? Of course.

Mark Lamberth:
Next piece of this is that it increases your reputation in word of mouth referrals. As you know, word of mouth and referrals are like gold in a business. We need as many of those as we can get. And so we want to get written testimonials. We want to get video testimonials. We have a whole process, kind of a whole SOP around creating video testimonials for our clients. You want to, I mean, if you can get video testimonials and Google reviews, that’s going to be one of the highest, most important things that you can do for your business. I’ve heard a great famous marketing guru say that if nothing else, if you had nothing else, if you just had a webpage that just had your logo at the top and had a scrolling list of video testimonials from your clients, that would be all that you would need to be as successful as you want to be.

Mark Lamberth:
Okay? It’s a pretty bold statement, but I think it’s profound, and I believe it, and I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it a lot. Next is it boosts, SEO and online presence. So Google rewards fast responders. Google knows when you respond to a client. I mean, Google knows so much more than we think that it knows. It’s shocking. We’ve had some kind of insider look into that, and I mean, you know that you hear this. We see on Google business profile kind of response times, okay, Google is measuring all of that. You’re logged into Google on your phone. Your client’s logged into Google on their phone, they sent you the web form, or they made that call while being logged in. Google is tracking all of that stuff. And so when they call your business and you answer, you’re going to get credit for that. And when they call your business and you don’t answer, then you’re going to lose credit for that, and they may even switch your rankings to people that are answering the phone more.

Mark Lamberth:
Very important that you take care of that. You really want to be the top of Google for your terms as well as you can, especially in that Google Business profile section. So really consider the impact of SEO on the way that you answer your phones builds a stronger relationship early on. So the initial interaction really sets the tone for really the whole relationship. And it may seem like a stretch to talk about how important this is, but the profit percentage that you receive, the top line revenue that you receive, the referrals that you’re going to get, these are all built right at the first interaction. So you want to be there on the phones and certainly, I mean, we record calls for clients. I recommend that you do record calls in your office because you want to check on those, and you want to make sure that whoever’s entering the phone for you is actually doing a good job of it. And if they’re not, in many cases they’re not, they may be annoyed, they may not know how to kind of handle, they may not have the process for how to handle these calls. You need to train them, okay? So you’re going to need to create a standard operating procedure of how that gets done.

Mark Lamberth:
Next piece here is that it helps you prioritize leads effectively. So segmenting leads is critical. When leads coming into your office, you want to know really as soon as possible. If we’re talking about a $15,000 project or an $800,000 project, certainly you’re not going to respond to those the same way. You want to obviously prioritize those huge whales of projects. Really important that you have a segmentation process and segment your leads. There’s a number of different ways to do that, and there’s some automated ways to do that with web forms and some of these things, but you want to segment those leads right away because those big important jobs, the jobs that you want, maybe they’re commercial versus residential, maybe there’s certain part of town that you want to be in more than another part of town. You want to know as quickly as possible, and you want to completely focus on those.

Mark Lamberth:
I mean, there’s a priority for who you call back first, and you want to know what that priority is. You want to segment those leads into a few different buckets. And the last piece here of this is that when you answer your phone and when you take care of the phones, well, when you take care of web forms, emails, all of that response stuff, it reduces stress for your team. Now, these days, it’s hard to find, recruit, and train and ultimately retain team by some measure. It takes six months or more before a team member becomes profitable. You’re training them, showing them your systems, whatnot. They’re making mistakes. Well, we need to keep the retention up as high as possible. We know this in the trades these days in the contracting industry, hard to find good people, hard to find people that are motivated to learn your systems. So we want to take care of those guys as much as possible. We don’t want to have a backlog of unanswered calls.

Mark Lamberth:
Your team is ultimately not going to take care of all that very well. Those things get kind of pushed down the to-do list. And after those leads have gone a couple of days without being responded to, I mean, call ’em back. But I mean you’ll notice, and if you track this, you’ll see it’s a completely different response rate from them. It’s a completely different close rate when you ultimately get those quotes out there. So we don’t want to have that backlog of unanswered calls and then ultimately want to enhance our team morale. Okay? A well-managed system where calls are answered promptly is going to increase job satisfaction for your employees. It’s going to make them a lot happier, happier in the office, happier working for you, happier being in your company. We want to enhance that morale as absolutely much as we can.

Mark Lamberth:
There’s a few different ways to do this. I mean, you can bring on new team to do this. You can again hire somebody like Pat Live pretty affordable. We engage in this as well. So there’s a number of ways to handle this, but before you build a new site, and before you do certainly any kind of marketing, you want to make sure that your phones are getting handled perfectly, okay? So I’d love to see your business grow in 2025. You need a plan to do that. And I would say really the first thing, the reason why I started here with this is I believe that the first thing to get right is those responses back to any kind of leads that’ll come in. I’ll tell you a quick story. We’ve had companies where we kind of make it rain for them. I mean, they start with us. They’re getting 40, 50 leads per month, and then after working together for six months or so, they’re getting 120, 150 leads per month.

Mark Lamberth:
And they churn, they cancel. They quit working with us, they get months down the road and they quit. Wait, what the hell? And what happened was that they had kind of a high quality business problem, but it was actually too high of, it was a serious business problem for them, and that is that they didn’t have a system set up in place to handle those calls. And when those calls come in, it actually overloads their system and they say, we’ve got to work through these old leads. Let’s just pause or whatever. We’re going to take a break. It’s an interesting kind of counterintuitive thing that when marketing starts to work well for a business, it can actually create a big business problem for the business. I don’t want you to have that problem. So I would love for you to commit to getting your phone handled in 2025 if you don’t already have that taken care of.

Mark Lamberth:
Okay? So hopefully this was helpful. This video here about contracting marketing ideas, contractor marketing ideas in 2025, if you’d like to reach out out to us@rocketscience.com, it’s R-O-K-K-E-T 2K’s no C rokketscience.com. My email is mark@rokketscience.com. Certainly give us a call. We’ll answer. And then I would just say that really consider setting up a plan, okay? You’re going to need a plan to grow, and that’s what it’s going to take in 2025 to grow your business. So thank you for watching this video. If you got any value out of this, please go on ahead and like it and subscribe. Subscribe to our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Helps us out a lot. It makes us really motivated and excited to get up and create more content every day for you guys. We’ve been creating a lot and we’re having so much fun over here. So thank you for taking a look at this episode and talk to you soon.

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