7 questions a contractor should ask before building their website
A website is essentially for any business, particularly contractor because you need to get found, generate leads, and post recent projects. But before diving into content it is good idea to answer some questions and have a plan.
1) What are my business goals
How many projects do I want a year? How many phone calls do you want to get a week? Contractors are always looking for new projects and to generate leads. But too many leads and following up with too many people can take time away from completing current projects.
This is why thinking about how many leads we needs we need, who do we want to work with and what are business goals are good questions to ask ourselves..
2) Who is my target audience
Choosing projects and customers that are not right for us can leave you open to bad reviews and worse law suits. Besides why would we want spend time and money marketing ourselves to people that are not right for us.
If your an electrician that only works for general contractors, why market ourselves to home owner. Getting calls and enquiries from homeowners is a waste of time for them and for us.
Write down the demographics and location of the group of people we want to work with. Answer the questions, what type of designs do they like, what is their budget, do they quality materials or inexpensive materials?
Getting a firm understanding of group of people we want to work with will help create content, design and our marketing plan for our website.
3) Who is my ideal customer
An ideal customer is description of a particular customer from our target market. We could have one ideal customer or multiple ideal customers that is up to you. Having an ideal customer allows us to focus who is right for, how we offer value and why should they pick us.
When thinking about our ideal customer, think about what customer we liked working with in the past? was their similarities in personalities, style, taste…
In the end most website are basically a sales pitch to our ideal customers. By having a description in mind it will give us our company and salesman an idea how to sell our ideal customer, and the benefits we offer.
4) What do you offer your ideal customer
People are busy they don’t want to look through our whole website to find out what we offer and how what we offer benefits them.
Make it clear on your home page and have corresponding service pages. Have a clear unique value propositon, be clear on what you offer and the benefits of those services and the negative consequences of not performing these servics.
5) What benefits do my services offer
People don’t the buy the product they buy what the product does for them. Save time, peace of mind, save money are reasons people buy. For example for a contractor sells quality long lasting products, space saving, create a unique design for dinner parties, spacious layouts, and increased home value.
Create a list of benefits. This will will be useful for landing pages, possible blog posts but also a gives a list for salemsan to use when making sales calls.
6) What is my ideal customer searching for
For contractor there is longer customer journey, Often your potential customer has been thinking about this project for months if not years. They been searching the internet, talking to friends and thinking about ideas, looking at houzz, long before they ever talk to you.
Understand your customer journey: Create a keyword lists, what search terms are popular, what social media platforms are popular with my target audience?
By understanding customer journey we can create blog posts, marketing campaigns that are relevant to our ideal customer. And when they ready for quotes you will definitely get a call.
7) How do I find my ideal customer and keep them
After understanding our ideal customer, their search patterns and social media habit we can create a marketing campaing plan. This could range from pay per click, seo, facebook ads etc. our goal is to get traffic to our website and not just any traffic our ideal customer traffic.
After we start to get ideal customers to our website we need to keep them coming back. We need to keep in touch.
Often a newsletter a good idea. There is a reason big retailers offer flyers because one deal can bring a customer in to buy full price products. The same is true for a contractor one good deal on a product can set the product in motion.
To get potential customers signed up to our newsletter. Have an optin piece of content that is enticing and that they will recieve after signing up to our newsletter. Then to keep subscribers continually opening their emails we need to have deals, promotions.offer a deal a weak and be consistent people wll look for it.
