The other day I was talking to a painter and decorator who’d moved from Sheffield in South Yorkshire to live on the North Yorkshire coast. He loved where he was now living and was really enjoying life on the coast, the only problem was that his customer base was still firmly established in Sheffield and he was having to get up at 0530 every weekday to drive the 100 miles to Sheffield. Not only was the weekly fuel bill of £300 killing him but also the 4 hours a day it took to drive there and back.
He’d built his business over 30 years around ‘word of mouth’ and to be fair he had a good reputation, and in Sheffield, he had no problem in getting new customers. What he now really wanted was work locally but he had two big problems:-
- He’d never really advertised and had no experience in marketing and therefore didn’t know where to start.
- He was overly concerned with the local competition because he had no idea of how to differentiate himself.
He has an urgent need to get local customers (build a new customer base) and I feel confident that if he follows my advice he could get some work pretty much immediately. Here’s the 5 strategies that I gave this decorator to get local work that would make a vast difference to his life.
Strategy Number 1. Work Your Existing Network.
So the most obvious place to start is his existing customer base, they probably won’t need work in the North Yorkshire area (as they are based in South Yorkshire) but they could well have friends and family who live in this area who’d have need for a good painter and decorator. So a simple email explaining that he was moving to North Yorkshire and would appreciate any referrals to people they know in this area and as a thank you he would reward them with a £50 gift voucher and would give their referral the same. Assuming that over 30 years he’d built up a list of say 1000 customers then if just 1% of them answered this call for help then he’d get 10 local leads to follow up with. The cost of this is pretty much zero as he would only pay out when he started the decorating job.
Strategy Number 2. Local Business Networking.
In pretty much every town in the UK and beyond there is a business networking group meeting. The trick here is to find the right one and get invited. Most business networking groups are pretty desperate for visitors so getting invited is really just a matter of finding the group and making contact. However, it’s fine going along to a networking meeting but what he really needs to do is to get those there to understand why he’s a person of value and worth knowing. This comes down to being able to give a great elevator pitch. A good place for him to start is by reading my blog on ‘how to give a great elevator pitch’. Business networking is unlikely to provide a quick source of ready customers but to move his business he needs to start building a local network of contacts and this is a great way to do it. The cost of networking meetings varies but typically you can visit most groups for about a tenner per meeting.
Strategy Number 3. Joint Ventures.
Perhaps the quickest way to find local customers would be to look at who is already servicing your potential customers with complementary products or services. In this case it would be the other trades such as builders, joiners, plumbers, electricians etc. All of these have either a contracted need for painting and decorating services (for example the builder could be renovating a building which would need decorating) or have a contact base of people who do need these services. The key here is to a) make contact with them and b) prove why he’s either better than their existing provider or why they should use him as an alternative to their existing provider when they’re unavailable. If he’s looking to replace existing suppliers he may want to check out my blog on accelerated discontentment. Obviously the cost here is pretty low, just his time building the list of potential JV’s and time spent contacting them.
Strategy Number 4. Using pay per click platforms.
If you’re looking for a service or product where do you go? If you’re like me then you’ll probably ‘google’ it. A quick search for painters and decorators in North Yorkshire reveals that not many of the local decorating companies use pay per click as a lead source. Yet a quick check using google’s keyword tool reveals that people are searching for painters and decorators in North Yorkshire (approximately 100-200 a month) and the average cost per click ranges between 68p and £2.90. Of course this would depend on how good his website was (probably not very good) and his expertise in using google ppc. I know of one painter and decorator who used google pay per click to generate £15,000 worth of work for a spend on google of just £100. Done in the right way Google’s PPC Platform could easily generate the necessary work for our painter and decorator. The cost would be in the region of £10 a day or £300 a month, but bear in mind that he’s spending £300 a week on fuel at the moment.
Strategy Number 5. Using plain old print media.
Lots of people disregard old fashioned print media to their peril. Leafleting done well and targeted correctly can be very effective, a good leaflet could produce a 0.1% or even 0.2% response rate and based on a typical campaign of 10,000 leaflets this could produce to 10 to 20 leads in the local area. The trick is to have a leaflet that is effective, one that meets the ‘marketing equation’ i.e interrupts the prospect, engages with them, educates them, and finally makes them an offer they can’t refuse.
The second print media our painter and decorator may consider would be advertising in local magazines. There are lots of these out there and again providing his Ad meets the marketing equation then there’s a good chance of getting local leads from these. The costs for a good leafleting campaign is somewhere around the £400- £500 mark and a typical cost for a ¼ page ad in a local mag runs somewhere in the region of £100.
So with a small investment in time and advertising our decorator could start to build a new client base in North Yorkshire and the benefits he would receive would be massive, a time saving of around 4 hours a day in travel time and about £300 a week in fuel costs. Improving his knowledge of marketing will also allow him to differentiate his business from his competition, who all appear to be the same old same old. Will he make the small investment in time and money to move his business base to North Yorkshire? Only time will tell.
To book a business discovery session with me, where we’ll look at the strategies you need to grow your business in 2019 and beyond click this link. These sessions are worth £199 but for the next month, I’m offering them for free to all qualifying businesses. (Click Here to book yours today)
Twelve intensive half-day meetings.
