If you are looking for an economical way to advertise your kitchen remodeling business, you will be delighted to know that there are several great ways that you can do this. Follow these 7 proven kitchen remodeling marketing tips to increase sales and find new customers, today! Remember, without using proven marketing techniques, your ads will always underachieve and you will not generate the maximum ROI possible.

Here are 7 Contractor Marketing Ideas for Kitchen Remodeling Services

1. You must carry out a customer survey or do your research before sending out ads – it pays to know your targeted customers along with their requirements and interests. The basic idea is to make the audience aware of the services that you provide. If you are aware of what attracts them the most, then your success is unstoppable.

2. You can approach people to gather feedback – you must understand what people like or dislike with the products and services that you provide. It is mandatory to know what people think about your services before you invest hundreds or thousands into marketing.

3. You must maintain your business website – your business acquires professionalism and credibility through the maintenance of an official website. In addition, a website also helps promoting your business by advertising your business information to the targeted audience online. Publishing photos of your previous works can add to the glamour of your website and attract more customers from major search engines.

4. Educate yourself – you must be aware of the latest fashions and trends regarding the kitchen renovation techniques and the highly developed equipments. If granite is “the hot seller”, then run a huge marketing campaign that clearly highlights the benefits of choosing your company over the competition. Remember, price doesn’t have to be the only focus.

5. Meet clients personally – you must personally visit your clients as it assures good feedback and registers a mark of professionalism. Reduce your customer’s anxiety with a warm welcome, friendly e-mail, or personal phone call. Send them thank you notes and treat them like royalty every step of the way.

6. Advertise online and offline – you must spread news of your services over the internet through various home improvement forums, local search providers, and community hot spots. Back up your online efforts with powerful direct mail advertisements.

7. Distribute flyers and coupons – you must distribute flyers to the appropriate audience by attracting them with the pictures of your work and promoting your special offers. Direct mail ensures that homeowners will focus on your business, and not the competitors, when making purchasing decisions.

Use these 7 powerful contractor marketing tips to generate more leads, more sales, and grow your business today!

Chris Barr is a marketing professional and graduate of Christopher Newport University. His areas of expertise include direct mail, internet marketing, copy writing, SEO, and new business development. Chris currently serves as Marketing Director for Taradel LLC in Richmond, VA.

Having a marketing plan means planning your marketing. Many painting contractors rely entirely on word of mouth. While this can be good when times are good, many will attest to the fact that when times are tough, word of mouth doesn’t get enough work. For this reason we need to market ourselves.

When we market ourselves, we stay ahead of 90% of the competition, because most painting contractors do not market their business.

This is not an article about how to market, but how to plan or schedule your marketing. For example, what should you be doing with your marketing in January? Or what should I be doing with my marketing in June? Most of whom I am writing for is the residential re-painter. Commercial or new construction marketing will be different.

1) January, if you have done your marking throughout the year you should be busy painting in January, so you can lay off your marketing because it will largely be a waste of time. I still do door hangers in the neighborhoods where I am working and also proximity mailing that is mailing to the locals around where we are painting.

2) February, I like to start my heavy duty direct mailing towards the end of February, with the intent to capture the shoppers who are already planning for their spring painting. Lots of times this will be mainly exteriors but it is also those folks who are planning their interior or exterior painting jobs around their income tax refund.

3) March is when we get serious about direct mailing. We are now getting jobs for the entire spring. Keep in mind that we never stop hanging doors or proximity mailings. Of course we are trying to fill in the summer months all through the spring.

4) April is pretty much the same as March.

Tip: How do you market for next January and February? Try this, every time that you win an interior job during the months when you are booked with exterior jobs, offer your customers an additional 10% off the top of the estimate if they agree to schedule their interior jobs during the colder months when you will be slow or it is too cold to work outside. Some will agree.

5) May is the same as March with the difference being that we should be booked up through the end of June and much of July.

6) June is the last of the heavy duty mailings for the spring, summer needs to be booked by now, as most jobs for the summer will be contracted out, and once again we are still putting door hangers out.

7) July means to ease back on direct mailings but keep up with hangers and your proximity mailings.

August is pretty much the same as July except you should get all of your printing need s done now because September starts the big marketing push for holiday and winter painting.

9) September is when we pull out all the stops and begin our all-out direct mailing campaign.

10) October we continue with September’s work.

11) November, at least in the early part of the month we continue marketing, but towards Thanksgiving we stop mailing as most people have scheduled their holiday work and are too busy to entertain painting jobs.

12) December marketing is pretty much over except for door hangers and proximity mailings.

How To Market With Postcards

Now that you’ve got an idea of the history of postcards and why they make sense to try to use today, it’s time to look at some concrete steps to design and implement your own successful postcard marketing program.

There’s basically 9 steps involved.

Step 1

Make up your mind that you want to do it. This is important because postcard marketing always works if it done correctly. But the devil is always in the details and if you don’t do something right (which includes that you might have to make some modifications to your plan along the way) then you might not win big at first.

Step 2

Make a plan and stick to it. Take the time to do some serious brainstorming and planning. Bring some other members into your team if you want to or have to. Don’t be afraid to ask advice. Write everything done for future reference so you’ll have all the facts for later ‘post-game’ review.

Step 3

Make sure you’ve got the budget, the tools and other assets to follow your plan. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Generally speaking, postcard campaigns don’t cost nearly as much as most other forms of marketing. And it doesn’t require anything more technical than a computer, maybe a printer (if your printing your own cards) and perhaps a telephone….all things that you’ve got anyway, right?

Step 4

Produce your first postcard. With today’s powerful and easy to use computers and printers you shouldn’t have any trouble at all in creating your first prototype postcard. Show it around to your inner circle to get their opinion.

Step 5

Do a test of your piece. Depending on the size test you want to do, take a small part of it and do a test campaign. One good thing here is that if your postcard is effective you’ll even make money in your ‘market testing’ phase. You get paid to experiment…how cool is that!!?

Step 6

Do a full mailing. If the test was successful, do the full mailing of your postcard. If it’s a good card, this is where you start to make money.

Step 7

Track your results. Keep track of sales. Be sure and have all your staff alert to sales from your postcard campaign. If you set it up right, there’ll be some sort of signal ‘key’ in each of these new sales that’ll tell you it came from your postcard campaign. It might even be something as basic as having the customers bring the postcard in.

Step 8

Exploit your success. A lot of business owners miss it here, but you should always, as a regular part of your sales cycle, make an effort to get a referral and/or get an email address of any other type of information that will enable you to follow up and continue to market to these new customers. Don’t let them just come in, buy and leave…never to be seen or heard from again.

Step 9

Review, plan and do it again. By the time you’ve gotten this far you should have a lot to look back on and analyze. Review what worked and what didn’t, review what was easy and what wasn’t, review your goals and decide whether you should adjust them up or down. Most of this will come naturally but just remember that everything changes a little bit each time you do it so you’ll want to repeat what works, discard what doesn’t but always be alert for changes and adjustments that need to be made.

Now… that wasn’t so hard, was it?

Now… you’re a real ‘postcard marketer’.

A seasoned expert in Postcard Marketing with over 25 years of experience under his belt, Ralph Kreshatik has built successful marketing campaigns for businesses in the US. His in depth knowledge of postcard marketing and creative use of Postcards is now shared for the first time online! Follow his articles by bookmarking his author page. More quality articles are on the way.

One of the questions I get the most is “which social media should I use to promote my company?” I generally give a generic answer because once I start going into detail I see the glazed look go over people’s eyes. Social media is a GREAT way to sell and promote a company. You can generate a lot of leads and sales by having a Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube account for your business. That being said, do you as a business owner know how much time your spending on these sites building and promoting, and how much business you are actually getting from it?

When I do marketing analysis for a company the first thing I do is look at the product and determine a target demographic. This is a group of people who I think would be interested in the product or service they are trying to sell. After that I create a detailed marketing plan that may or may not involve social media. This is based off demographics for all the different social media sites. I not only put in the plan which sites to use, but how much time, energy, and most importantly money is put into the site. I base this all of ROI (return on investment). I want to ensure where I am putting the money is where I will get the most leads. If I put $10,000 towards social media I want to see the company get that much business back or more within a certain time frame. It is not good business to put $10,000 in advertisement into a media that may only give you $5,000 back.

The next thing I usually get back is the money being put towards traditional media and advertisement. Again, this is part of market strategy and analysis. The internet is a great way of advertisement but as long as people who give potential business are still leaving their house, you should be putting money to advertise in the “real world”. It is true that social media is much cheaper to do. Most of my techniques in social media advertisement is free! The thing with traditional advertisement is that it will get people who do not use the internet or social media to notice you. There are many ways of doing this as well that can be done with a small budget.

Here are a couple scenarios to help explain:

Scenario 1- A company in San Francisco is launching a new handheld gaming device. It is a product that does not link with any current gaming systems (ps3, xbox). It has its own selection of games, many similar to what is offered on other systems. They want to create a marketing advertisement but after development and production they have a small budget for the first 6 months of launch. After reviewing the product we determine we want a 70/30 split on media. 70% of funding will be put towards social and online media. A site was developed, Facebook was set up to target males 16-24 (determined initial demographic), and a twitter account was set up to help give updates of the product. A linkdin account was also set up to market and network with other companies to help with distribution and sales. We then put 30% of the budget towards traditional advertisement. We designed and printed posters and fliers to put in malls, video game stores, and used money to help launch promos with movies that came out with a related video game.

In this scenario it made sense to direct a lot of money towards social media. Not only is our demographic very large on social media sites (16-24 male gamers) but since the product was an electronic gaming device, it was a safe assumption that many “gamers” also had an online presence. We did want to do other marketing to ensure we were seen around competition in the stores and create a presence outside of social media as well.

Scenario 2- A candle making company based out of Salt Lake City needs a marketing campaign to launch their new scented candles. They have no market presence currently. After review of the product we determined that we wanted to sell these with a more traditional approach. Instead of selling directly to customers, the company wanted to sell to other companies to distribute. We determined to still create a website where they could sell directly and a Linkdin, Facebook, and blog was set up. These were set up primarily to set up a fan base and create brand presence. We only spent about 20% of their budget on creating this. The rest went towards contacting and creating networks with other businesses and creating banners, flyers, posters, and displays for the products in the stores that carry them. This will help make their product stand out from the competition.

In this scenario we determined it was important to develop a web presence as well as a way to sell directly to the loyal customers who do not want to go to the store each time. We did find it more logical to do more traditional advertisement and media within the stores where they will be sold from.

It is important to realize that market strategies should be reviewed continuously. It is important to review to see what is working and what isn’t. If you thought using one media was good, but after 3 months of putting money into it and getting no new business it is a good idea to possibly adjust or abandon that media. I also always suggest trying every media and gauging the results from it. Also watch for new technology and media that may work well for your business. Marketing is simple in getting the word out, but is very complex when it comes to ROI and being effective and efficient. If you are not sure what to do it may be a good idea to hire or at least talk to a marketing or media expert.