I have just registered my trade name with the state of NH for www.breezyridgedirtwork.com I am looking for suggestions on the best way to advertise and market my services. Yellowpages? How to get web site hits?Other postings? Few excavator companies in the area are members of the BBB, but I was thinking amybe the Chamber of commerce is a good way to hook up to other contractors who need site work after the heavy digging is done. Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks
I've tried about anything imaginable for advertising and to do it all over again, I wouldn't do anything special, just put an add in the local papers, but I'm in a small town setting, I have no idea what type of work you do or what your setting is, large metropolitian area, inner city or small town or a half dozen other options. To me word of mouth is my best advertising and also my cheapest, I've done all what you mentioned and more and wasted my money on all of them, none of my clients ever called me because of how or where I advertised and those that did I didn't want to work for anyhow. First you have to figure out who your customers are or who you want for customers, then figure out how they look for contractors and go from there. If your customers are 80 year old ladies then don't waste your time putting an internet site up, they won't have a computer to find you anyhow, same goes for advertising in the BBB if your customers are going to be multimillion dollar companies looking for someone to do the odd jobs and site clean up for them. All advertising is directed at attacting a perticular type of client and before you throw out a net to draw everyone, figure out who you want to market to and go from there, or you'll be pestered with everyone under the sun wanting you to do nothing of what your capable of or intersted in doing. An example I'll give is this, we put an ad together and we do large excavation type work, usually rural areas and a little old lady called from 40 miles away and wanted us to come and dig out a stump in her back yard with a shovel, because she didn't want machines tracking across her lawn, now multiply that call times several hundred more wasting time to answer them and you learn fast where not to advertise, I"ve had ladies call about needing a roof repaired on their house, light bulbs replaced in spare bedrooms, even cement work done, driveways resealed, electrical boxes replaced, even wondered if I would walk dogs on weekends, all from an ad placed for heavy equipment work, as in dozers, excavators, etc, how they came up with dozers type work to walk dogs is a new one on me or any of the above is still somewhat puzzling, but we learned fast not to just put adds out there for the general public to see, we tried to narrow down our viewer window and hone in our where our customers would look for us at. I can't imagine how many hours I've wasted telling people I don't do that type of work when they call from up to hundreds of miles away. Remember if in doubt you can always pick up a phone and call, you spend virtually nothing to do that and maybe someone on the other end will do the job you need done, thats most peoples mentality today, the problem lies in your the one screening the calls and having to figure out who they are, what they need done and worse yet take the time to go look at things that end up being nothing but a wild goose chase or someone who won't pay anyhow.
'Your area may be different, but I wouldn't waste money on a phone book ad in mine. After having a business in another state for a long time I decided to do the kind of work I wanted to do when I moved here. I was unknown to anyone (let alone unknown as a business), so the learning curve starting up was pretty steep. It took over 10 months for the search engines to "find" my website, so in the meantime I did everything I could to get my name out there and direct traffic to it. My photo page shows up on the first search page more than any other. I believe it's because each photo provides a caption with the description of the project and the town / area the project was performed in. Here's a few other things that helped me drive in work. I advertised on every free classified listing service I could find...OLX, Backpage...all of them. Do searches for your type of work in your area and see who's ads pop-up on the first page and from what sites they originated. If they're listings for your competition on free classified sites you should be listed there too. A free ad with thumbtack.com (owned by google) couldn't hurt either. I also keep a nicely done flyer with "driveway special" posted continuously at any business that will let me...feed stores, convenience stores, gas stations, TSC, etc. I've actually only performed the "special" a few times over the last year, but the flyer has brought a lot of work in. Hope this helps and good luck!
Knock on doors, talk to everyone, talk to people other people send you to, it is a long hard road, but in the end all your hard work will pay off. Oh did I mention talk to everyone.