The endorsement letter

Endorsements work. This images is from a screen shot of a Webinar with Mike Jeffries posted on Michael Stone's website.Yesterday, I listened to a webinar hosted by Michael and Devon Stone of Mike Jeffries of closingsuccesssystem.com. Jeffries offers a free eight week course: "8 Weeks of Low Cost or No Cost Lead Generation Strategies and Tactics" and his first suggestion is elegantly simple and effective: Arrange with your best and most influential clients to send out endorsement letters on your behalf.Endorsement LettersFind a customer who is very happy with your services.Let them know that the best work you get is from referral.Ask if they...

Read More

Marketing, quality and value

Home Shows can be truly effective in supporting referrals and word-of-mouth. If you have a great reputation, people will 'rediscover' you at these events.We all appreciate the power of positive word-of-mouth advertising.In fact, the absolute power of word-of-mouth is so great that many generally successful businesses think that advertising, promotion and marketing is beneath their dignity. In good times, especially, they receive enough work through referrals and repeat businesses they have to turn away business they don't like.Conversely, many people perceive a negative correlation between quality of services generally chosen by word-of-mouth,...

Read More

Measuring passion

You can download the first in the part of the SMPS Marketer article on Metrics at the Wordpress version of this blog at http://www.constructionmarketingideas.com.I'm working on the second of a series of articles for the SMPS Marketer about the effective use of metrics in architectural, engineering and construction industry marketing. Yesterday, my ears perked up when the marketing representative for a highly successful West Coast architect said her practice had discovered a way to measure "passion". (I don't have permission yet to share who the architect is, but hopefully will soon.)She said every project and pursuit is coded into the architect's...

Read More

Enterprise pricing -- how to collect $100 for $10 in real value

I prefer to sit in the big seats in the front of the plane. How do airlines get away with charging five to 10 times the price for the trip to the same destination as the economy seat travellers pay. (Of course, I never actually pay the real business class fares, but many do. Why?)As a business owners I want to run for the hills when I see signs of "enterprise pricing". As a marketer, I drool. Nothing is better for increasing your margins than the ability to disassociate the actual cost of your service from the decision-making process to purchase it."Enterprise pricing" is the ability of business-to-business marketers to grossly inflate the...

Read More

The planning meeting (2)

The setting for the 2008-2009 planning meeting, a secluded lake chalet. We held this year's meeting at a dining room table at consultant Bill Caswell's Ottawa residence. The result: A strenuous and somewhat tiring day -- but we got (most of) the job done, and began to shape the picture for a much better year in 2010. Planning is essential, even if sometimes it can be painful in hard times.The planning meeting yesterday proved to be long, tiring, and somewhat strenuous -- and as the clock ticked and our minds started frying with fatigue -- we concluded it without working through a key element of the planning process, the 2010 expense projections....

Read More

The annual planning meeting

Today is our annual planning meeting. Things are a far cry from last year, when we rented a Quebec chalet for $1,000, and employees flew in from North Carolina, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. I shudder to think about the overall budget for the event, including consulting fees, travel, and time.The recession had just started hitting, and we spent a fair bit of time discussing whether it would hit us. In fact, we made some strategic decisions to bolster our position including a rather creative one to raise our prices. (This actually proved to be wise; sales certainly dropped, but I don't think it was the price increase that caused the decline...

Read More

The start-up marketing challenge (2)

Yesterday, I asked members of the Remodelcrazy.com forums how they solved the start-up challenge. The answer, three people reported, is "business cards" -- lots of them -- but not just blind distribution. It is a selling effort.Consider this posting of Rory Swain of Servicez Unlimited Inc., a Washington, D.C. area contractor. My first year in business in D.C. . . . ALL of my business came from handing out business cards. I would give out 20-30 a day seven days a week . . . I also stopped and talked to everyone I handed out cards to.Usually at least one or two of the persons I gave cards to had a project or knew someone that needed work done.Within...

Read More

The start-up marketing challenge

Start-up architectural, engineering and construction practices/businesses have the standard "experience" problem plaguing prospective employees either just getting started, or starting a new career.You don't have experience, and no one will give you a chance without experience and verifiable references. This is especially painful for public projects, where supposedly the competition is fair, but you require a bond, and surety companies won't touch you with a ten foot pole.If you are a renovator, designer, or the like, how are you going to stand out from the clutter of really bad hacks, willing to work for next to nothing, and what kind of clients...

Read More

Finding your way: Self employment, start-up focus and marketing

Yesterday, I had coffee with a friend who I've known for many years. Formerly employed by a major corporation, over his life, his pay cheques have probably been much larger than mine (we've never discussed specific salary or income levels: bad manners to do that, of course.)He's seen shifts, changes, bumps and grinds, and experienced the painful reality of corporate life: When decisions are made outside your control, you can be victims of corporate misfortunes not your fault.His challenge now: He doesn't know exactly what to do, and his explorations in starting up in business for himself have had their share of disappointments.He started...

Read More

Learning marketing lessons from the scammers

As construction industry marketers, should we spend some time learning the scammers' tricks? This is a challenging question because, of course, great scammers are also brilliant marketers.They are able to pull the wool over your eyes enough that you part with your money and beliefs for something that is only in their self-serving imagination.Scammers, of course, distort the concept of trust -- they win your trust through trickery and psychological manipulation, and then destroy it. Scammers create fear in the marketplace. You distrust strangers, "too good to be true" marketing messages, and sales pitches. Trouble is, the best scammers are...

Read More

Craftmanship or Systems: Which is best?

The Mountain Equipment Co-Op building in Ottawa, one of the award-winning projects of Christopher Simmonds Architect.Yesterday, I met with Chris Simmonds, an Ottawa architect who won the Peoples' Choice Award in the recent Greater Ottawa Home Builders' Association housing design awards competition for a luxurious home in Mississagua, near Toronto. (He entered the home in the "open" category as it is obviously far away from the Ottawa market area.) His practice -- he has a team of about 10 -- has built luxury residences, community facilities, and environmentally sensitive institutional buildings. "Underneath the hood" is an incredibly brilliant...

Read More

The competitive impetus

Yesterday, I received a call from someone who noticed a long -established competitor is responding to his group's initiatives with changes and improvements to the competitive site.We agreed that this can be seen in a flattering light; if your ideas are good enough that they are being copied, you are on the right track. Nevertheless, the question is, what should you do when you see the competitor sniffing around in your "space" and, seemingly, stealing your ideas.One solution, not recommended except for those with very deep pockets, is to bring the lawyers out, as has happened recently with Reed and McGraw-Hill Construction. These mega-corporations...

Read More

Three rules for construction marketing success

Here are three rules which will virtually ensure you have a sustainable and successful, construction marketing strategy.Create incredible (free) experiences for current and potential clients, delivering value far beyond their expectations.Get your suppliers -- the organizations to which you give money -- to pay for your marketing.Consider creative "inversions" of the above two rules to surprise the market and achieve marketing star status.You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that when you put the first two elements together, you can generate extremely effective marketing at truly low cost. You reach the level of brilliance when...

Read More

Winning Awards: Scale, quality and marketing

My wife and I have attended the Greater Ottawa Home Builders Association Housing Design Awards Gala for 17 years. We have reason to be there, even though we aren't home builders and have never designed one. With my ongoing responsibility to publish the association's internal newsletter, The GOHBA Impact!, I'm there in a journalistic capacity.However, with a week before our firm publishing deadline, and the fact the awards are extensively covered by the local daily media, I don't need to "work" that hard as a journalist during the evening. We can soak up the atmosphere and, today, I can discuss some general concepts about the awards and award-winning...

Read More

Pumpkin marketing

Michael Stone, I believe, hits a marketing home run with this suggestion in his recent Markup and Profit Blog posting:If you ever read the Peanuts comic strip, you’ll remember Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin. The Great Pumpkin appears on Halloween and does something (I can’t remember what). Here is my take on pumpkins and your business. Many of us have small farms nearby selling pumpkins. How about offering the owner a lump sum for 100 – 150 – 200 pumpkins? You figure out what it’s worth and make an offer. Then send a note to all former and future potential customers telling them they can take their kids or grandkids to the farm, using the...

Read More

Metrics; The SMPS Marketer article and survey

After several months, my story: Marketing Metrics: Measuring Your Results has been published in The SMPS Marketer.You can read it by clicking on this link, or by visiting the Wordpress version of this blog at http://www.constructionmarketingideas.com.The article makes the point that measuring your marketing methodologies is an important element in achieving business success, but acknowledges that this isn't always an easy thing to do (and that some highly successful architectural, engineering and construction businesses don't have formal measuring programs.)P.S. Can you catch the typo that might really impact my ability to measure the results,...

Read More

Competitive intelligence, marketing, and confidentiality: The Reed - McGraw-Hill Lawsuit

A story of competitive intelligence with marketing intent has come to earth with the filing of a lawsuit by Reed Construction Data against McGraw-Hill Construction Dodge.The suit charges that Dodge has unlawfully accessed confidential and trade secret information from RCD since 2002 by using a series of fake companies to pose as RCD customers. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks an unspecified amount in lost profits and punitive damages, trial by jury, and injunctive relief as a result of Dodge’s misuse of RCD’s proprietary construction project information, Reed announced in a news release....

Read More

It's free -- who pays?

An increasing number of postings on the Design and Construction Network's discussion group are selling messages. If groups allow too many of these to dominate the board, real discussion dries up, and the group loses its relevance.One of the great challenges in the online world is that access is both free and easy. This means the conventional barriers to the wide distribution of mediocrity or irritation are greatly reduced, so much that appears on line is less than inspired.We build our own filters to keep this junk out of our lives. Spamblocks stop much of the stuff, and our common sense causes us to quickly hit "delete" to the garbage that...

Read More

Social networking and construction marketing

Partial results from our survey on the use of social networking sites for the construction industry. If you wish to participate, just click on the image or this link. You'll be able to review the results of the survey overall once you complete it. Your identity will be anonymous unless you wish to share it.How effective are the new "social networking" technologies including Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.com for construction industry marketing? And how can you use these resources most effectively.I've decided to look closely into these matters for an article I'm writing for the Design and Construction Report, a publication born out of the...

Read More

DimDim and interactivity

We've all heard about webinars and some of us have participated in them. Even fewer have hosted -- in part because of the cost of setting up the system.A relatively new service, dimdim.com has solved many of these problems in co-ordinating online interactive meeting with video and two-way communication. I first learned about this resource from the Design an Construction Network when a meeting to discuss how to use Twitter effectively "sold out" (it was free, of course) in less than 20 minutes.I haven't used the system yet except for some experimentation, but it appears to have all the functionality you could want in more expensive resources, and creates an intriguing opportunity (I think) for you to develop online programs and community activities.I've set up two DimDim meetings for this...

Read More

Ottawa Renovates -- September 2009

We've just published the second issue of Ottawa Renovates, a consumer magazine. The project has proven that you can extend your business beyond its original scope if you think rationally and set up appropriate joint venture agreements and partnerships. The challenge when you stretch yourself away from your core competencies is the risk of cannibalizing your existing resources and (more significantly) diverting your energies on the sideline project.I think the key to deciding whether to go ahead with a project that stretches you beyond your core competencies is the question of how much of your existing talents and resources support the new business,...

Read More

Humble Pie

Yesterday, in baring my soul about the challenges of converting this blog's construction marketing leads to business, I inadvertently practiced one of the most effective marketing principals, in admitting my flaws.After the posting, two readers sent some truly constructive suggestions (I will quote from their emails once I receive their permission to share their insights publicly), and we received several highly qualified leads which are worthy of follow-up.Sometimes it makes sense to be humble in your marketing. The reason is authenticity. Most of us know no one (or almost no one) is perfect; by getting down to earth and showing our weaknesses...

Read More

My two biggest marketing weaknesses

I'm happy this blog has top ranking for relevant "construction marketing" Google keywords. Despite this accomplishment, things aren't perfect around here, with two rather large and as yet unresolved marketing quandaries.Maybe you have some of the same problems in your own business and possibly you have faced -- and solved -- these issues.Disconnect between the leads/initial inquiries I am receiving and my actual serviceThis blog continues to generate between one and five inbound inquiries/leads a day -- with requests for the "Art and Science of Publicity", sign-ups for the free e-letter, or calls or emails seeking marketing insights.But virtually...

Read More