Are you the best electrician in the world… Prove it and win $70k!

Transcript

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Hey, guys. James Rest here from Marketing Secrets for Electricians. And today we're looking or talking about are you the best electrician in the world? And if you can prove it, you can win up to 70K. I love it.

I haven't seen something in our industry like this ever and thought it'd be fun. So here's what I hear a lot. How do normal electricians like us? Who are properly trained and licensed, who are not willing to cheat and take shortcuts and who are wanting to own a successful electrical business. How do we compete against the big guys who own the market share or the guys that charge peanuts for an electrical job?

On top of that, we want to employ the best electricians so we can get off the tools and have plenty of time for other areas of life. That's the question. Join me and follow along as we search for the answers. is James Rest and welcome to Marketing Secrets for Electricians. So I found this article on Fox Business and did some research and found out that it ranked up 1.2 million interactions on Facebook, which is insane.

Now, I love this because it's a great example of a company providing so much value that its customers spread the word. It takes feet of its own. It runs off and people just can't stop talking about whatever it is you have brought to the table. And would that not be amazing if we could get your business in front of 1 million people or 1 million people see and know about your brand, your company. That doesn't happen every day.

So what I like to do is break it down and review what it is this company is and how I think it went. So first off, they are an American based company that provides tools and equipment for guess what? Electricians. So I haven't told you what the ad is yet. I'll get to that later on.

What the name of the company is Ideal Industries and their ideal customer is anyone in the electrical trade. And then researching their ideal customers, they found out what issues they are facing. What is the which in this case is a skill shortage of electricians and they came up with their own solution, a competition to help raise awareness and get more people to see being an electrician as a good career choice for the first year they, which was in 2016, they had about 25,000 people join in this new electrical competition and it was such a success. It's grown to over a hundred thousand plus competitors and continuing to increase. So the best part of this for Ideal Industries is they are getting their products right in front of their ideal customers.

So during the time of the competition, they're talking about how good their products are, their tools are, their materials, what electricians can use to do the job. They need their tools. They're marketing their tools as the thing that electricians need to be a successful electrician. So that's part of their marketing campaign while you're at the event and spreading awareness of the company, of the tools, electricians are talking about it. So it's a really good marketing campaign.

Before I continue, I want to review the process Ideal Industries went through. So, or I think they went through. So this might help inspire you to come up with something for your electrical business that you can use to help grow your company. So I've broken it down to the three steps. Now I'm not saying this is what they actually did.

This is what I see as an industry. I'm outside looking in at the process and the steps are step one is who is your ideal customer? Step two is what is the problem that they have in the industry or they just have in general? And step three is what is your solution that you can provide for them? So that's the three steps.

And now I'm going to go run through an example for you. So let's look at step one. Who is your ideal customer? Now this can be anyone really, however, it's better. If you niche down and it's related to your company, you as a person, so you can relate what connections you have.

And this is where every electrical business I think should have a different ideal customer because each person, you, the electrician in charge of it is different. There's no question about it. So anyway, you got to niche down and find out who your ideal customer is. In this case, I'm going to say it's for me, say a stay at home mom is who has a one or two year old baby. Now step two, what problem are they having?

So you're a mom, you're at home. And let's say you're worried about the baby getting electrocuted. For example, I've seen an ad a while ago where they have a kid climbing up on to the kitchen bench and putting a knife in a toaster. Like, you know, maybe they have that fear in their thought and they're like, I remember that ad, but how do I know if my baby's safe? They don't know about RCDs.

They don't know about safety switches. They're just like, this could be a stress point for them. So their question, their head is how do I protect my baby from an electrical shock? And this is where you come in in step three is you want to provide a solution. So how are you going to help them now makes it easier or or it's better if you can say, talk to, for example, you've got a wife and a kid at home, talk to your wife, but that might still be a bit close because you're an electrician.

So maybe a friend or someone else or even a past customer, you could go back and say, hey, I see you've got a two year old and run through the situation and talk to them and discuss, hey, do you know this? Do you know that? Find out what they're thinking, what they understand so you can help create something of value that you can offer the next person that is the next person that is your ideal customer and then you can give them this particular product. So from the conversation, you want to figure out what is your kind of five point checklist or some kind of document or checklist that's easy for them to digest and read and for them to start understanding what they need to do. It could be like, hey, you need to check that you've got this in the house.

You need to do this, you need to do this, you need to do this. And just it doesn't have to be long. It can just be simple, but it scratches that itch. So it solves that problem and they're like, ah, I feel safe. I feel that my baby is safe in my house and isn't going to electrocute it.

Now this is like a big relief for them. So I hope that makes sense. And then you can offer this for free to your potential customers. So they have like, for example, they haven't done any business with you, but you could like run a Facebook ad, run a Google campaign. You can hand out flyers when like how you get the message out there is another kind of topic.

But essentially you're giving value to your ideal customer and they will read it and maybe they won't need you right now, but you provide enough value to start the relationship. They're like, ah, this guy's okay. He's helped me out. And the next time they're like, hey, I need an electrician to X, Y and Z. Who are they going to call you who helped them or some random electrician off the street who's done nothing for them?

And there's like no trust, no value there. Now let's get back to this article with 1.2 million interactions. It's called electrician shortage, six figure salary job. If you want to search in Google, she'll come up or I'll leave a link in the description for you to go check it out. But I'll give you a quick summary.

It talks about the skilled trades gap, especially for electricians and how there's going to be a massive trade shortage in the year 2026. And they're estimating that about 60,000, like there'll be a shortage of 60,000 electricians in America. And in my opinion, this is great news. If you currently are electrician, I would be expecting a pay rise because of supply and demand, which I've kind of touched on obviously. But to help bridge the skills gap, there's this guy called Jim James from Ideal Industries and he started this competition.

So he started it as a marketing strategy. That was it. Right. So he created a competition for electricians and their apprentices and where they're giving away like half a million dollars worth of prizes if you add it up. But essentially if you go there, you compete against the other electricians, you can come home with up to a $70,000 price, which is cool.

And but even the what I find better is you claim the title, essentially you claim the title of best electrician or apprentice for that year. So best electrician 2020, that is a awesome thing to not brag about, but use as a as the leverage in your marketing. So you might want to use it in marketing by saying, hey, don't use any electrician or get the best electrician of 2020 to do your work or feel safe knowing that the best electrician is on the job. And even if your apprentice is there, you can use that in your message. Tell your customers, talk about this.

This is a thing I don't think electricians don't do enough of is make noise, talk about what's going on in your business to your customers. So they get to know you, who you are, because the better, the more you talk, more chances you have a building relationship. And if you build a relationship, they're going to trust you over some other electrician. So if you want to find out more about this electoral competition or electricians competition, you can and even join in and go for it. Go to IdealNations.com.

I'll also leave a link in the descriptions for you. But then for me, the next question arises, what if what if you go to this competition where there's over 100,000 other electrical competitors and you don't win? Would it not be a waste of time? And then you wouldn't be able to use it for marketing and all that. And if you went just so you could claim that title, you know, that type of thing.

And it costs you money. So you spend all this money and you haven't got the 70K, you haven't got the 10K, which is like the third prize and you didn't win. You say even came last. Well, the good news is that even if you don't win, you're the last electrician there, you're the like worst electrician of 2020. You can still take advantage of that.

I wouldn't say you're the worst electrician, but in your marketing, you can use the strategy in your electrical business, even if you are the last one. Now, how you might do that is a topic I want to dive deeper into into a future episode. So until then, if you like this episode, please like comment on iTunes or if you're going to go to the games, you've been to electrical games. Let me know, reach out, share your story. Love to hear from you and thanks for listening.

Have you ever wondered how that electrical contractor came to be so popular, have so many customers and what they did to get there? And let's face it, a bit jealous that your business isn't quite there yet. Well, I'm doing a interview video series where we're interviewing these electrical contractors, getting the gems of knowledge and what they've learned over the course of time that they've run their business to get it to that point. We're not only going to cover how they got there, but what pitfalls they ran into along the way so you don't have to go through them yourself. And you can go straight to ideally having that success or implementing things straight away that lead to your business growing a lot faster than it otherwise would have.

So if you're interested in getting and listening to this video series course, you can go to marketingsecretsforelectrician.com and I'll see you there. [MUSIC PLAYING]