Episode 25 · Customers & positioning
Build your well before your thirsty!
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Hey guys, it's James here from Marketing Secrets for Electricians and I've just finished a podcast episode for fine electricians near me and this is gonna go along with same lines because I think it's relevant to what we're doing here and it's essentially build your well before you're thirsty. 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.
So, what do I mean by build your well before you're thirsty? There's actually a book on this by some guy that I have never actually read the book but the title kind of gives great meaning or gives you an idea about the purpose. So, if you're thirsty, essentially you need water. So, let's dig the well before we need water because we're gonna know we need water. In the case of a business, electrical business, water is customers, is cash flow.
That's the life blood of the business and if you're in business as an electrician, you're going to need customers. So, let's build basically a customer base before you need them and essentially what you could do, say for example, you have no work on tomorrow, the day before, you could send an email out to this customer base and you could be like, "Hey, got this special deal?" or whatever the case may be, make some kind of offer. So, you would offer them something special and say, "Hey, it's only for tomorrow and it is because you only have the next day." And then you're busy on work again. So, this could be like you could use one of the powers of marketing which is like a scarce resource. You're like, "I can only do this tomorrow.
It's a true thing and it's scarcity. So, let's take that and use that in your marketing and if you have a list, if you have an email system set up, all you would have to do is click a button essentially and it's away and you would probably get a couple people calling up or booking you in depending upon how you've got your business automation set up for your electrical business. So, how important is this list? And essentially, we don't call it a list in the electrical game. It's basically customers.
Someone calls you, you go there, do a job and you get paid. That's essentially the best their basic minimum requirements for an electrical job. But if on the other hand, instead of just doing that, you grabbed their contact details, either a, you know, it could be Facebook now, it could be telephone number, it could be an email, whichever point the main thing is you have some way of contacting them again. So, you can make them offers or talk to them or continue building their relationship and in marketing, there's a theory that for every customer you have on your list, you should be making about $1 per month. So, if you have a hundred, you have a thousand, you have ten thousand, you should be able to make that monthly as a rule of thumb.
So, in your business, how many people, how many, so there's also two types. So, there's customers and there's like leads. So, customers are the ones that have purchased from you and there they would have, they're like more valuable because they've actually pulled the wallet out and hired you and purchased your services. Whereas the leads, they're like people who have like an electrician or I'm interested in electrical work, but I haven't yet for whatever reason made that commitment to get the job done. So, these two people are part of a list and essentially you would have two separate lists.
So, one for your customers and one for that people that have not purchased. Now, going back to build your well before your thirsty, how can you build a list right now, today, whenever you're listening to this, what do you need to do in order to build that list? One thing, for example, is to start marketing on Facebook. You could do a video if you're at a job in the car, hit record, say hey, I'm such and such, I'm an electrician, I'm in the area, do you need electrical work done? Click here to find out more and or comment in the links below.
It could be as simple as that. Like, I think we try and over complicate how we do the work we do, especially like marketing can seem like a big beast, I guess, but we can simplify it down to what is the next step I need to do. If you could pull out your phone, go on Facebook live and just talk like about who, what and why and where you want them to go essentially. So, who are you? What, what do you want them to do?
Why you want them to do it? Why I find is a very important thing and click here to find out more or comment below and I'll give you a free something or comment below and I'll come around to your house now and say, say hello. And we can look at your for a free quote, for example, on installing that ceiling fan or whatever you want done. So it's right now working towards building your list. So when the day comes and there will come a day when you have no work, you can email or contact everyone on your list to fill up that empty space.
And if you have other electricians under you in your business, you're going to need that more so to help regulate the work. So there's kind of depends on how deep we go here, but there's different ways of getting leads or building that list. One is going on Facebook and advertising. The other way might be Google. There is like YouTube.
There's Instagram. There's all these different ways to market yourself. The main thing is, are you actually marketing? Are you putting energy behind it? And if you are, what returns are you seeing?
So are you measuring the returns like your marketing efforts, especially if you're spending money, even if it's like, you know, doing SEO blogs, this type of stuff, you still want to see returns, especially if you're paying for it. But that's also a longer term term view. So you're going to wait in SEO. You're probably going to wait at least three to six months to start seeing some results for your efforts. Whereas if you want to use paid ads, you could do a video right now, put it up on Facebook, hit the boost button.
And within the next day or so, you could essentially see the results of that ad or that video or that doesn't have to be a video. It can be a picture of the work you just just did. So all these things you can start to do now. The trick is not to wait. There's many reasons not to take action, not to press record.
But I would encourage you to do so because the more you do it, essentially the easier it gets to do the thing. And the more content you put out, the more chances you have of being found and guess what? If you get found, more chances are you're going to get more leads and more leads equals more work, which means you have more business, which means you can make more money and change your life and hide new stuff and do the things that you want to do. So just a small act of doing a video, add a blog post, whatever that thing is for your marketing efforts. Do it daily on a consistent basis and you will see results.
And if you're not seeing results, you will change. You'll need to change. something. So it's test, do test and repeat and keep doing that. And I guarantee you'll get some leads from it.
That's all I got for today. I hope that helps. Talk to you soon. Are you an electrician looking to market your business? When I first started, I didn't have a clue.
The trade school that I went to, they didn't really help. So over the years I've managed to find a way that it works effectively, scalable, and you can basically put it on automation. Once you've set up, if you're interested in implementing this in your business or discussing marketing in any fashion, come join us in the Facebook group. You can go there by going to marketingelectrician.com and clicking on the Facebook button. See you in the group.
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