Articles and advice on how to market your contracting business are very important. But just as important is advice on what not to do. You can follow the tips that people give you on how to market, but they won’t do you much good if you go about it in the wrong way. Here are 3 good examples of the most common marketing mistakes that contractors make.

1. Not focusing on your specific market - To be successful in today’s competitive marketplace, you must focus your marketing solely in the Contracting Business field. And this is especially true if you’re on a limited marketing budget. If you ignore this advice and try to market to a large general audience before first becoming the  leader in the contracting market, I can all but assure that you will go broke and out of business in a pretty expedient manner. However, if you do decide to focus on serving your contractors business market, you greatly increase your chances for business success with far less financial risk.

2. Focusing on features instead of benefits - A feature explains a fact about what a product does as a specification. For example, a new asphalt product on the market is made partly from recycled rubber. That is a fact about the asphalt - it has recycled rubber. The problem with only listing a feature is that a feature does not explain how it benefit’s the company buying it. Why would you want asphalt with recycled rubber ? The answer to that question is the benefit. Recycled rubber adds an extra adherent quality to the other ingredients, and because it‘s recycled, you’re doing your part to help the environment. The benefit is the positive end result. People buy benefits, not features. Therefore, in your marketing, you absolutely must focus on benefits instead of features. The more powerful you can make your benefits, the more successful your marketing will be.

3. Not marketing on a consistent basis - On any given day, a market will only have about 1-3% of its population interested in buying your product or service. For example, let’s say you are a home remodeling contractor and you meet with 100 home owners. On any given day, only about 1-3 people may be interested in buying your services. That means up to 99% will not be interested right now. However, in a week, a month, or a year, they may be ready to buy because their needs have changed. If you are only doing your marketing on a one-time basis, you are missing out on 99% of the market that may buy from you in the future. That is why you must consistently market to your target market month after month forever.  If you advertise on the Television, don’t run your ads for a month and stop. Keep it up month after month. Think of it as out of sight, out of mind. If you are not constantly marketing to your target audience so your name and the benefits of your services is in fresh in their minds, they will forget about you very quickly and buy from the company that is consistently marketing to them.

If you follow the advice given in this article, I can all but ensure you that you will see an increase in the success of your marketing program and your business will grow and prosper.