When a customer needs work completed on their home or business, they’ll look for a contractor and decide who to hire. Will they hire you?
Here’s a wake-up call for most contractors: your brand tells your customer whether or not they should hire you.
A brand is made up of a number of factors, but let’s start with the most obvious — your company name, colors, logo and slogan. These simple building blocks of a brand can actually help or hurt your customer acquisition.
In this article, you’ll read about how to look closely at your brand and determine whether it’s helping you or hurting you, and we’ll ask a series of questions to help you examine your brand more closely and decide if your brand is working for you.
3 Key brand questions to ask
When customers want to hire a contractor, they’re looking for a certain combination of qualities: some are looking for integrity and trustworthiness, others are looking for the cheapest service possible, others want speed, others want to know that your workmanship will last for years. There are other qualities as well and every customer has their own preferred mix of these qualities.
So the first question you need to ask is: what qualities do our best customers look for? For example, maybe your best customers aren’t looking for the cheapest service; perhaps they’re looking for integrity and workmanship. You need to first figure out who you want as customers and figure out what qualities they look for a contractor.
When you know this answer, you can create a new brand or adjust an existing brand to encourage the right customers to hire you and the wrong customers to avoid you.
Once you have that small list of qualities (probably two or three at most), then it’s time to look at your brand itself.
So the second question you need to ask is: does our brand reflect the qualities that our best customers are looking for? This is where it gets challenging for contractors who realize that their brand doesn’t communicate that information.
Building from the example earlier: if a customer is looking for integrity and workmanship, which contractor are they more likely going to hire — company called Integrity Contracting (with the slogan, “serving customers since 1965”) or a company called John Smith Contracting (with the slogan, “affordable contracting services”)? Of course they’d response more positively to the first one.
And now it’s time to think about the future. So the third question you need to ask is: how do we want to grow? Some contractors are fine building a trusted local business that they can pass down to their children, while others want to build a large company that they hope to expand.
There’s nothing wrong with either approach, but this too should be communicated in your brand. If your brand is John Smith and Sons Contracting (with the slogan, “serving the town of Springfield”) then you get an idea of what this company’s goal is, versus a company called National Contracting Services (with the slogan, “The name that Americans trust for contracting service”).
If you want to own a massive national contracting business someday then build the brand for it right now. If you want to be a Fortune 500 brand in a few years, create that brand right now, even if you only have two customers.
Making changes to your brand
Most contractors don’t want to spend a lot of time on their brand. They’d rather put something on the side of their truck and then get out into the field and start serving customers. But customers aren’t industry experts and they don’t know what you can or can’t do, or whether one contractor or another is the best one to hire.
So you can help to guide the decision of these prospective customers, and ensure that you are hired by more of the right customers (and not hired by the wrong ones!) by building a brand that communicates in the right way.
Decide what kind of customers you want to attract and how you want to grow your business, and then you need to create a brand that tells the world you’re on the way.
Once you’ve examined your brand from these angles, you may find yourself applying certain tweaks to your brand to ensure that you’re communicating most effectively to the right customers — to communicate specific qualities and to position your company for the future.