Start doing the basics yourself, set up a google listing, social media etc. Try local google ads etc. This is all that marketing agencies will do but will charge you big $$$. Want them to create content, write blog posts etc? costs even more to the point where you can just hire a full time marketing person. Advertising is VERY competitive
Thanks. I have all this done already, although there is certainly room for improvement. I feel like we have a small SEO impact/presence but nowhere near the point where it's bringing in consistent leads, let alone ones from the right clients. I've thought about google ads and I think they have potential, but then again the people I want to attract probably aren't sitting around googling "signs near me". I think the perspective clients I want to attract are more so on LinkedIn and I've had a consultation with one of their ads people. It was a free consultation and was actually pretty helpful, they suggested I start with some generalized "introduction" posts for a while before throwing any money at it. They daily budgets jump up pretty quick if you're targeting a broad area.
I think we have discussed my experience with hiring a marketing company, but thought I would chime in Incase it helps someone else.
December of 2023 I decided to hire a company to help me with SEO on my website, I was ranking well for some things, but other products were not ranking very well. I set up some meetings with a few SEO marketing companies, being careful to try to avoid the ones based overseas as I've heard horror stories about them. I got a few quotes for around $700-900 per month, but none of the companies really clicked with me.
I got a call from a marketing company I do print work for, I asked them about SEO and they told me that they do offer it and put me in touch with their "SEO Guy", he put together a plan and seems to be really knowledgeable and realistic. They quoted me $1500 / month and set up a 12 month timeline and schedule of what they would do each month. I decided to give it a shot, we had the budget for it and I've never been serious about SEO, up until now I just did basic things that I read about online and used a SEO plugin on our site.
For the first 3 months, they spent their time on the backend of the site, making sure things were setup properly, images were optimized, the site loaded quickly etc. after that they alternated between writing blog posts and writing "off page" content to generate back links.
Every month they would send me a report, but it was may as well be written in russian for all I could understand it, they did explain it, but I don't have a brain for that type of data.
Well, this last December was the end of our 1 year contract, and I'm not renewing. here are they key takeaways that I learned:
- The marketing company didn't seem to take the time to learn about the product, I could be selling shampoo or shoes, I think their approach would have been the same
- While I did get a sizeable increase in visitors to my site and a lot of quote requests through the web form, 90% of it was for small orders, or tire kickers, I did get a few decent sized orders that I can attribute to the increased visibility, most of the jobs that came through were a waste of time.
- The content that they created seemed to be written by AI, there were a number of factual errors that I needed to correct, this could also be due to their lack of understanding of my products.
At the end of the year, I did not feel it made financial sense, as a business owner, I would need to see an increase in profits of those products of at least 3x what I spent on the SEO to make it worthwhile, I didn't see even close to that
The key takeaways I got from the past year:
- Google likes updated content, if you have a blog on your site, post on a semi-regular basis, this can be anything, case studies, use-cases for certain products etc. Chat GPT can pretty much write these for you, just need to tweak it a bit.
- The perticular products I sell, do not have a huge amount of online competition, it is fairly easy to rank on the first page of Google, I don't need a marketing company to do this.
SEO is different from marketing, but I felt it was the best place to put my marketing budget, perhaps I was wrong, there are a bunch of different types of marketing, do you know what types of marketing would work best for you?
I do remember you sharing your experience with the SEO marketing and although I did consider going this route, I keep coming back to the fact that even IF we could get SEO to start paying off, it would be driving people to our site that isn't currently a super accurate indicator of what we do and what to do.
I've had similar experiences with marketing agencies, marketing experts etc. None of them could raise sales enough to cover their own fee, drop in ROI with ads if you include their fees
A commission incentivized sales person, boots on the ground type marketing person would work better IMO for a sign shop type business
Not being able to bring in their own fee would be a huge concern, and something I'll be sure to mention if I speak to some local agencies. I know there are no guarantees in this game and that results may vary, it takes time etc etc but I want some sort of assurances that my hard earned money would eventually generate more than what was invested in marketing.
One of the quickest ROI's you can do is to market yourself to your existing clients. How many times have you heard "oh I didn't know you did that". Your existing clients already trust you and like working with you, and you're already on boarded in their system.
Also, don't be afraid to ask for referrals, a well written email asking if they know of anyone else in their industry who might benefit from your services goes a long way. Much like you know a lot of people in this industry and can refer people around, so can they.
I agree with Victor, start with the basics of online marketing,.make sure your Google business page is setup, make sure your websites content is written for the type of client you want to attract, photos should have their alt tags properly filled in etc. This alone will put you in the top 10% of sign shop websites lol.
Thanks for this. I'm starting to realize that this is probably the smartest and most efficient way to potentially drum up some more business. In the graph of ways to increase sales, selling new products to existing clients is sure to be the simplest and most cost-effective option.
What are your product lines and what are your target markets? I've never worked with a marketing company. I have had sales experience in several industries (and of course this includes signage). We are very fortunate to get a lot of our business through referrals. I have seen a great deal of success with bidding, but not everyone wants to enter that competitive arena. One of our clients does a fantastic job at relationship building sales. He's very friendly, sincerely trying to help, and is confident (or will find out if he doesn't know) about his products. That's my least favorite way to sell. I am not a fan of the golfing, meals, lunch and learns sales tactics.
Like most sign shops, our existing product lines are huge. In typical sign shop fashion, we (almost) sell anything to anyone. I've become more selective over the years and will turn down anything related to exterior electrical signs, paper products, and apparel. I'll also turn down anything that isn't worth our while or sounds like a headache.
What we mostly do, and what I want to focus all our efforts on, is work with construction clients. General Contractors, Builders, Electrical Contractors, Heavy Construction, Mining, etc. From small local guys to national companies, we work with these companies well and I believe we do a great job servicing them. We know how they operate and how they expect things to be done. We provide them with coroplast site signs, fleet graphics, pipe markers, equipment decals etc.
It's not that what we do is necessarily super unique or different than other shops, it's more that we've gotten really good at servicing these clients and we speak their language.
These are the loose goals I've come up with, after thinking about what my answer would be when a marketing person will ask what we're trying to achieve:
-Position ourselves as the authority when it comes to signs & graphics for the construction industry
-Create branding guidelines and image for future advertising
-Redesign website to match our new image and audience
-Redesign & print new brochures/sell sheets
-Create an introductory campaign “re-introducing” the “new” company
-Create an ongoing campaign to boost traffic to site and increase leads from the right target market
Some of those things I suppose I can do myself, I guess it's just the initial "positioning" part that I'm struggling with. I really want our brand identity to resonate with the right people and portray us as the professional, seasoned company that we really are. I've read lots of marketing & business books and I can probably struggle my way through this part, but I feel like it's a very important first step & foundation that all the other marketing efforts will be built on.
Phew, that was a mouthful. I appreciate the feedback so far and welcome any more you guys have on this.
