The Basics of Electrical Contractor Marketing

Electrical Contracting Credentials

It’s surprising how often electrical contractor enter their market without the proper training. Electricians operating without the proper training, experience, and licensing are susceptible to fines and lawsuits.

In most states, it is illegal to advertise or operate without the proper licensing. Additionally, being a fully-credentialed electrical contractor gives operators more credibility when marketing their business.

If you’ve not already done so, be sure to check your state and municipal requirements for practicing electricians. You will need these certifications to build your business properly.

Establishing Your Brand

Creating a brand accomplishes two things:

• It makes your business more memorable to your target market; and,
• It sets you apart from your competitors.

The key to creating your brand is understanding how your prospective clients will perceive your business. With strong brand positioning, you can influence an audience’s perception of who you are and what you do.

Your brand usually consists of the following elements:

• Registered business name
• Logo
• Messaging

If you are well-connected with your target audience, you may be able to establish your own brand. It’s important to find out if your business name is available with the Secretary of State. When you’re ready to create a website, you’ll need to find an available domain name that matches your brand.

Thankfully, there are seasoned marketing professionals that can help you build your brand or rebrand your business to help you connect with your audience.

Establishing Your Online Presence

In this day and age, you need a website, as well as business listings with online directories. Without these tools, customers won’t find you easily, and they will flock to your competitors.

Your online presence includes any place where you feature your brand. For most professional service businesses, an online presence includes a website, social media profiles, and online directory listings. 

Unless you are professionally trained to establish and maintain these online presences, you risk damaging your brand if you try to create them yourself. Poorly-built websites and profiles can confuse - or worse - repel leads. Professionally-built online presences attract leads and provide clear information about how you can help your clients.

Turning Your Objectives into Marketing KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

As we’ve established, your business needs leads, calls, and clients. Your key performance indicators, or KPIs, are milestones you create to help you inch closer to your objectives.

For example, suppose it takes 240 website visitors before you generate a lead. From this information, you can set a KPI of 2,400 web visitors to generate 10 new leads every month from your website. Or, maybe you get one paying client for every 7 leads. Another KPI might be 70 leads, resulting in an average of 10 new paying clients every month.

Reverse Engineering the “Buyer's Journey”

Setting KPIs requires you to “reverse engineer” the “buyer's journey.” In other words, your KPIs illustrate the path that a paying customer takes from the moment they are exposed to your brand to the point of sale.

Marketers refer to the times when you engage the customer (or your customer engages you) as touchpoints. Every industry and business has an ideal number of touchpoints per paying customer. 

Mapping the buyer’s journey for your clients shows you how easy it is for your customers to do business with you. You can track these touchpoints through KPIs, and then you can develop new marketing strategies to improve your KPIs over time.

For example, after realizing that your website doesn’t make it easy for visitors to get in contact with you, you consult your web developer to update your website. As a result, you find that it only takes 180 web visitors (instead of 240) to generate a lead. Thanks to this improvement, you can adjust your KPIs and achieve better results.