Q4 Marketing Tips Part 1: Perfecting Your Marketing Plan

The 4th quarter of the year is shoulder season for many contractors—October and November is the perfect time to examine your marketing efforts! Even if you’re in peak season right now, it never hurts to examine your marketing plan and determine if you need to add a few steps to yours. Read on as we uncover the top Q4 marketing tips for contractors.

8 Tips for Perfecting Your Marketing Plan for the 4th Quarter (and Beyond!)

This is a lot of information to digest. We get it. If you have any questions please reach out to your marketing coordinator for further details and ideas on how to setup your 4th quarter marketing plan. iMarket Solutions is here to help every step of the way, focusing solely on digital marketing for contractors.

1. Look at What Has Worked and What Hasn’t: What has worked so far in your marketing plan? What hasn’t? What does your situational analysis look like? Many contractors get stuck in a trap of “doing” but not actually tracking if what they’re doing is getting results. You need to ask yourself what you want your marketing plan to accomplish.
2. Define a Media Plan: Have you defined a media plan that delivers the leads you require each week or month? Whether we’re talking about traditional media or digital, mobile advertising has taken over. Is your website responsive? Are you utilizing mobile advertising? These are all things to consider and incorporate into your media plan.
3. Get Your Residential Service Agreements to 1,500 per Million: We can’t talk about a business plan or marketing plan for contractors without discussing service agreements! Your residential service agreements should come out to 1,500 per million, with that million representing residential change-outs, repairs, maintenance, and demand services. Ensure that your company culture is set up with a solid business model so you have long-term success with your maintenance agreements. 
4. Develop a Tuck-In Strategy: Metro areas, in particular, benefit from tuck-in strategies. COVID-19 has certainly impacted some companies more than others and this should be considered here. Heavily impacted companies should be focused on capturing and monetizing their database.
5. Have a Solid Promotion/Marketing Plan for Precision Tune-Ups: A good goal to work toward is converting 60-65% of your precision tune-up appointments into service agreements. Your price points should be organized in a way that entices residential customers to want to sign up now rather than waiting for the next promotion. This should be a core part of your business model!
6. Create Promotions and Make It Easy to Say Yes: This is absolutely necessary if you are in your shoulder season. Even if you’re in your peak season during the 4th quarter, you still need to have a budget and a lead forecast.
7. Create a Marketing Campaign Calendar: We provide a very complex and comprehensive marketing campaign calendar template, and plan, so that contractors can successfully implement marketing plans with a high ROI. Current iMarket customers can gain access to this by reaching out to their Marketing Coordinator.
8. Build Your Digital Brand: We can’t write a blog post about creating a solid marketing strategy without mentioning your digital brand! Digital is a pivotal part of your 4th quarter (and beyond) marketing plan. Your traditional marketing processes should lead customers to your website, and your efforts there and on other digital platforms is where you can convert those leads into customers. We will dive into this further in part 2 of this 2-part blog series.

We may have outlined 8 strategies above, but this is only the beginning of developing a solid business and marketing plan for your 4th quarter. We can’t fail to mention also, the importance of committing to daily training of your technicians.

If you haven’t already, you should implement a solid sales training process, focusing on what will bring you the most conversions. iMarket can help! If you’re not already partnering with us, be sure to reach out today. If you are a current iMarket Solutions client, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Marketing Coordinator.

When you’re ready to upgrade your marketing, reach out to the team “Dedicated to Contractor Success”—contact iMarket Solutions!