Why Contractors Need Marketing Transparency
Contractors often have a poor reputation thanks to bad past experiences customers had. Because of this, it’s essential that contractors focus on building their customer base by being honest and transparent. Here’s what you need to know to build a marketing strategy focused on transparency to rebuild the contractor’s reputation.
Why Customers Don’t Trust Contractors
The most common reasons customers don’t trust contractors is because they’ve experienced a contractor who wasn’t qualified for the job, who left the job early or who ruined their home and never returned. At worst, the contractor may have collected payment up front and never showed up at all for the job.
Unfortunately, these are not uncommon stories and many consumers can tell you they’ve hired a bad contractor at some point. The old saying that one bad apple ruins the whole bunch has some truth to it. A customer may have hired 10 contractors in the past, all of whom did good work, showed up on time and charged a fair price. Then, the customer hired one who took their money and ran or did half the job and they never saw them again. The customer will remember that one bad contractor over the 10 good ones. That bad taste in their mouth will overshadow all the good work the 10 other good contractors did.
This gives contractors as a whole a bad name, and people are weary of them because they don’t want to be cheated out of their money, pay for poor work or have to pay another contractor to fix the mess the previous one left behind.
From a branding perspective, people tend to like brands because they trust them. A customer might not even be able to tell you why they like one detergent over another. If the difference in quality is negligible, most times, the reason they like one over the other is because of the brand equity the company has built with the customer.
This is why it’s important to establish brand equity through your sales team, social media channels or messaging so you can build trust with your customers. People don’t want to let just anyone into their homes. When you have a buttoned-up brand that exudes professionalism, honesty and character, you have an immediate advantage over your competitors. You set yourself apart from stereotypical contractors and begin to chip away the fears and distrust the customer has.
Why You Need to Build Trust with Your Customers
When you build trust with your customers, people will pay more believing that you will do quality work. It all comes down to perception. If a customer thinks you have a better product, even if you don’t, they will be willing to pay more for your product because of that perception.
What you have to consider is which type of customer you want to appeal to. Customers at different price points have different mindsets; a homeowner with a larger budget and pride in their home has no problem paying more money to make sure the job is done right and their home looks fantastic. On the other hand, a homeowner with a tighter budget is more concerned with getting the job done cheaply than the quality of the work. These are the customers who save money by doing half the job themselves and want you to come in and finish it. They don’t care much about your brand or who you are, they just want the job done for as little as possible. On the other hand, the homeowner who is willing to pay more is looking for an attentive contractor who has a clear brand proposition and puts the customer at ease.
Building trust with your customers by creating a seamless brand position and value proposition ensures you’ll only attract customers you want. You may end up with fewer leads, but they will be twice as lucrative. The best route to building trust quickly is to focus on referral leads. Getting good referrals comes down to the quality of your work and your product, but it also is tied to how you are referring yourself out to the community. It’s important to present yourself in a transparent way that will elicit a level of trust so you can get the referral leads that you want.
How to Build Trust
The fastest way to build trust when selling in-home is to show up with a polished and professional appearance. That applies to your sales presentation as well. Ingage provides its clients with the quality presentations they need to build trust with a customer. But before you even meet the customer in person, how do you build trust with them online or digitally?
To build that top-of-the-funnel trust, the first thing you want to look at is your ads. If you’re using unrealistic expectations in your ads, you’ve already broken customer trust. You’ll see that in poor comments or in a poor click-through rate. The reason is when an offer seems to be too good to be true, it most likely is. It’s essential that you set realistic expectations with your ads, even if that lowers your conversion rate or raises your cost per lead. Having realistic, transparent expectations set at the top of the funnel is extremely important in building trust.
Another way to build trust is to speak to customers’ questions or objections through your ads. When you know what questions a customer has when hitting the landing page, you can have the answers there waiting for them which encourages the lead to move forward. For example, if the customer’s main concern is price, and they’ve been burned on price before, they can see your gallery, your certifications and customer testimonials on your website and will be prompted to take action and request more information or an instant rough estimate.
Ingage presentations can help you build trust with your customers. Use interactive features to show your reviews or non-linear styles to let the customer lead the presentation. Check out our latest webinar where we take a deep dive into this, and then let’s connect so you can see Ingage for yourself.