Mastering Your Marketing Strategy - Tim Brown

Hey, out there, Facebook world, it is Jim Johnson, your host here at Contractor Radio. And again, I believe every single time, we bring on some of the best guests out there. And today's guest is going to be exceptional when it comes to marketing. And I want to talk to you a little bit about some tips that we might share with you. We share with our coaching clients to kind of get you up to speed on how you want to start thinking strategically about your marketing. And so you have a lot of things to consider. You have things to consider like are we going to do this in house or are we going to get third party? Or maybe we going to do some kind of hybrid of those two things. So you got to kind of get that figured out first. And then you also want to figure out, well, what buckets do I want to put my marketing into? Am I going to put it all in, all my eggs in one basket and maybe focus on things like canvassing, or am I going to spread myself over a few different avenues and really think about how I might be able to generate leads in a variety of different ways? Some of those other avenues that you might consider would be digital marketing. How would we go about doing that? Whenever I say digital, I think social media, websites, search engines, and some of it like Google Ads and things like that. How do we use those tool to drive our lead generation? You also have your more traditional media like radio, tv and there's so many other things out there today with your streaming services that allow you to really target some things. And so is that something that you might consider? You also might consider your word of mouth opportunities. So is that something that you're going to rely on for your business? One of the things we found with word of mouth marketing is you're really relying on your customer to do that. So you better have a really good strategy that's going to incentivize them or you better have delivered in a way that is just so outstanding that they can't do anything but tell everybody about it. And then there's this other concept out there called guerrilla marketing, which the best way to think about that is unique, low cost marketing that drives lead generation. So you can do some pretty unique things. We're gonna do a podcast just on guerrilla marketing and talking about that with some experts out there. But today we're gonna be talking with Tim Brown, the owner, founder, president, a mastermind behind the Hook Agency, who works with a lot of contractors in our space and has a lot of great results, track record and in marketing in our space, as everybody knows out there, we get bombarded with folks out there that are trying to get our marketing dollars. Our marketing dollars are super important. Every single one of those has a return on investment on it and we want to make sure that we spend them wisely. So really ask your people that are trying to get those marketing dollars. Some of the best things that you can do is get some references and talk to those references. Ask about those folks on Facebook groups. Everybody will be honest with you, tell you probably more than you want to know in some cases. So make sure that you do a lot of due diligence before you go giving money to somebody on whether they are truly an expert at generating leads or not. Our guy today, Tim Brown, is an expert on this. He actually works with several of our clients. And we want to talk marketing strategy today. So welcome aboard. Tim, welcome to the show. Good to have you.

Hey, well, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to talk about this stuff today.

Yeah, I've gotten a chance to talk with you several times. I was actually on your podcast and we were talking a little bit about strategy and coaching and stuff like that. And I said, wow, that was so great. I want to get you on and talk a little bit about marketing and the strategic approach to that. And I got to come hang out your office. You were kind enough to give us an opportunity to bring a bunch of contractors together there in your office and talk about some things. And I got to learn a little bit more about how you guys approach this and what you do. So give us a little background. How did you get into this? How did Hook agency start and why are you end all and be all of digital marketing?

Hey, so we, I started as a web designer, made websites, coded websites, did all this stuff, WordPress, all that. Like got really into it, got in, went to school for web design and development and I made a lot of pretty websites. In fact, I even made a website for Mall of America and made a lot of like kind of bigger companies around here. Tria Orthopedic. I made some sites, I mean I worked at another marketing agency, but for small businesses and growth oriented businesses, contractors and stuff like that, I started to have people that would, I would make a website, let's say as a freelancer and they would say, all right now why isn't it increasing our business? And so even though we made very nice looking websites, right, they were beautiful. You can make the most beautiful website in the world and it's still not necessarily going to create that much more business for you. Because the only people coming to it are, like, people that see your sign and people that, you know, somebody tells them about your company. So it's basically, it's a it's a problem with the quantity of amount of people coming to your website. And that problem, I was able to solve it for web design, right. I ranked locally, Minneapolis, web design, you know, we're number one for that or whatever, right? So we were able to get a bunch of business that way. So people are like, how did you do that? So I had people, clients that we were helping, or I was, excuse me, it's just me at the time helping with websites. And they just said, how do you do that? Can you do that for us? So that was essentially the first couple clients that.