Aaron and Wayne from Gas Engineer Software break down three mistakes trade business owners make: not defining an ideal customer, focusing messaging on the business instead of customer problems, and picking marketing channels before understanding your market. They introduce the marketing triangle: start with your ideal customer, craft a problem-focused message, then choose where to reach them.
Chapters
Let's be honest, when you're running a business, marketing can become a bit of an afterthought. In our experience talking to customers, most recognize how important marketing is but don't properly sit down and spend the time on getting it right. The downside of this? Well, you're essentially leaving money on the table to be picked up by your competitors. As always, I'm Aaron from Gas Engineer Software, and today I'm going to walk you through 3 common marketing mistakes that trade businesses often make. Instead of learning things the hard way, you can apply this framework to get the most out of your time spent on marketing. Mistake number 1: not understanding who your ideal customer is. Every trade business caters to a niche. This is the type of job or customer that you prefer working for. Taking a blanket approach to your business and marketing may find you the jobs you need, but not always the customers that you want.
We often end up playing this game where we're jumping from, you know, platform to platform or from media to media. You know, kind of a language we'd use here in the States would be throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, right? We're just trying a bunch of different things to see what's going to work. And what I can tell you is, first of all, that's not strategic. That's not going to work. So we believe with the marketing triangle, you have to start with clearly understanding your market first.
Mistake number 2: not targeting your customers' problems. Ultimately, it's all about serving your customer better than your competitors do. One of the ways you can do this is by targeting their problems in your messaging and not talking about your business.
You want to use language that doesn't just speak to, if you have a problem with your heating or plumbing, call us. You want to speak in such a way that you're speaking directly to that person. In other words, we know you're busy running around. We know what it's like to have, you know, job, full-time job, plus managing kids, plus all the other things. Here's how we make it simple for you.
Everyone can say that they've got this many years experience or pride themselves on great and friendly service, which is great, but the more you can speak to them about themselves, the more your message is going to resonate. Mistake number 3: starting with the medium and not the market. Rather than starting with medium and then working back, it's much better to start with the ideal customer work out the message, and then pick the appropriate medium.
Most entrepreneurs start with the media or the medium that they're going to use to broadcast the message. So they look around and they see their competitors are doing a lot on, let's just say, Facebook as an example. And so they say, we've got to be more, you know, consistent on Facebook, we've got to get our messaging out on Facebook. So they start doing a bunch of stuff on Facebook and it doesn't work.
In Wayne's words, you want to put your message in a place where it is the absolute best chance of being seen and understood by your audience. Is that on Facebook? Is it down the local pub? Or maybe even in a shop window? And that's it for marketing in this video. If you'd like to learn how you can save hours each week and eliminate paperwork, check out Gas Engineer Software by clicking the link in the description. If you know an engineer who might benefit from our video or our software, make sure to send it their way. And don't forget to like and subscribe and follow us on our socials for more practical tips and info. Thank you and see you in the next video.
