MARKETING and SALES

Why Target the Affluent Prospect?

Because that's where the money is

Your goal is to be NUMBER ONE in some niche of the market...
(even if you have to invent that niche.)

Four topics to pay attention to as you develop your marketing campaign

1.  Image

The first step in successful marketing is to establish your company in the mind of the public you intend to serve. Your company image has everything to do with your success.

Everything you present -- from your personal appearance to the way you speak, from your vehicle to the appearance of your jobsite, from your business card to the way you answer the phone -- adds to or subtracts from your image.

2.  Market Opportunity

It is critical to formulate and understand the size of the opportunity your market offers.  If you live in a small resort town that has an average build of three houses a year and there are five builders competing for the business, you have a very difficult market.

Perform a "no B.S." analysis of your market and identify where your business best fits.  Then build your marketing around that analysis.  

3.  Business Intelligence

Every city or regional building authority makes available the information it collects. Reviewing this information in the context of successive period (months, quarters, years) can provide very useful information regarding the state of the construction industry in your area.

Build a dossier on the builders competing in the area you intend to address. What are their strengths, what are their weaknesses. You are going to be doing a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis later. Start gathering the information now.

4.  Positioning

Once you are on the way to developing an image that represents all that is best about your company and you gathered and analyze the business intelligence available, you are ready to address the positioning of your sales efforts.

You want to position yourself as offering something unique that your potential client needs, wants or is going to want. Your research, if conducted properly, will expose gaps in the sales efforts of the other builders. As you position your business, you will take advantage of those gaps to be able to proclaim, truthfully, that you are providing something that the other builders are ignoring or are not taking the effort to provide.

See the links to the right for discussions of how to approach your chosen client segment, branding your company, keeping track of prospect and competitor information, converting leads to sales, and many more suggestions relating to presenting your company as an alternative to all the other builders.