Digital Marketing for Tradies

Marketing for Tradies using the Smartyr Marketing Framework

One of the biggest mistakes in tradie marketing is thinking that it is all about getting more leads. Whilst digital marketing is primarily about getting leads, at Smartyr Marketing we take a broader view, and not only help you get leads, but also help with convetting these into sales and managing them after the sale to build your brand. Over the 20+ years we have been helping trade businesses grow their businesses with more leads, we realised that a lot of sales were left off the table because of inadequate strategies and tools for nurturing these leads and managing your customers after the sale to encourage referrals, reviews and repeat business.

Find out more about our overall small business marketing framework.

Why you need to be online if you want to grow your tradie business

There are plenty of different ways you can market your trade business, but if you’re serious about growing your business, then you need to be serious about digital marketing. One of the key principles in tradie marketing is to ensure that your business message (website, ad, signage etc) is where your potential customers are looking for your service. In other words, if your business message isn’t showing when your potential client is looking for a new hot water system, air conditioner, or switchboard upgrade, then how can they use your service. The answer is they can’t and instead will use your competitor, whose message is showing. 

But where are your potential customers looking for your service?

Where do they go when they need that hot water system, air conditioner or switchboard upgrade? The answer is primarily online. They either go to Google and do a search, ask their preferred AI Platform or scroll through their social posts looking for that recommendation. So, as we said at the start, if you’re serious about growing your trade business, you need to be serious about your digital marketing.

 Fallon Solutions has used Smartyr Marketing for many years now and we have had great success in building our business through Jarrod's insightful SEO techniques. He has supported our SEO and other digital requirements including our monthly e-newsletter. Thanks very much Jarrod.

Mark Denning - Fallon Solutions

What services do we provide for your tradie marketing strategy?

At Smartyr Marketing we are a full service digital marketing agency for trade businesses. This means that we can help you with it all, including:

• SmartyrWebsites
  Websites built for ease-of-use and Search/AI Optimisation
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) 
  This is getting your website to show up when someone Googles your services.

• AI Optimisation (GEO)
  Helping your website get citations when someone asks a related question in their AI Platform.
• Search Engine Marketing (Google Ads) 
  Getting an ad to show when someone either, searches on Google, or is browsing the internet.

• Social Media
  Having either posts or paid ads to show when people are browsing their social media.

• Email Marketing
  Sending newsletters to your database or follow-up emails for leads etc.

Smartyr's Digital Marketing for Tradies

At Smartyr Marketing, we offer all the digital marketing services you will need to grow your trade business. Let's dig into each of these and what makes them important if you want to grow your business.

Tradie Websites

A great digital marketing strategy should be built around your website. A website is often referred to as "owned media", which means media that you own and have a lot of control over. Unlike a Facebook page that can be taken down at any time, a website will stay online until you decide to take it down.

At Smartyr Marketing, we have built our own platform (SmartyrDXP) to build what we call SmartyrWebsites. For the 20+ years we have been helping tradies get their website found, we developed a proven structure that both Google and AI love. We also understood the importance of making it as easy as possible for website owners to keep their website up to date. We tried many different website content management systems (CMS), but none of them had all that we needed. So we built our own from the ground up, with a focus on both ease-of-use and optimised structure.

Our SmartyrWebsites for tradies include the following modules:

• Latest Projects
• Suburb Search
• Photo Galleries
• FAQs
• Team members
• Offers 

SEO for Tradies

Just having a website is not a complete digital marketing strategy. This is like having a box of brochures that sits in the back of your office; useless unless you get them handed out to potential customers. So now you have a kicking website, you need to develop strategies to get visitors to your website. One of the best strategies for this is search engine optimisation or SEO. This is making sure that your website is ranking well in Google (and other search engines) so when someone does a search for a related topic your website comes up. At Smartyr Marketing, we have been doing SEO for tradies nearly as long as we have been building them websites (20+ years). 

What about GEO?

With the recent developments in AI, both in search and AI platforms, there has been a push to create a new digital marketing channel called GEO (or AIO, AEO etc). This is just another way the digital marketing industry likes to confuse the average business owner and trick them into paying for something else. The fundamentals of good SEO are exactly the same as what they are calling GEO. The best way to do SEO has been changing from the beginning and this is no different, except now we also consider search in AI. At Smartyr Marketing we believe in continuous improvement and are continually refining the way we deliver results for our tradie SEO clients.

Google Ads for Tradies

Google Ads and other forms of online paid advertising for tradies are a great strategy for quick results and for the ability to turn off and on as business dictates. Similar to SEO, the way these ads work is continually changing so it is important that you have a digital marketing agency that keeps up to date. At Smartyr Marketing, we prioritise conversion tracking to ensure that we are maximising the number of leads our ads generate.

Social Media for Tradies

With recent changes in search and AI, having a strong online brand is imperative to get great results. We believe that social media is one of the best ways to build your brand. Whilst it may not generate the number of conversions a good SEO or Google Ads strategy does, it will definitely help these strategies do even better, as well as help maximise your sale conversions.

Email Marketing for Trades

Electronic direct mail, or email marketing, is a great way to re-engage your current customers. A regular newsletter to your database will help keep you in their mind when they need your services. We can also look at email series to help convert your leads with the larger purchase (eg. solar system. ducted air con etc). In fact, we have built our own email newsletter platform (SmartyrBroadcast), that allows you to send out a newsletter to your database in 10 minutes.

Digital Marketing for Tradies: Proven Strategies

The benefit of using Smartyr Marketing as your tradie marketing agency, is that we have been helping tradies grow their business since 2007.

What do we know about marketing for tradies?

Back in 2010, we started working on digital marketing strategies for Fallon Solutions, and continued for 14 years. During this time we had great success and got the website ranking top of Google for the majority of the targeted keywords. This success meant that we started getting enquiries from other trade companies around Australia, wanting us to look after the digital marketing for their trade business and deliver similar results. Before we knew it, we were working with many different trade businesses and continually improving the strategies we used. So in short, we know what digital marketing strategies work for trade businesses to help them grow.

Trade Business Digital Marketing Agency to Trust

There are many different reasons why you should use us as your digital marketing agency, but here are just a few:

We Strive for Long-Term Relationships

One of our values is to build long-term relationships with our clients. We know that one of the best ways to do this, is to deliver what we say we will. Our clients stay with us because we grow their leads year-on-year. They can confidently grow their business knowing that they will get more leads.

Did you know that on average, our clients have been with us for over 7 years?

We’re Sales Driven

Whilst other digital marketing for tradie agencies talk about driving traffic to your website and ranking you for certain keywords, we have always talked about conversions. We understand that your main priority for digital marketing is to generate leads for your business. You can have great rankings for certain keywords that drive traffic to your website, but not get conversions. The skill is in knowing what keywords to chase and how to best convert the traffic these generate.

Ask about the SmartyrDashboard that allows you to track your critical number for both marketing and your business overall. This integrates with your job management platform (eg. AroFlo, ServiceM8 etc) so we can show exactly what revenue your marketing expense is generating.

We Continuously Measure and Review What We Do

Whilst we have proven strategies that we know will grow leads for your trade business, we also know that the internet is continually changing, so we need to adapt. We are always looking for new and better ways to do things, and then test and measure to see if they work. To do this effectively, we set up conversion tracking on everything (webforms, phone calls, web chats), so we know exactly what is working.

Our team meets monthly to review client websites and our strategies to see what we can be doing better.

Digital Marketing for All Trades

Whilst we work with all trades throughout Australia, not every trade business is the right fit for us. We only work with trade business owners who are serious about growing their business and will only work with between 3 or 4 businesses offering the same trade in the same service area.

• Digital Marketing for Plumbers
• Digital Marketing for Electricians
• Digital Marketing for HVAC
• Digital Marketing for Builders

Next Steps Digital Marketing for Tradies

So if you own a trade business, and you’re serious about growing your business, get in contact. Either fill in a form, give us a call or if you’re really serious, book a Free Digital Marketing Audit where we’ll discuss how your website is currently performing and how we can improve it.