Why Contractors Need An Online Presence

Harry Trott

January 22, 2014

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I recently worked with a lead generation company based in New Jersey. As part of the assignment, I had to talk to a number of contractors and small business owners in Canada and the United Kingdom about my client’s products. One interesting insight I could obtain from my conversation with these small businesses is that a lot of them still do not see a need to open their business up for the internet.

One machine equipment rental company I spoke to in Toronto told me that they have good enough networking in town and don’t really need to pay for leads generated from elsewhere. Another roof repair contractor in Manchester told me that while they are open to new forms of customer acquisition, they are happy listing on YellowPages and the like. Investing in an internet strategy is potentially a waste of money until they see real value.

Having worked with similar businesses in the past, I can see why a lot of small businesses still have this mentality. Most of these contract businessmen have served in the locality for decades - that’s well before the internet arrived. To a lot of these businesses, networking is done through face-to-face discussions and marketing is mostly through word-of-mouth. Given that most of these contractors have teams of less than 5 people, there is only so much work that they can take up and the traditional marketing means have worked well.

However, that is extremely short-sighted thinking. According to Google, there are close to 5000 searches every month in New York for people looking for construction contractors. If you are a new contracting company with no network or contacts to get you started, a mere presence on the first page of Google could ensure that your business is up and running successfully. Again, you do not have to be a new company to have an internet strategy. What the Google figure also tells us is that 5000 searches happened from people who moved beyond the friendly neighborhood contractors to a new one from the internet.

As with any business, even contractor jobs see a regular churn in clientele - you find new clients and you lose old ones. What if the economy slides down again and your business is in a position where you are losing more clients than gaining new ones? In such a scenario, it is always helpful to own a channel that can provide you with a steady stream of new clients so that retaining older ones is an added bonus and not a financial necessity.

Having said that, an internet strategy is not merely something you take up for a rainy day. Today, dominance of a business online is the most prominent sign of it being an authority in the industry. A number of recent studies have shown that customers place better trust on businesses that have an established internet presence compared to competitors who do not. Given these reports, it is high time contractors start exploring avenues to establish their brand online. It is the only sure-shot way to ensure stability in business over the long run.