7 tips for building your contractor’s brand locally

Community partnerships remain potent tools for building your contractor’s brand locally. If they were not, Fortune 500 companies would not invest so much in partnering with non-profits, sending employees to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity and sharing their efforts on social media.

Aside from the personal rewards that volunteerism and charity can bring, supporting local community organizations can provide great networking opportunities and show potential customers that you generally care about their communities. It will enhance your authenticity as a local brand and draw attention from potential customers you may not be reaching otherwise. In addition, it can often be done by donating time and expertise, rather than cash.

Here are seven steps for building your contractor’s brand locally.

Research local causes

For building your contractor’s brand locally, check in with local civic groups and places of worship you admire or scan VolunteerMatch.org, Idealist.org or AllforGood.org to see what charities are looking for volunteer and other support in your community.

If you’ve been in the contractor’s business awhile, think back to all the local charities that have approached you for help. Where is the need?

Find your passion

Making a difference takes time and patience, so focus on a cause you are passionate about. This is critical to sustaining your commitment on top of the 60 to 70 hours you spend each week running your business.

Find synergy

Find a cause that’s relevant to your core business adn your marketing plan. If you run a bakery, food truck or catering business, consider donating food or helping raise money for a local food bank, hunger drive or relevant fundraising event.

If you are a construction contractor, landscaper or janitorial service, for building your contractor’s brand locally consider volunteering your time to Habitat for Humanity or the elderly.

Make a list of three causes that inspire you and where your construction or remodeling business can have an impact.

Geography

Consider your geographic market. Are you serving a neighborhood, a section of town or a metropolitan area? Pick a partner or cause that will scale to your market.

Metrics

Decide ahead of time what you want this partnership to achieve and how to measure your progress toward those goals. Ultimately, you want to boost brand recognition and grow sales, which are difficult to measure. However, if the partnership yields local press coverage or leads to connections in the community, you’ll know it’s working.

Get buy-in from employees

If you have employees, ask what they are willing to do to support the cause. Are they willing to help organize or staff events? Would they need to be paid, or would they volunteer a certain number of hours? If they need to be paid, include those costs in your marketing budget so you can calculate return on investment later.

Leverage your efforts with digital marketing

Once you’ve nailed down your partnership, don’t forget to leverage all the hard work online by linking to your partner websites, advises Carl Sorensen, owner of Sites4Contractors.com, which designs websites and digital marketing campaigns for independent contractors.

“If your business is sponsoring a marathon for example or another local sporting or charity event, create a “community” page on your website and link to the different event websites that you’re sponsoring or volunteering for.  Be sure to ask the event coordinators to link back to your website as well from their own sponsors or supporters page on their website.

These very targeted local backlinks can enhance your SEO (search engine optimization) because it shows Google you are relevant to the local area and engaged in the local community,” notes Sorensen.

This is particularly helpful when it comes to boosting listings in mobile search engines, which are much more focused on presenting local results.

Sorensen says that while outbound links risk drawing visitors off your website, links to local partners are often worth the risk and links back to you from these local websites are pure gold for your SEO.