This PDF tells a story about how I helped a Denver contractor with 477 competitors make his business the obvious choice in his market. We essentially eliminated the other 477 companies from consideration by people who needed his services. For more contact Joe McVoy, 720-890-8760 joemcvoy@gmail.com

1. profitablemarketingsystems.com http://www.profitablemarketingsystems.com/how-to-eliminate-477-local-competitors/
Joe
McVoy
How To Eliminate 477 Local Competitors
Posted by Joe McVoy on Apr 14th, 2015
If you have a local brick & mortar type business, this post is for you.
Do you have a lot of local competitors?
Do you wonder how to differentiate yourself from hundreds of other companies in your same market?
Here’s a story about how I did just that for a local client – a painting contractor in the Denver market who had 477
competitors.
Here’s the biggest problem . . .
Clients come to me asking for an ad or marketing piece. What they don’t understand is that creating marketing pieces
is only step 12 in a 21 step process I use for clients.
To abbreviate the process to make it simpler to explain, we have to do these things BEFORE we create any
marketing.
we need to see what has been done before, examples of marketing pieces and ads and whatever data is
available as to how well they worked
next, we need to understand the customer. What are the customers frustrations about buying the type or
service you offer and what are her frustrations with the possible solutions
from this, we need to define the customer’s “hot buttons” – the things they really care about
then, we need to verify these conclusions by talking to customers and prospects
define what we do to alleviate those concerns and what the industry as a whole does. Are we better than
everyone else? If not, what innovations do do we need to put in place to be better?

2. (note that we need to “be better” before creating marketing claiming that we are better – promoting ourselves as
being better if we aren’t is a losing strategy – customers are not stupid so if you lie you WILL get caught!)
decide whether we are dealing with a defined or undefined target market. With defined target markets where
we know who the prospects are requires a totally different approach than undefined target markets.
in this case we were dealing with a painting contractor and an undefined target market so advertising in the
yellow pages made sense (this was back in the day when people found home service contractors from the
yellow pages, not the Internet)
then we write 30 or 40 headlines for the ad and test them with people in the target market
after that we create actual ads and test them with the target market too.
Here’s what our research showed:
- home service contractors were one of the most complained about business categories – only after the cable
and phone companies
- the woman of the house makes the decision
- the prospects do not know how to tell who is good vs who is not
- one of the biggest complaints is service providers don’t show up on time – or even at all
- there is another big concern about being scammed or being overcharged with add ons and previously
undisclosed charges
- these female customers especially do not like service providers who are rude, dirty and make a mess in their
house and on the grounds
Here’s the ad we created and tested over and over until it beat all the competitor’s ads currently running in the yellow
pages.
In case the image is too small to read, the first “mistake” we point out and solve is making sure the job gets done right.
We do that by pointing out most local painting contractors are not in the BBB and very few are members of the
painting trade association that certifies the right processes are used to get the job done right.

3. In fact, out of the 477 painting contractors in the Denver metro, only 10 are both in the BBB and members of the trade
association that certifies quality.
The next concern about being on time, we introduced an “on-time” guarantee and guaranteed to pay the customer
$50 cash if we are more than 30 minutes late. No one else did that, so we have now eliminated all other 477
companies, but we’re not done yet.
We also introduced a price guarantee and a 3 year quality guarantee.
On top of that, we also guaranteed our painters would not be rude, use foul language, leave a mess in your yard,
leave your bathrooms dirty or play loud music. In fact, although not in the ad, we made it a policy to not only clean up
after ourselves each day on the job site, but to actually do enough extra cleaning that the homeowner would notice we
left the job site cleaner than when we got there.
And, just to add the icing to the cake, we offered the services of a home decorator to help the homeowner pick out
colors and textures – all at no charge!
(it was free for us too as the home decorators were willing to do the consultation free in hopes of getting additional
business)
The “Offer” in the ad was a free 15 point checklist and consumer guide as to how to choose a house painting
contractor.
So, I’m sure you’re wondering – how did it work?
Very well.
The business had had not experienced any growth at all in the previous 3 years and we doubled their business in one
year with this ad and the accompanying marketing programs.
The 4 other competitors who also had 1/2 page ads (same size as ours) found out that their ads stopped working and
they went from 1/2 page ads to small in column ads the next year!
Having an ad that works to get lots of bid requests is great, but then you have to close those bids.
I’ll do another post about that as we helped them go from closing 20% of their bids to closing 80%.
To Your Success,
Joe
PS If you are not a home service contractor and would rather make money online, take a look at this video from
Chris Jones. I do that business with Chris too and it works really well.
See it here.

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