Lead Generation for Remodeling Contractors with Brooks Burnette

Remodeling is different from other home service businesses. It’s a special industry that needs its own strategies and approach for creating a marketing plan. While other service businesses need a lot of leads, remodelers don’t. How can remodelers create an effective marketing plan without needing so many leads? In this episode, I have Brooks Burnette, Founder of Remodel Reach Marketing. His company specializes in serving residential remodeling contractors. Brooks shares his strategies for working with contractors, generating and converting leads, and building effective websites. He also emphasizes the importance of listening to and understanding clients' needs. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Lead Generation for Remodeling Contractors with Brooks Burnette Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about contracting, specifically remodeling contracting, but contracting in general is a kind of topic that’s gotten a little bit more attention lately. I know we just lived through a few decades where a lot of that type of work was looked down upon by some segments of the population, and now, amongst the new generation that’s seeing kind of a greater amount of security in that, there’s a renewed interest, as well as the clear impact that you see with your work right away as opposed to some of the jobs that a lot of people feel stuck in. But, of course, there’s a lot of considerations when contracting or starting any business that you need to get your business off the ground. An important one and a topic that I’ve covered before is also getting noticed, getting your business out there, getting it marketed. To talk about his business around remodeling contractors, how they get their digital marketing done, is the founder of Remodel Reach Marketing, Brooks Burnette. --- Brooks, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, man. Oh, well, thank you so much. And I like to start a lot of my episodes by getting people oriented. So we know you’re talking about Remodel Reach Marketing so you’re obviously not the contractor yourself, you’re the one handling the marketing for the contractor. Right, exactly. So we’re a full-service digital marketing agency for remodeling contractors. Typically, that’s just residential. There’s not very many remodeling contractors who are solely commercial versus residential, most of them are residential and those are the guys that we like to talk we like to target. The commercial, they typically have their own client base and they go to the same people over and over, like in one industry, like restaurants or like hotels and things like that so they typically don’t need a lot of help. But the residential guys, they’re the ones that we really go after. Now, when you talk about the residential versus the commercial, can we think of this as kind of similar to the difference between a B2B and a B2C play, where the commercial contractors or commercial remodelers are doing B2B and B2B is going to have a very different method of marketing than B2C, the residential, where you’re talking about the individual person who’s looking to do a remodel in their home? Yes, yes, absolutely. So, one thing that we find is B2C, there’s a few different strategies that really work well for them with lead generation and SEO and all those things that you kind of mentioned a little bit earlier, and the B2B, it’s pretty much all about relationships and just building relationships with those other industries and getting their name recognized within those industries, going to shows for those industries, like restaurants, again, for example, and just really focusing in on those individuals rather than trying to build their brand like a residential contractor would have to do in their local area. Now, that makes sense. So you’re helping residential contractors build a brand. Now, one of the things that I think some people are wondering is that there are a lot of people out there who are contractors and do a lot of different type of work. Do remodeling contractors tend to be contractors that only do room remodeling type of thing or do they tend to be contractors that dip into some other types of projects, such as building a new home? So most of them, at least, most of the people we go after, like most of my ideal clients, are mainly the remodeling contractors. General contracting is kind of the catch-all term but that splits off, like you were saying, that splits off into the residential remodels, the commercial remodelers, the home builders, even house flippers and people like that and so we find that the right target for our market is really, again, just those residential remodelers because they can typically handle the workload that home builders really can’t. If they’re a certain size, obviously, huge companies can be building multiple homes at a time, but most remodelers, they want to have a steady flow of jobs and jobs that provide a good income for them and so that’s really a good sweet spot is just trying to focus in on the residential remodeling contractors. And do residential remodeling contractors operate in a similar fashion as general contractors building a home where they’re kind of the project coordinator and then they’ll bring on people such as an electrician, a plumber, etc.? Yeah, and that’s really what separates remodeling from a lot of the other home services, like painters, like plumbers, and guys like that. They’re kind of the managers of the whole thing, because in one job, if they do a bathroom remodel, let’s just say, they’re hiring plumbers, they’re hiring painters, they’re hiring electricians, they’re hiring all these different people and managing them. That’s what really works for them when they want to get those bigger jobs, that pay like sometimes $50,000 for a bathroom remodel or a kitchen and that’s kind of what it takes, because you’re having to hire and manage all these different people. So it’s really a unique industry within home services and within the contracting industry as a whole. And now, just in case anyone out there listening is exploring different career paths, in the people that you’ve worked with, these contractors for residential remodels, what kind of person do you feel like you encounter the most and what kind of person do you feel like would be a person that’s a good fit for that type of a career as a residential remodel contractor? ’For remodeling, the number one thing is professionalism in home services as a whole.Share on X You really have two different groups of individuals – of owners, I should say. You have what we call or what I call the guy in the truck so it’s typically like your handyman type guy, nothing against these guys, these guys are awesome and they’re really good at what they do and they’re typically a little bit more focused in on one specific skill set so like carpentry and things like that, but you’ve got like the guy in the truck type workers, it’s just them and maybe a couple other people. And then you have the design build firms on the other side and those are just the big companies, the companies with a lot of money. Not to say, again, not to say the guy in the truck doesn’t have a lot of money. Typically, they do, believe it or not, you’ve just got two different types of workers or of owners in that space. And so what I hear most of the time, the big separator between the two is that professionalism, showing up with your brand, branded merchandise, branded shirt, having a branded truck, and just being professional, being courteous, and things like that. That’s the number one thing that I’ve heard separates our clients and separates other remodeling professionals and just general contracting professionals from the rest. And so if you have an eye for that thing, if you have an eye for being professional and presenting yourself well to your potential customer, that’s going to set yourself apart from a lot of the other competition in your area, because most guys, they just come in and they just say, “Well, you know, we can give you a new bathroom for this much,” and they don’t really help you or answer your questions and they might be late, they might not take off their shoes when they come into the house, and just little things like that, so if you can really hone in on that and hone in on those specifics like that and those little things, then it will really set yourself apart from anybody else, really. That’s good for people who are thinking about building businesses, like a lot of the clients you work with. Now, let’s talk a little bit about your story, how you came to start Remodel Reach Marketing. Where does your story begin though? Is the home services industry a place you’ve always been? Well, believe it or not, my story starts in a high school classroom. I used to be a high school teacher. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, used to be a high school teacher and after I got my first paycheck, I realized that teaching might not be all it’s cracked up to be, even though it doesn’t really have much of a good reputation anyway. And so I started looking for, this was back in 2019, I believe, so about five years ago or so, started looking at other ways to – just other career opportunities and stumbled across marketing and just learned how to do Facebook ads and a couple things like that and really worked behind the scenes while I was teaching and just learned a skill of online marketing. And I spoke to a lot of people who were like, “If we didn’t have you here or if we didn’t have help with this, I don’t know what I would do,” kind of thing for their business, whether it’s getting their ads going or building a website for them or whatever it is. But, to me, at the time, it was no big deal,...