Construction marketing: Outsiders, insiders and the point of transition

At the Design and Construction Network Happy Hour in Washington on June 30: Sarah B. Dolby, Associate Account Manager with Atlantic Risk Management Corporation, Kathleen C. O'Leary, Business Developmentt with Scott-Long Construction, Inc., Lindsay B. McGhee, Account Manager with Atlantic Risk Management Corporation, and Brad McCoy, Account Executive with Mainbrain. You can connect with this group (no cost!) by visiting mydcn.com.

Successful construction-industry marketing is all about winning a place within your current and prospective clients' inner trust circle. When you get there, your relationships don't feel like business, they are more like enduring friendships. Money is still important, but your clients don't begrudge you your price (and profit) because they know you have their best inters ts at heart.

If your clients are "forced" by regulations or standard practice to ensure there are competitive bids, they will wire things so that you virtually always win. (I still remember a Labor Day weekend email containing the complete bidding documentation of a competitor sent to me by the bidding authority. No, I didn't ask for this confidential information, or imply even indirectly that this unofficial communication should happen. It just did.) In the U.S. public sector work especially at the federal level operates under Brooks Act rules, which takes price out of the picture and puts relationships and trust at center-stage.

The first construction marketing success question is how you win this trusted place? Equally important -- and providing a great clue to the the second question's answer, is "How do you retain the trust?"

The second question of course is easiest to answer. You retain the trust by delivering the goods with sensitivity, respect, and a sense of community, compassion, security, and adventure. In other words, you do your work so well and with your clients' interests so much in your heart that they would be insane to leave you.

(If you have in good times had a successful business by 'relying' on referrals for new work and repeat orders, you mostly have the second question answered correctly.)

Most importantly, you need to solve the second question before you even try to answer the first question. In other words, if you cannot truly deliver value for your clients, you must stop, think carefully, and either revise your business or do something else. You will be spinning your marketing wheels.

Nevertheless, even if you are great at what you do, you still need to answer the first question. You need new clients to replace ones that leave and to grow. You need to show people who don't know you, or who know you but aren't ready to accept you, that you are worthy of their consideration. Solutions include:

Connect your current, satisfied clients with new/prospective clients
This is where organized referral programs are helpful. These could be as simple as inviting clients for a meal and seeing if they know friends or colleagues who would do business with you, or as sophisticated as co-ordinating Networking and Thank-you events for your current/prospective clients.

Achieve media recognition and respect
Positive articles about your business in credible news media provide powerful trust-developing capacities. You aren't selling, you are delivering. The best media publicity is mostly "free" in that you don't pay directly for it, nor can you control every word or image that is published, and you don't have marketing control over the time and schedule of the publicity. Advertising-supported editorial (advertorial) publishing can be an effective compromise. It is what we do best and we can often provide this service without any cash or financial requirement from your business. See the Design and Construction Report for example.

Connect with your community
In the consumer market, this includes sports and community groups and associations; in the business market, you'll gain much traction by contributing to relevant client-centric associations. (Yes, participate in your own trade association, but your marketing clout will be highest when you participate in the association reflecting your clients' interests.)

Get your web presence in order
You need a great website optimized to attract leads and client interest within your marketplace. Most people now head to the Internet when they are looking for someone new, or to verify the credibility of someone they have heard a little about. High search engine rankings are better than top billing on the old Yellow Pages (these still work in some places), or community classified ads because they convey both credibility and provide immediate connections between potential clients in immediate need and your business. (We can help you out here, of course, especially if you have discovered this blog through the search engine process!)

Will any of these resources provide a quick-fix to your business/marketing challenges? Certainly, you can quickly develop your current and previous client relationships and build on them.

You may hit it off immediately with someone new, "Love at first sight", but obviously if you are banking on this happening with strangers, routinely, you are asking for trouble, both personally and in business.

What about price? Can you win trust by lowering it?
I think this is the hardest and most foolhardy way to win marketing battles. Do you really want to work with clients who hammer you down so far that you can't earn a profit?

And if you are marketing on price, how will you ever make enough money to make your business worthwhile? The only exception is if you have such a technological or operating advantage that you can truly be profitable while undercutting your competition. But most of us don't have that advantage.

As you read this, you may be scratching your head. You are being under-cut by fly-by-nighters, your loyal clients have deserted you to save some money (even though you provide great service), and you aren't worried about whether a potential client is an outsider, insider, or some fly on the wall. You just need business, quickly.

My advice for you is to take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, reduce your business expenses and overhead as much as possible, and spend an hour a day studying marketing. Then compile a list of your current and former clients, and figure out some "gives" (time not cash!) to justify a call or visit.

As you do this, start your community/association connection and publicity strategies. Call or email me at 888-432-3555 ext 224 or buckshon@cnrgp.com for some ideas.

How do you know you've reached the point of transition when you turn from an outsider to an insider? That magic moment occurs when someone you know and respect calls you, without hesitation, and either offers you business without worrying about price, or forwards a referral, seemingly unrequested. At that moment, you can celebrate true marketing and business success.

Video ads reviewed

This professional-style video posted on contractortalk.com resulted in an interesting thread on the topic. Is this television-style video better than home-made testimonial content; or would both be effective?

How good can good video be?

I'm seeking some answers to that question, observing this contractortalk.com thread and the observations about the video of Mr. Mikes' Painting in Louisville, KY. Hopefully I'll be able to speak with Mike Smith there in a few days to learn more about how much the video has helped business, if at all.

My sense is the video is fine, and the overall website is excellent, but the most powerful video would not be the "television ad" design, but some human, real, and substantiated testimonials. (Mike has great written testimonials on his website.)

Are contractors willing to pay for video services? It seems the market may be a little slow. Jeff Uecker at Big Time Productions in Burbank, CA, for example, sought some publicity in this blog in March, but by June, he had sent me this email:

Thanks for the email Mark. We didn’t have a lot of luck with contractors in these challenging times….the site has shifted focus on other small businesses for now, but we will be redesigning the contractors section….lowering the price and giving options on how the contractor might want their commercial to look like, rather than a more custom one currently featured. I will keep you posted!

I think one challenge for most of us is that video, even with the simplest camera and uploading resources, still requires significantly more time and energy than other online communications formats. Then again, we have webcams on our computers and handheld video cameras are only a couple of hundred dollars these days, so maybe there is no excuse not to include at least some simple video on our sites and in our marketing materials.

Note: The Design and Construction Report (http://www.dcnreport.com) includes some effective video.

See the clip on the Page 4 of this reprint, or more accurately, "eprint" of the special feature about Homestead Renovations in Northern Virginia.

The human (and personal) connection

This afternoon, my wife provided one of those insightful wake-up calls. I was explaining to her how we were starting to think about improving our methodologies in communicating within the inbound communications and requests for the Construction Marketing Ideas newsletter. I told her about my work with Clay Posey.

She gave me one of those looks that only someone who has lived with you for 16 years and knows you inside and out could get away with. "Why don't you just call them yourself?"

Gulp. Shucks, yes, this blog is receiving upwards of five leads a day, and many only provide email address contact information, but how long does it really take to respond with a personal, thoughtful email instead of just an autoresponder reply? And why do I need to pass these initial leads on to a sales representative within my organization when they are, indeed, responding to me, personally?

Tim Klabunde made something of a similar point last week when he suggested that I not use Constant Contact to communicate my offer of editorial profiles in the Design and Construction Report to people who attended the Design and Construction Network Happy Hour in Washington on June 30.

"My only comment would be that I think you will get a better response if you don't use constant contact as it would be much more personal. In the office I use eMail Merge from Outlook," he wrote.

I have some fear that my "individualized responses" to people who respond to the blog/eletter invitation will start turning out to be a little bit canned -- and that may be the case, but does it hurt to communicate directly?

I think not. For the next month, I'll keep track of the number of leads who received a personal communication from me, and the results. We'll see what happens.

Relationships underlying marketing

You achieve the magic construction marketing moment when you reach the level of communication that trust and respect are considered the core of your relationship -- not "selling something".

In fact, I would argue that with rare exceptions you aren't going to sell very much until you achieve this status.

However, you can't usually achieve this high relationship quality by conventional selling practices. I mean, do you really trust someone who telemarkets you, or really believe the advertisements you read?

But it is easy to lapse into the conventional, in fact, it is natural -- you think this is the way it is done, and so do it. You are "marketing" after all.

Yet, when you look at your business, you see that virtually every (profitable) sale you make actually occurs when the relationship founded on trust is so strong that your price doesn't matter. (Well, your price indeed matters, to an extent, because if you have a relationship based on trust, you would never abuse the trust by gouging someone or charging a price outside of the realistic value you are delivering.)

The irony is that our business is primarily selling the standard stuff -- advertising -- but we sell most of what we sell by connecting more closely with our clients and their own relationships.

You probably appreciate these principals if you have built your business in good times by "relying" on referrals. You do your work well, you build the relationships with your clients to such a level, that they tell their friends and colleagues about you, and your order book is full.

Unfortunately, when things slow down, you may be tempted to fall into conventional marketing traps -- or be sold a pile of crap by conventional marketing sales representatives.

How do you get around these marketing myths and achieve meaningful results. I'll go out on a limb and suggest three ideas to follow:

1. Build on your referrals. If you have great client relationships, connect (more closely) with them, in a systematic but human way. You'll achieve far greater results with this form of marketing than any other option.
2. Look at media publicity as the most cost-effective non-referral marketing opportunity available to you. Media publicity can include your own media; namely blogs, videos, and Internet forum participation. It can also be independent editorial coverage in publications, websites and radio/television stations. We make most of our money by providing advertising-supported editorial publicity; done right, this can be a great seed for independent editorial coverage, and is far more effective than conventional advertising.
3. Remember that relationships don't need to correlate directly to any selling or "business development" but you want these relationships to focus within your ideal client community. In other words, focus on giving, sharing, and connecting without worrying about return, but hang out in the right neighbourhoods or with the right business associations.

Does this stuff work? Absolutely. And you don't have to sell a thing to find the clients you really want to serve if you get it right.

Lead nurturing

Clay Posey posted this entertaining video from Hubspot.com on his site.

Clay Posey at mychiefmarketingofficer.net sent me this email after completing my "spammy" survey seeking to understand if there is a way to convert initial inquiries from this blog to requests for special advertising-supported features within the Design and Construction Report.

(If you wish to see -- or take -- the survey, you can find it here.)

I read your blog post about the results - interesting. Yes, the survey you sent out tends to be on the “outbound” side of things. Emailed surveys are perceived as “spammy”. Even unsolicited emails to an opt-in list get bounces these days. Let me offer a couple of observations if I may.

First, in regards to the instrument design, your choices were very narrow (which can be good) but they were not inclusive. Regarding question three, your answers are restrictive. I would have included an option for “available at no cost to me.” Everyone knows that advertising pays for publication if they’ve ever done any advertising at all. The fact that you can create an advertorial piece at little or no cost to the client is really quite amazing. You could always explain the advertising in a marketing or sales conversation. And I’m sure you realize 15 is not a statistically valid number. Any given outbound campaign I do results in a 2 to 3 per cent opt out with the occasional spam. If your bounces were shown as SPAM and not just unsubs then I’d really have to think about why. I know Constant Contact's Spam check feature would have caught any obvious problems. That fact is disturbing.

Second, in regards to inbound marketing, it is anything but passive if done correctly. Your blog and your high Google rank are huge for lead generation. They are inbound tools at their best. Inbound, in a nut shell is about getting found (Creating interesting compelling content coupled with superior SEO efforts), converting (this is the "not passive" part of calls to action {step 1} leading to stunning offers {step 2}) that change visitors to leads) and then a solid LEAD NURTURING PROGRAM to convert leads to sales. You’re a pro so I don’t even want to begin to sound like I’m schooling you on marketing, but I’m betting that the gap in your program is related to lead scoring and lead nurturing. What you are doing so well with your blog and your SEO works so well that when coupled with the rest of the program, the results eclipse all other marketing efforts.

I have a client who is an architect. He was actually my first client. Last year he had two leads off of his web site. Every keyword he wanted to rank for was at least 100 pages deep in Google. I started working on his inbound marketing in earnest last March. In June, he was on the front page of Google for 15 of his keywords. For two of them, he ranks number two. He also had 17 leads off of his website. Zero from his outbound efforts by the way. It all boiled down to getting him found, giving folks a reason to stick when they got to the site, creating specific landing pages for specific personas, having a stunning offer for them to respond to and then tracking to analyze and improve the effort. It will only get better over time.

Intrigued, I have invited Clay to work with me to solve the lead nurturing problem with this blog. Can we redefine our methodologies to encourage more positive results, and relate more closely the lead quality and ranking to our sales efforts?

We discussed the best approach to take, and Clay recommended that we try out variations in the communication/copy and measure results with a/b testing. That is, we compare the existing/standard approach with an alternative, and see which one pulls greater responses. We may need to conduct several a/b tests over time, as we tweak the system, hoping to find a "home run" but regardless, seeing how the quality and effectiveness of the leads management system can be improved.

In the weeks ahead, I'll report on our progress. You'll see as the story unfolds how we develop new business and build a system for leads management and sales which can be effectively adapted to your own organization. If, as I think will happen, Clay succeeds in solving my challenge, he will rightfully earn the strongest endorsement possible (and of course validate some other marketing principals outlined in this blog, namely that respectfulness, sharing, and contributing without worrying about immediate results are far more effective marketing methodologies than conventional, irritating and intrusive advertising and sales practices.)

Calling lost clients: Why you should

This video from Jeffrey Gitomer reminds us that, if we are trying to rebuild our business, the best people to call are the clients who you lost. I found the reference in this Contractortalk.com thread.

You can gain some additional insights in this earlier posting (with a rather gross image) when Gitomer visited Ottawa.

The perfect (and near-perfect) marketing place

The BILDCOttawa event provided plenty of networking opportunities, in a natural environment. Perfect for marketing.

Yesterday afternoon, recovering from my spammy survey market research effort, I attended a perfect marketing event. Perfect for my business, that is. Nevertheless, the event also proved to be near-perfect for most of the other participants.

The event: A BILDCOttawa afternoon panel discussion focusing on the "Anti-Recession Infrastructure Program". BILDCOttawa is a lobbying and information-sharing consortium of associations representing the Ottawa Regional Society of Architects (ORSA), The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) -- Ottawa, the Consulting Engineers of Ontario -- Ottawa Branch, the General Contractors Association of Ottawa (GCAO), and the Iinternational Facilities Management Association (IFMA) -- Ottawa Chapter.

GCAO representatives encouraged me to attend, and organizers made me welcome by waiving the $25.00 fee (which included lunch and dinner). Representatives of several companies providing products and services for facilities management paid to be sponsors and had space for their exhibits.

The meat of the event: Representatives of the Canadian federal government and the City of Ottawa explained exactly how much money they had from anti-recession infrastructure programs, and how they planned to spend the cash. This is golden market research information for the general contractors and architects in the room and great stuff for Ottawa Construction News. (I was the only journalist there.)

I'm sure you don't need to be a rocket scientist to see why this is a perfect marketing venue for me.

• The participants and organizers wanted me to be there because my presence lends support and credibility to their efforts;
• The participants are mostly decision-makers and senior executives within the community of people who can facilitate revenue-generating features and advertising for our publications;
• We were in a warm, educational, and relaxing environment, where we had plenty of opportunity to network, communicate and share stories.
• The event cost me nothing but time (and this time is well spent -- I have significant editorial content for our publications, as well as valuable marketing and sales leads).
• Our presence there creates a positive connection between our publications and the marketplace; in other words, it helps the brand.

In reading these observations you may be saying "good for you, but how does this help my business?" The answer is that you can find similar opportunities, right under your nose, if you look in the right places.

Consider these points:

Association involvement, especially with associations that connect or serve your clients or key influencers, provides powerful marketing opportunities.

You may find you can take things a step further by building liaisons and linkages between your specific trade association or group and client-centric organizations, to create new levels of association involvement, such as BILDCOttawa. Leadership in these endeavors ultimately puts you in the right place, at the right time, among potential clients.

Consider the power of your niche, namely your specific skill or service, and how it applies in the marketplace.

We sell advertising; you might install drywall or build office towers, but you have something of value to offer. Meld this within the association and community framework, and you hit a marketing home run.

Look at the associations named in this article: Yes, they are local, Ottawa chapters, but most are part of associations with chapters in most major cities. In other words, the synergies and inter-relationships here could truly also apply in your own market areas.

From a near-perfect perspective, I don't think the suppliers who paid for exhibit space at this event feel they lost out on the deal. They had direct and immediate access to people who could truly specify their services, and they could overtly promote their services in a meaningful environment.

Regarding my spammy market research test, yesterday's blog entry resulted in some useful emails from readers with practical suggestions and ideas to overcome the marketing challenges exposed by that experiment. This blog's openness may represent one of its most powerful marketing advantages. Bob Kruhm pointed me to this Raintoday.com posting: Using Social Media to Build Trust and a Brand, which explains how blogging and showing your business as it is, warts and all, can be really helpful in your marketing process.

De-selecting a sub

San Francisco general contractor Dave Markham of C.M. Peletz Co. has posted a fascinating observation about how he decides which subtrades to use, and which ones to drop.
I don't think he will mind me reproducing the post in full here:

I once attended a forum sponsored by CSI (Construction Specification Institute) where one of the topics was Contractor/Subcontractor relations. There were several executives of large General Contractors in attendance. When prompted on the subject, one of the panel members, Jim Balboni, an executive with Otis Elevator, stood up on his chair and shouted, “Why in the hell do contractors continually use subcontractors that fail them!” In the best humor there is always some truth.

The General Contractor/Subcontractor relationship is, for better or worse, a telltale of project health or for that matter Contractor health. A great subcontractor makes the job of the General less time-consuming and allows him more time to plan and budget and thus makes the General look good. A poor subcontractor bogs all facets relating to his portion of the project down and can make the project and the GC look like a disaster.

In order to truly represent the interests of the client, the subcontractor list must constantly evolve. Great subcontracting companies come and go. So by simultaneously trimming the potential subs-list and adding to it constantly, you are adding extreme value to your relationships with clients. Pricing will be competitive and current. Technique and communication will be modern. Trust will be there.

That is not to say that all subcontractors must go. We have several that we have worked with for more than 20 years and continually stand the reasonableness test.

Disengaging from a subcontractor prior to contracting for a project

As with any relationship, until we have experienced a project together, we really do not know each other. A Subcontractor who violates the basics needs to be let go before they start for

• Improper insurance
• Disagreement with our indemnity language in our subcontract agreement
• Expired license
• Poor or non-existent references
• No office presence where phone calls, (e)mail and faxes are received, messages taken and phone calls, (e)mail and faxes returned.
• A misunderstanding of the management necessary for the very high caliber building process

If a subcontractor fails in any of these or you get the gut feeling that you’ll be let down, pass early and often. Experienced Generals know the feeling.

Eliminating a subcontractor from the proposal list

Now that we have experienced a project together, besides pricing, what makes us know the Subcontractor should not be considered for the next team effort:

• Poor product installation
• Offers no consultation in trade
• Improperly handles client/GC relationship
• Improperly handles architect/GC relationship
• Continuously late, inaccurate billings on improper form
• Does not understands the key rule that additional or extra work will not be paid for unless approved prior to work being completed
• Maintains a slovenly jobsite environment
• Add your own here

There is some give and take with this list. A subcontracting field with a small number of competent competitors might warrant a little leeway on a few of the above items. There might be some give and take for a rock-star that does very fine work. However, if a few of the above are tied together, even the best subcontractor is expendable.

The bottom line is that the GC needs to pull off the project on time and within budget and make the experience for the client worth reliving. If a subcontractor isn't doing his part to contribute to that smile on the Client's face, perhaps their place on the subs-list should be reconsidered.

I've always maintained that the most important aspect of marketing your business is how you handle your actual work, and Markham proves this point with this argument. Of course, not every story is the same and we all know of the classic challenge of general contractors receiving unrealistically low bids from sub trades who may be less than totally qualified.

Do you decline the "low bid" and then not win the final job, or do you accept it, knowing that things are likely to go wrong? This is one problem that isn't going away anytime soon.

Testing your ideas (2)

Yesterday, I received a solid reminder of the costs and challenges of surveying and testing marketing ideas, especially when you engage in intrusive communications. The question, always, is whether the intrusion's reward is worthy of its cost.

The question is whether our special advertising-supported editorial feature concept, the backbone of our existing print business, could be adapted effectively to leads generated from this blog in the new Design and Construction Report (http://www.dcnreport.com).

You can see the original posting explaining the concept here.

Out of 1,419 survey invitations, 15 answered the question, but disturbingly, six people reported my email as "spam" -- the highest number of spam complaints I've received for a single mailing since I began using Constant Contact about two years ago. (The spam complaints may have resulted in part because I inadvertently selected one of my employees as "sending" the email, and the recipients may not have known her. (She got a surprise on waking up to find dozens of 'bounces' in her email box!)

However, while nine people responded by saying they would welcome publicity only without any cost at all to their organization (hardly of value for our business), three said "yes" to the question of whether they would be willing to pay for the service with a "satisfaction guaranteed or there is no cost" fee, and three said they don't know whether publicity would be of value to them.

Later in the day, Chase observed in an email to me:

"Three leads where people would pay a fee is promising.

"The real question is to determine if the people responding are the real decision makers or not.

"I suspect we would see an average of five per cent close rate from the blog leads. I have no problem working these and as more issues are published the close rate will increase."

The results, obviously biased with responses from people who have a relatively close connection with our business, suggest there is some interest in the concept, but we don't have overwhelming or obvious demand. In other words, I certainly have not hit a home run.

And, to get the answers, I pushed myself into the face of busy people who don't really need nor want the intrusion.

But it isn't a dead loss either. As Chase points out, if we can achieve a five per cent close rate in the early going (that is one in 20), without being a pest or spending too much sales energy on weak leads, we have a viable market -- because this blog and its high Google rankings generates upwards of 20 to 30 inquiries a week. With our average revenue per feature, this indicates a market potential of upwards of $100,000.

In marketing, sometimes we need to push out a little to see what is happening, and sometimes we need to be a little in the face of our current or potential clients. This is certainly not the "Permission Marketing" advocated by Seth Godin, but I think a totally passive approach with no assertion or invitation/call to action is asking for silence when you try out new things.

As well, I appreciate that our business idea probably requires the effective intervention and co-ordination of intelligent sales representatives. The editorial publicity/special advertising feature concept is reasonably simple, but may not lend itself to the "check the box, 'I'll take it'" attitude.

Nevertheless, I'll be respectful and careful before rushing to generate another survey. I need to respect that far too many people resented the intrusion.

Testing your ideas

Yesterday morning, I floated a trial balloon on this blog, suggesting that the Design and Construction Report could be an effective opportunity to associate your interests (as Construction Marketing Ideas blog readers) with our own marketing strategies.

I then presented the idea to our weekly general meeting, and received what amounted to a collective "sigh" from my company's sales team. They effectively told me, "no, this won't work."

Glub. "Brilliant ideas" go nowhere without execution. So, the question is, am I wrong to assume there is a valid marketing correlation between responses and connections from this blog and the marketing of publicity-focused services, or should I push forward and (even more dramatically) invest time, resources, and money in making it happen?

Most of the time, these sorts of questions are aired and responded quietly within our own businesses.

But this blog's foundation is its openness and experimentation -- you can see ideas maturing, tested, and sometimes failing, right in front of your eyes. The result hopefully show you what can work for your own business, and which ideas should be dropped like lead balloons. (That's the second balloon analogy in this posting.)

In practice, most successful business people process dozens, even hundreds, of ideas a year. These arrive through their own experiences, insight flashes, employees, external media publicity and conferences, and sometimes, the initiative of outside sales representatives.

We need to process the ideas quickly and sort them into ones worthy of further experimentation and implementation. Most ideas rightfully end up right in the trash can, but unfortunately, I'm sure, many worthy innovations are not introduced because of inertia, fear, laziness, or simply lack of knowledge.

The question is, how can you sift the ideas effectively and quickly and focus your energies where they will be most useful? I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest these tests are worthy of consideration.

Is the idea you are testing low risk, easy to implement, and not likely to cause too much disruption in existing operations?
This is an "easy to say yes" idea -- but one which probably won't have that much impact long-term.

If you are asking someone else to do something, would you do it yourself? If not, why not?
My sales representatives said "no" to the idea of marketing leads generated by this blog for the Design and Construction Report. I suppose I could force them to do some work here -- but if I'm not ready to do it myself, why should I ignore their resistance?

Can you find quick tests that will validate your assumptions, without burning bridges or draining resources?
A few years ago, a well-placed person proposed a business idea that seemed relevant and valid, but would have required commitments of resources and effort beyond normal levels. We spent months setting up the concept, even developing prototypes. But I hesitated and decided I needed to see how the market would respond. I contracted with a reliable but non-employee representative to work with me for three days to see whether he could sell the idea. It failed, miserably. Maybe the idea should have received a 'second chance' but I realized that we were entering the space of diminishing returns. I dropped it.

Will the idea produce immediate revenue or reduce costs right away, or is it an "investment for the future"?
The former two variables are easy to say "yes" and move forward, the latter requires a much higher commitment threshold (and the risk increases with the investment size).

Can you find a test that will quickly provide you with insights and results at minimum cost and effort?
The three day test described above for an idea we had worked on for months made sense (and the investment in a few days pay for one person proved to be worth every cent), but do you want to spend that much time and effort validating other ideas, at the earlier stages of their development. You need some quick tests and measuring tools to tell you whether to take things further, or drop the idea.

For the idea I posted yesterday, the negative feedback from my staff is a major warning to go slow, if at all.

I can now take things in two directions: Pick up the phone or send some emails to a sampling of potential clients to see their interest (that is, do the work myself, with sampling, one by one), or survey the readers with a quick online poll.

I decided on the latter -- it is fast, easy, and if it works, will provide immediate and actionable leads. And if it doesn't work, I'll know equally quickly, and we can move on to other ideas.

If you haven't already received the survey invitation email from me, you can see it here -- and once you complete the survey, you will also see the results!

What we do (and why this is helpful for you)

This article about Herring & Trowbridge Architects in Northern Virginia is an example of the feature which we can produce for your business or practice -- often at no direct cost to you.

Some of your best marketing is indirect. But sometimes you lose nothing by being straightforward. Over the weekend, I realized this blog is perhaps a classic example of indirect marketing -- readers here may need to look hard and long to figure out exactly what we "sell".

In part, this dichotomy has a rational history. Until recently, the blog, which I started about two and a half years ago as a client service initiative, connected thousands of readers around the world with a business which served distinctively local markets. If you were based in Ontario or North Carolina, we could provide a useful service for you; elsewhere, frankly, we had nothing practical to offer.

Things have changed with the launch of the online Design and Construction Report. Now the core service we provide in local markets is available anywhere in the world, but retains relevance to your business even if you only serve a highly local community.

The reason is that you can take advantage of our feature writing and publicity service no matter where you are. And the resulting editorial content including (if you wish) live video and hyperlinks in the electronic edition is a powerful and useful resource for your own website, search engine optimization, and local marketing (while giving you a point of contact for people who may be exploring your market, but who aren't in your community yet.)

How does it work?

You can elect two options for publicity within the Design and Construction Report. The first is to become a Design and Construction Network Sponsor. This is an ideal opportunity for you to connect with the Network, especially if you are in the greater Washington D.C. area or would like to develop a chapter/community group in your own community.

The second option, which may be of greater appeal if your market is less within the design and construction community than with the "outside market" in your area, is for us to publish a feature profile of your business or practice in an upcoming issue. And you can do this in either of two ways.

In the first, you simply contract with us for a base fee of $1,500, and we'll write and produce a three page feature with images and text, and then provide you with the PDF file and electronic version for your own use. (If you wish an in-person rather than phone interview, or require us to take photos for the story, there will be some additional costs, which we will discuss with you before incurring the expenses.)

In the second option, if you permit us to communicate with your suppliers and invite them to purchase supporting advertisements, your feature can be without charge. (We'll of course treat your suppliers fairly; the Construction Marketing Ideas blog originated as a service to our advertisers, and they can receive extensive free marketing consulting services, which will far exceed their advertising investment.)

You can use the feature articles to:

• Improve your search engine rankings
• Create a positive brand awareness within your market;
• Set the tone and encourage other (free) local media publicity (we'll show you how);
• Recognize key clients and suppliers;
• Provide something tactile and useful both in your presentation materials and for your client service packages.

If you would like more information, please feel free to email me at buckshon@cnrgp.com. Chase at chase@cnrgp.com, Leslie Greenwood at lgreenwood@cnrgp.com, Bob Kruhm at rkruhm@cnrgp.com or phone 888-432-3555 ext 224.