As I rushed from my home with my son for his first lacrosse practice a canvasser approached me. “Not interested. Go away,” I blurted as Eric looked at me with a frown on his face. “Dad, do you need to be so rude?,” he asked, and of course, he was right — but I’ve always hated sales intrusions in my personal space and when I’m busy and rushing to do stuff, I really don’t need someone to push an unwanted product or service on me. I rationalized my response: “I was saving the canvasser time so he could see someone who might actually purchase what he has to offer,” I said.
Thankless job, canvassing, but as I’ve posted before, I know it has a valid place in some contractors’ marketing arsenals. In fact, it proved to be a topic that justified a near-Thanksgiving flight and day in Columbus, Ohio a couple of years ago as I researched content for the new Construction Marketing Ideas book.
Canvassing and book-writing share some things in common: a degree of perspiration and plenty of frustration coupled with some instant gratification. The difference is that canvassing is a true immediate hit and miss exercise (and you will undoubtedly miss more than you hit). Book writing is simply a long slog but when you are done, you start reaping seemingly easy rewards.
For example, I determined that the book could be feasible when I learned where to print it economically and, when the time came to publish, things worked exactly as promised. Within a couple of days of setting the book up, Amazon.com had a listing and (thanks in part to information from a sample book sent by the printers), I completed some of the supplementary functions to enhance the book’s presence and visibility on the online site.
I also discovered Google Books and within minutes uploaded my book’s content for further revenue from advertising, coupled with incredible search engine optimization opportunities unavailable to most websites. (The actual posting of the book on Google may take several weeks, however).
Marketing for this industry, indeed, is part inspiration and part perspiration. Sometimes you achieve flashes of insight and some marketing miracles occur without much effort but if you think you can find an easy, fast and absolutely certain way to succeed, you can dream as much as you like but you might just hope to find the answer in my book, or anyone else’s for that matter. (Then again, I really found some great ideas in others’ books far faster than I could have any other way.)
Update on Design and Construction Report recruiting
This morning I think I solved the problem of the key testing and evaluation link in the recruiting process for The Design and Construction Report and, for that matter, our other publications. We’ve always taken the stance that no one should be hired without working with us for a few days and proving their ability. The challenge is that the working assignments are built on current operations, so it is hard to find a consistent and reliable testing and evaluation approach, especially when we don’t have much “current” material to evaluate. I asked our designer to complete marketing materials for a directory listing product which I think will provide a consistent and quick test.
Three or four candidates are worthy of short-listing for this test — and once I am comfortable that all the pieces are in place, we’ll run a final group of Craigslist ads and then sequence the testing. I think this will take about a week as we also prepare the layouts for the Spring 2010 issue.
