Why Job Shops Need Branding More Than Sales
I don’t care how rich you are: We are all blessed with the same amount of time and energy to use in a given day, and how you put these resources to work translates to your success rate. Do you use that time developing your brand to attract the customers you want, or hitting the pavement to sell your machine time?
Attracting customers through branding is called pull marketing whereas traditional sales methods rely on push marketing. The difference between the two is that push marketing will have you hitting the pavement until the end of time whereas pull marketing builds on itself, keeping your ideal clients lining up around the door to work with you.
Bottom line–where you focus your time and energy will change the way you do business.
PUSH MARKETING, AKA SELLING
With traditional push marketing, your shop needs to sell a certain amount of machine time and man-hours, so you draft up your list of potential customers and then you start chasing. Maybe you join your local chamber or an industry organization and start going to their events to meet people. You build relationships with them in the hopes that they will eventually start to know, like, and trust you enough to send customers your way.
You might consider cultivating a handful of referral partners in related industries and making sure they understand your capabilities in case their customers or leads need your services. You could also buy advertisements or sponsored content in an industry publication, set up a booth at a trade show, sponsor events or sports teams, or donate your time or money to community organizations to get your name out there. These tactics are all ways to get your company in front of the right people.
But they also take a lot of energy, and that means shop owners who spend their time and money on push marketing strategies like this don’t have the resources to invest in building up their brand’s notability where it counts. Let’s be honest, in this scenario, you are either out there pounding the pavement or making sure the work gets done right and on time, which makes it hard to dedicate time to anything else.
PULL MARKETING, AKA BRANDING
Branding is about so much more than having a nice logo. A brand strategy, or pull marketing strategy, begins long before you even start thinking about your logo. It starts with focusing on you (and your team if you have one). Forget about your current state of business for a minute–beer can help with this (please drink responsibly)! Now, take a huge step back and get to an open, creative place and answer the following questions:
What do you want to get out of this business?
Why did you start it to begin with?
What are you great at?
Who are your favorite customers?
What jobs have been most profitable for you?
What do you want to be known for?
Why does that matter to you?
Now, imagine you have achieved all of those things–what does it feel like?
Once you iron out the vision (which will inevitably change, and probably often), you can start taking steps towards it. If you need to expand your skillset or purchase new machines, what will that take? Are there job training grants or lines of credit that can help you take action on them now? If you need to re-think your business process and efficiencies, do that. And most importantly, start building your credibility and authority in that space rather than chasing after the next job.
This is a much longer game that will require discipline and resilience. If we use the tortoise and the hare as an analogy, pull marketing is the tortoise–slower going, but much longer-lasting. When you take this more intentional approach and keep your eyes glued to the prize–and only those efforts that will lead you to it–you can build something that attracts the customers you want to work with, like magnets to metal, in a fairly short period of time.
The key here is focus. When your energy and resources are laser-focused on what you do and for whom, you can build your skillset, value, and prominence so that the customers come to you. It’s like switching from a manual lathe to a CNC lathe. It’s a large investment initially, but you know it will pay off in the long run because you will be able to do the same amount of work in a much shorter time period, and once you pay it off, it’s pure profit from there on out. Don’t get me wrong, both channels require a significant time investment, but the return you get from building up your brand will pack a much bigger punch and it will build on itself for as long as you are in business.
Let’s imagine two job shop owners: Bob and Sue
Bob is a talented machinist who does superb work. He can turn a block of metal into any product you need, and help you design and develop it. He knows his sh*t and is a joy to work with. When you meet him, you like him instantly and you can tell he knows what he’s doing.
Like most job shop owners, Bob spends much of his time networking, prospecting, and going after leads, and because he’s such a great guy, he gets plenty of referrals from people who know him. But at any moment, the people who are referring him are meeting other Bobs. So even though he gets leads, he also puts in a lot of time and energy into quoting jobs that he will never get or lowering his rates to be competitive enough to win, losing out on profitability.
Sue is also a machinist with just as much talent and personality as Bob. But a couple of years ago, after making a few custom stainless components for the pharmaceutical industry, Sue made the decision to specialize in pharmaceutical machining and launched full force into building her reputation in that industry.
As someone with a rare medical condition that would quickly kill her without her medication, Sue takes a special interest in pharmaceutical production. Believing that innovations in this space will help bring the prices down for other people like her provides an altruistic motivation for Sue that cannot be manufactured. This ignites her passion for her work and stokes that fire every time she thinks about the good she is doing in the world. Then, rather than hunting for any random customer who might need machining work, Sue can get special certifications for machining medical-grade components, pay attention to medical manufacturing trade publications, and go to in-person or online trade shows to learn about new technologies and production methods. She can write articles or vlog (video blog) about her experience and pitch ideas and content to publications in that sector.
Each experience adds to the value potential customers will perceive when they stumble upon her content. Every time she machines something unique for this industry, she posts a little video about it explaining why her approach works better than the old way. With each new customer, she learns something new about pharmaceutical manufacturing and the industry in general, and after consistently doing this for a couple of years, she begins to see patterns in what these customers need. Now, not only is Sue a great machinist, but she has also built up a reputation in the pharmaceutical industry as the go-to shop for machined components. She isn’t just designing and machining products that function and look good; she is also bringing all of her expertise to the process. She often knows more about pharmaceutical production than her customers do!
Even though Sue’s core offering is machining for pharmaceuticals, she comes to every new project with a depth of knowledge that is near impossible to top. Her youtube channel is full of helpful videos about machining pharmaceutical components and conversations with her customers, and she can be found talking intelligently on industry-specific podcasts, gaining recognition from the exact customers she wants to attract. Sue doesn’t have to go out and sell or network because she meets people through industry trade shows and piques the interest of people who are looking for industry-related content online. When you visit her website, it’s obvious that she is an expert in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.
This is how branding and pull marketing works.
Sue focuses her time and energy on developing her skills and reputation so that her ideal customers find her. Because she is worth more to these customers, she can charge more for her work, and avoid racing to the bottom in a price contest against other shops.
And if Bob and Sue were both in the running for a pharmaceutical production job, who do you think would win? I would bet you $100 that Sue could not only win, but quote the project at a higher rate and still come out on top. Why? Because her overall brand shows that she is an expert in that field and her service comes with more than just machining capabilities.
Pull marketing requires more than just a laser focus. It means becoming your brand in its entirety and channeling it with every step you take. Spending your valuable time to network with small groups of people is a short-term strategy that should only be done when you have invested in becoming a brand worth remembering.
If you want to avoid the endless feast or famine cycle and begin pulling ideal customers to you, you need to set aside time to build a pull marketing strategy and a brand that means something. To do that, you must invest a significant amount of time in developing your skillset in whatever niche you choose and demonstrating your expertise to that world. Networking is a one-time thing. A youtube video lasts forever.
Sales and push marketing have their place, but when combined with a solid foundation of branding and a pull marketing strategy, you become infinitely more powerful. The difference between meeting a few people at a time and telling them what you do when you have a generic Bob brand instead of a focused Sue brand is immeasurable. If Bob meets 10 people and not one of them remembers what he does, he might as well have gone to the bar. If Sue meets 10 people, chances are far greater that at least one of them will remember her, know someone in the pharmaceutical industry, or be curious enough to check out her youtube channel or podcast appearances–or all of the above.
Who would you rather be: Bob or Sue?
Both approaches require hard work, but only ONE offers a future you can rely on. Which one will you choose? If you want to start focusing on YOUR goals and take control of your destiny, learn about how we help shop owners like you do just that.