Darryl’s been on a steep learning curve but has loved every minute. He says, “I have learnt to become a marketer and not a doer in my business – working smarter not harder. I started the journey by implementing as many effective marketing pillars as possible. I’ve created a real buzz with my videos. I get calls for new business every week on the back of these videos and randomly I even have people that call me up and tell me how brilliant they think I am!”
He’s also used video effectively on his website. Darryl says: “I put the video on my homepage and actually had one customer call up that said he hadn’t even looked at the rest of my website as when the video auto-played (a tip from Botty) and he called up right away as he knew he wanted to do business with us.”
Personality and connecting with his potential customers has been a big part of Darryl’s strategy to grow his business, the way he promotes the business – ‘people buy people’.
Darryl says: “If you take a look on my website it contains some fun stuff and information; we had one guy call through recently who wanted to do business with us purely because of the fact I was a West Ham fan.”
Darryl has widened his customer base by targeting specific groups and markets which has enabled him to tailor his marketing message to improve response. One example is his focus on attracting architects to become customers and offering specific advice to add more value to the work they do for their clients.
He says: “We have been able to be really specific in calling out to architects in the marketing pieces that we run – it’s a lucrative market we simply didn’t get close to before. Typically architects speak to the building contractors and in turn they speak to us but by going directly to the architects we can provide a better service for them and we end up saving them money. No one else really does this; we’re bridging the gap and creating new customers.”
A key change in his business has also been the introduction of systemised follow up to new enquiries and people that have not taken action within the first few weeks after enquiry.
Darryl says:“We use Nigel’s Dynamite Sales system to send out personalised postcards to people that made an enquiry 3-4 weeks ago but have gone quiet. So many businesses do the hard work to get new leads then fall down on follow up and conversion. We find that the most effective way to do this is nudging them with postcards to get them back. Before I joined the EC I waited for my customers to give me a nudge but now I’m nudging them in the right ways all the time. Just as importantly I used to wait for my customers to create jobs for me (letting me know when they needed something doing) now we create jobs by letting the customers know about different things they may need doing and offering peace of mind and repeat visits.”
He has a business card dispenser on his vans (tracking numbers on the cards of course!) that has been really effective; he brings in customers via Twitter;runs his blog,; creates direct mail campaigns that includes miniature Lego men electricians and even his own comic strip.
Darryl says, “Not only have I doubled the turnover of the business but I now have more time to spend mixing with business owners that are better than me. I would never normally have been able to afford this time away from the business. All the pillars of marketing I have implemented wouldn’t be there without the EC.
I didn’t have any clear goals; I just went from day to day relying on word of mouth to grow my business. Now everything has changed.”
