Category Archives: Marketing

Using LinkedIn for Decorative Concrete Marketing

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LinkedIn is a powerful  and popular social media network for business.

From the LinkedIn website:

Founded in 2003, LinkedIn connects the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. With more than 135 million members worldwide, including executives from every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the Internet.

Even though it seems as if LinkedIn is populated primarily with corporate-minded individuals, a local decorative concrete business owner can also benefit from participating on the social network.

With a reported 116 million users and a ranking of the 11th most visited website in the U.S., LinkedIn is heavily crawled and indexed by search engines like Google, so one benefit of being a member of LinkedIn is the ability to create a profile which gets lots of attention from the search engines.

Setting up a strong and powerful profile at LinkedIn is easy:

  1. Create a LinkedIn account and profile by entering your personal and professional information.
  2. Create your public profile via the “Edit My Public Profile link.
  3.  Keep the current URL designated to you or choose your own.
  4. Click on the “Set Address” button to personalize your URL address.
  5. Fill out the Education box with your attendance at Engrave-A-Crete’s Discovery and Training Seminar.
  6. Fill out the “Company Website” box with your company’s website address.
  7. Be sure to use keywords in your paragraph.
  8. Request recommendations from your customers or people who know you and can give a character recommendation.  They must be members of LinkedIn to give you a recommendation. These same people will become ‘connections’ as your network grows.
  9. Click on the “View My Profile as Others See It” link to review your public profile.

Be sure to sign up for all of the groups that are pertinent to your business.

Answer questions, ask questions and build your network.

Most importantly, fill out and enable all forms of communication so anyone on LinkedIn can contact you.

Let Google and other search engines carry your profile over the Internet to potential customers using a free LinkedIn membership.

Decorative Concrete Benefits From A Network of Friends

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Helpful Puppy & Decorative Concrete

Just a little help?

You can do just about everything you need to do for your decorative concrete engraving business from the back of your trailer or truck.  So it seems.

Engravers who have a network of people get ahead along a smoother and faster road.  Patrick Gibbs of Legacy Concrete Engraving is an example. He worked with his dad and one of dad’s friends to get the idea of a sleek, attractive cart that supports, hauls and displays heavy samples of his work.  The thought of a slab large enough to really show the beauties of concrete conjures up a backache!

Legacy Concrete Engraving

Patrick and his network fabricated a set of carts  They have tremendous possibilities for demonstrations — one-on-one or at a trade show.  The demo concrete can be moved easily and safely with the cart.  In the actual exhibit, the concrete is supported and displayed attractively.

The cart is a wonder — but the network is the big thing.  People shared interests and skills to accomplish something that made a good situation even better.

As a contractor, look around you at your network.  How can you contribute to one another, create joint ventures for expansion or design something new?  Once you get your network rolling, you will never want to be the Lone Engraver again.

Legacy Concrete Engraving
P.O. Box 66
Tyndall, Manitoba, Canada
204-960-8700
Email Contact

“What’s In It For Me?” The Only Thing Your Customer Cares About

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If You Aren't Addressing Your Customer's Wants in Your Marketing, Your Business Might As Well Be Offering The Contents of This Truck.

 

What are you trying to sell your customers and leads?

Are you selling them decorative concrete staining and engraving, or are you selling them a solution to the cracks in their driveway, patios and ugly plain gray basement floor?

The harsh truth is, your customer is tuned in to only one radio station: WII FM – What’s In It For Me?

They don’t care about your experience, or your artistic vision if you can’t get them what they want… a solution to their problem.

If you fix just one person’s problem, they will do a lot of marketing for you. They will deploy the most popular, inexpensive and effective marketing there is. It’s called Word of Mouth marketing and word-of-mouth marketing from a satisfied customer can do wonders for your business.

They may not do a perfect job of representing your business… They may not talk about everything you’re capable of doing, but they will tell their friends and neighbors about how you handled the cracks in their concrete and gave them a dazzling new driveway.

The take-away here is, be sure to market to your customer’s wants… You don’t stain and engrave concrete, you transform ugly, plain, scarred-up concrete into beautiful, elegant, eye-pleasing works of art.

Be brave, be creative, be adventurous be creative in your marketing, and deliver the goods using Engrave-A-Crete decorative concrete tools and Concrete Resurrection Stains and Sealers.

You can learn more decorative concrete techniques, as well as great ways to market your decorative concrete business at the Engrave-A-Crete Discovery and Training Seminar. Call 800-884-2114 today to learn more or visit Engraveacrete.com to register for the next seminar.

Image Tags Work Behind the Scene to Market Decorative Concrete

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Texas Star engraved and stained into a bad section of a Boston driveway

Reviewing the latest activity across the web, it appears you have become believers about posting  images of your decorative concrete jobs on your Facebook Fan pages and websites, blogs, plus the photo display/storage resources such as Flickr. Photos on your website and public pages are indexed by Google and can be found most easily by searching Google Images and using keywords which are part of the description, title, Alt text or URL for specific photos.

Visually minded people turn to Google Images to get a picture of what they want.  They know good decorative concrete engraving when they see it and will use those images to check out a contractor.

The images are sorted by data (key or important words) that can be found in the webpage or blog post surrounding the area where the picture is used. In particular, the Alt Text, which is a Meta Tag used by Google for search engine indexing, is important for ensuring your images show up when people search for decorative concrete using keywords.  I know that’s kind of technical, but just think of “Meta” as “Data about data.” Keywords, captions, titles, descriptions and Alt Text are all various forms of data about what the image your posting is all about.

As an example, let’s say you’re a decorative concrete contractor in Boston, and you installed a Texas star on a customer’s driveway and you took a picture of it and are now posting it to your blog… we’ll title this picture the Texas Star Driveway in Boston. Start by saving the picture as texasstarboston.jpg. Most blogging software allows you to upload and insert pertinent pictures directly from your computer to the article that you are currently working on… use this feature, and you will notice that you are asked to fill in the Title, Alternate Text (Alt Text), Caption and Description of the image.   Special thank you to David Larson of Advanced Concrete Staining in New Braunfels, TX for letting us work with his unique rendering of a Texas Star pattern on a concrete repair project.  David has a special affinity for the Texas star and works it into many of his artistic designs. The image has tags that imply the engraving is located in Boston, Texas, but that is only for ‘pretend’ and my literary license so you can see how tags and descriptions work.

Keywords that people might use when searching for these images could be Boston, decorative concrete engraving, or Texas Star.

What we can take away:  Contractors are doing a good job of putting photos in their internet marketing. Your next customer could find you using Google images, especially if you put your key words in the file name, image title box and either blog or complete the extended description boxes that are part of the upload system.

You can learn more about marketing your decorative concrete services by clicking on the Marketing category in the right hand sidebar of this blog.  Or you can come to the Discovery and Training Seminar at Engrave-A-Crete.  In the state of the art Missouri facility, a lively session on marketing is part of the training.  Call 800-884-2114 today for more information or request information at Engraveacrete.com, available 24/7 for your convenience.

Add Professional Glossy Brochures to your Decorative Concrete Marketing Strategy

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Custom Promotional Brochures

You can have a beautiful tri-fold brochure with a theme that showcases your business while being clear about decorative concrete.

We’ve worked up a package that lets you have economical marketing brochures without stress and strain of creating the layout.

With 3 great themes to choose from you won’t have to worry about cookie cutter designs. Working with Sherry, the graphics designer at Engrave-A-Crete, your brochures can be set up to represent your business. Your logos and tag lines can be included while the text can be personalized for your services.

Once you’re happy with the final design they will be professionally printed and shipped to your door, all for one low price.

You can stay focused on engraving.

Engrave s.r.o Brochure

Engrave s.r.o Brochure

The example brochure features Engrave s.r.o, (Vladimir Hanzi, Czechoslavia). The specifics were worked out in Missouri and emailed to Vladimir who had them translated and printed there. We were excited to see the results of this international project. We love to work with engravers in any country.

Call 1-800–884-2114 with questions about the brochures. Ask for Sherry, extension 111. Get yourself a quality tool to use in your marketing strategy.