Listen to this episode of Beyond The Tools with today’s guest Denise Goodyear, to discover all about what it takes to find the target audience for your home service and residential construction business. You’ll also learn all about how to start better marketing practices, tools on how to figure out who your target audience is, how networking impacts your business, and more!

For the full show notes, head on over to:

https://reflectivemarketing.com/podcast/Denise-Goodyear-Why-Identifying-Your-Target-Audience-is-Key-for-Effective-Marketing

Krystal Hobbs 0:04

Welcome to Beyond the Tools, the podcast that helps contractors attract more leads, grow their business, and finally get off the tools. In each episode, you'll discover marketing tactics that work. You'll get actionable insights from other successful contractors, and connect with experts to help you grow. I'm your host, Krystal Hobbs, owner of a social media agency that helps contractors attract and convert more leads. Get ready to take your business to the next level so you can finally enjoy the fruits of your hard labor. Ready, let's go!

Welcome back to Beyond the tools. I am thrilled to introduce today's guest, my friend, and longtime colleague, Denise Goodyear of Intuitive Media. Welcome to the show, Denise.

Denise Goodyear 3:15

Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.

Krystal Hobbs 3:17

So I know Denise, you, and I really got to know each other through our work with the Canadian Home Builders’ Association. But I actually don't know much of your backstory, I guess. So tell us a little bit about how you got involved in the trades.

Denise Goodyear 3:37

Krystal Hobbs 5:01

Wow. Well, I'm glad I asked that because I had no idea.

Denise Goodyear 5:07

A long time.

Krystal Hobbs 5:09

Yes, fantastic! And now that you've got your own company, you are working quite a bit with the trade still?

Denise Goodyear 5:16

Yes, I've been lucky enough to do a lot of work continue to work in the industry for realtors, and developers, builders, sub trades, basically, everybody in the different categories. I guess you'd call it a business in the industry. Currently working with a lot of builders, rebranding, doing a brand refresh, trying to really level up digitally. That's where I've been spending a tremendous amount of my time with CHPA members and even in the commercial and industrial side of construction. I've also spent the last couple of years managing all of the marketing for the office to advance women apprentices, which has been a lot of fun, and getting to know and watching apprentices go through the red seal process in different trades has been fascinating. Also, being able to help some of these apprentices make connections with employers and help the officer advance women apprentices make those connections has been very rewarding as well.

Krystal Hobbs 6:15

Awesome. Speaking of leveling up digitally, I know it can be especially in today's day and age, a lot is going on online. It seems like every business is on there, I guess, as a whole like how do you help your clients cut through the noise and the clutter? What's your starting point with them to figure out how to go about their marketing?

Denise Goodyear 6:45

Sure, that's a great question. I guess it really starts with their why. Why do they do what they do? What serves their own purpose and gives them energy? And sometimes, especially dealing with builders and sub-trades, they look at you like a deer in the headlights sometimes when you ask that question. But, there's always a reason why we made the choices we made in our careers, especially if you're an entrepreneur doing the work, it takes a lot to run a business. And if you've got a skilled trade under your belt, you can make a great living working for other people. So as entrepreneurs, we really have to let our “why” drive our purpose and our passion. And I think that's what keeps us all going back and not moving on to just working for someone else. And to that point, when it comes to cutting through that noise, it starts with their why then it comes to finding your audience. It's always an interesting subject to approach with clients because more often than not, you're met with answers pertaining to how broad their audiences are. But the truth of it is, the narrower you get in defining your audience, the more specific you can speak with them and make connections. And that's really where marketing has gone in the digital age, we're in where were we thought we were in a data before were like 10,000 messages a day. Now it's just dozens of times more than what it once was with traditional media. So you really got to make genuine connections with people to cut through that clutter. And the only way to really do that is to understand them and speak to them directly. When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one, and you have an impact.

Krystal Hobbs 8:29

I love that. And let's dig into that because I think I know pretty well every client call, every sale call that I do, and I asked, “Who you're trying to attract? Who you're going after?” And like you said, a bit of a deer in the headlights, well, you know, homeowners in my service area. So what's the starting point to figuring out who my target audiences are?

Denise Goodyear 8:56

Well, I think for anyone already in business, I think it's actually thinking about, of all the people you do business with, who do you enjoy working with? As a marketer, I've had to make choices over the years, as we all have taken on jobs that maybe it's not exactly what we want. I know lots of builders who took on renovation work through down cycles of new builds. And, we do what we need to survive in business. But at the end of the day, when we enjoy what we do, and we've all heard this before, it doesn't really feel like work. So working with people, we enjoy appreciating what we bring to the table that is willing to pay for our services. That's our ideal client, people who are willing to pay you a fair price for what you do and for your skills and your expertise. And sometimes we're sort of afraid of really leaning into that and saying no to the ones we don't want because there's always a fear of not enough business. But, when you try to be everything to everybody, you really risk being nothing to anyone because you're not making any specific connections. For example, no matter what trade you're in if I'm building a home, or I'm renovating our home, or I have a problem with one of the systems in my home, or I need an inspection or an appraisal or any of that, if I'm a young, first-time homeowner or buyer, versus say, someone whose kids have grown and moved out, when they have the house back to themselves, again, our needs are going to be very different. Our time availability is going to be very different. How you deal with us will be different. A younger person may want you to correspond by text. If someone's in the baby boomer generation, they may prefer a phone call. Somewhere in between, there might still be someone using email. So, I mean, you really got to understand your customer and to be able to serve them up the information and even communicate with them through the methods nowadays that matter to them. Because email isn't for everybody nowadays. Its messaging and text are far more important to a big chunk of anyone's audience nowadays. So we really need to figure out what matters to them. Do your homework, do your research, ask questions, ask your current customers, ask to pick up the phone, and call someone who's called you back a dozen times for work or given you referrals and say, what is it about what we do that keeps you coming back? And then utilize that to attract more like-minded people. And of course, a huge part of that is referrals. When we enjoy working with someone and we actually proactively ask them to refer us to others or to provide our information, we provide them something tangible to hand on to someone else. Now that's where the magic really happens. Because of those people we've already proven ourselves to them. So it's really about finding more of them.

I love that. Okay, so if I'm in this industry, and okay, I can call up my customers, how do I go about structuring that conversation? Or like, what's an example of a client that you've worked with that you've been able to help them figure out who their target audience is?

Sure. Well, I'm currently working with a builder who has been around a long time, for example, who's decided and it took a while for some marketing planning. We started talking about a new brand, refreshing their brand, creating a new website, and a new identity for them to really help them evolve. And from the time we started that process till we got probably a month or six weeks into it because they weren't in a panic to get it done and it was something they were working at in between, we determined that they don't really want to do the same work they always did. And they made the decision, the husband and wife team, they made the decision to really lean into the work they want to do more, which is more on the project management side, right with the homeowner, maybe working helping other builders with projects, commercial projects or developments, and managing those larger-scale projects, still doing some of the build stuff, absolutely, but also being available to provide the expertise to manage something else. And that happened when we really started asking the tough questions about all the current work categories of work you're currently doing, what do you enjoy doing. And the truth of it was they really lost the passion for some of it over many years of doing it and really felt the need to move on to something else. And it wasn't until that I kind of forced them into that conversation that they went, “I can't do all of this so let's lean more this way and change our language.” Now we're changing. We're slightly changing their name, changing the brand, and changing their approach. And in doing so, in this particular case, this client wants to work with potentially other builders and other developers to manage projects for them. So, of course, that also means they've gone from a strictly business to consumer America to bring in a bit more of the B2B side of thing, which also means, “Okay, now, let's start talking network. How do we grow our audiences that way?” So, that's a good example of someone in the industry. They've changed their mind and decided to narrow and that's okay. Whether you're two years in, six months in, or 25 years in, we can all make the choice to do business with people we enjoy.

I love that.

which is a lot of fun.

Absolutely. And I do want to dig into the networking side of things in a minute because I think that's an interesting point. But I guess before we get there going back to audience research, besides calling up my customers, I guess, what are some things that I can do to figure out or I guess, to gather that intel on your customer base?

Well, I think it starts by making some of those contacts like we talked about with intent, basically, first, first things first, actually the back Got up a moment, think about who it is, think about who you've worked with, that you enjoyed the most, that were least resistant to any of your pain points around price or, or timelines or anything like that because let's face it, some of them, some of your customers are going to be very demanding of your time and they demand urgency when it's not necessary. Maybe they're not the right customer. And that's okay. So, when we determine who they are, we can start to really think about, what do they do for a living? How much money do they make? Where do they live? What kind of home do they live in? What do they drive? Do they have children, whether their interests, then we start getting into psychographics, such as their interests and their behaviors? Build a persona as best you can around them? Doesn't it sound way more complicated than it is just to paint a picture of who they are, who are they? And then once you've developed that, then we need to start thinking about okay, so where do these people, as I've outlined spend their time?

So there's a lot Google can tell us and social media channels can tell us a lot in that. You're likely friends, Facebook, friends with some of these people see what they do see where they hang out? Who do they hang out with? Who Are they friends with? I know, it sounds a little investigative, but we put that level of effort into it, it just pays back tenfold. So online groups are a big one, because let's face it, as we grow our audience, and find our people, so to speak, or customers, we need to look at where we can find them, sort of in-person and locally, but we also need to see where we can find them digitally. So if we can find, for example, we find out that they're big into gardening, okay, great. That's a really good piece of information. Now, what gardening groups are out there, what landscape groups are out there on social media, where they may hang out, where you as a company or an individual can join and be part of that conversation, right? Like Austin Business is a fantastic group for women locally in business called Femme Fte, where I hop on to say, I need a freelancer to do this job for me, or I'm looking to hire someone, or who knows about this opportunity or what best tool to use for that. And it's a wealth of information.

So leaning into those situations, basically define who they are. And then do your best to determine where they hang out. And again, ask questions. And as you get to know more of them and seek them out, ask them questions. We're all very conversational people, when we're in front of people enjoy it. So even those conversations will come easier. When it comes to that, ask colleagues and friends and industry associates and people that, maybe you're after a similar customer, but you offer a different service, maybe you represent different sub-trades, but you want the same people to work together and lean on each other. Certainly, another way that can help and even like Statistics Canada, as valuable information and demographics and occupation of salaries and all these sorts of things. It's not something that happens overnight. I always tell people to start that Google Doc and keep it going. And just keep adding to it as you learn more about them. Then you don't forget.

Excellent. I remember speaking to a lawn care company last year. And one of the things he said that I found kind of funny on the avatar side of things was when he started the business, he thought he would get people because they were doing natural lawn care, he thought he would get people that we're worried about their children like playing on the lawn. He was like, "No, I get pet parents." He's like, "I get people that like love their dogs, and don't want their dogs eating grass with all these chemicals on it." So I thought that was coming.

We'd like to think our kids will be eating grass.

So I think picking up on those little bits of conversations that you have with your customers and fleshing that out of it. Cool. So I love your point on like, then looking at the networking side of things, and I mean networking, not that fancy, not the new Tiktok are the greatest latest thing, but something that it's all about relationships, right? So how do you work with your clients to figure out how they can network and how that networking can have an impact on their business?

Sure. This is a fun one for me, I have to say. As someone who's been in the marketing world for 20 plus years, I'm the person who went to every event for the first decade I was in business, went to every event, took every hand, took every business card, whether I could do business with them or not in my current role at the time, I saw it as a future opportunity to develop a relationship and I did that. So, it's something that I sort of clued into early on in my career of the power of our networks that were involved with, especially our industry networks. So let's take specifically this industry. We look at, say, HVAC, as an example. So, when I meet with clients who are a member of that group, or another industry group for their specific trade, or whatever the case may be, we'll always start the conversation around what groups are you a part of, as a starting point. And I'll often be met with, well, I'm part of this group, they don't get much out of it, or they'll build start talking about, some specifics in that regard. And I always kind of pause things for a minute and ask them to back up for a minute and think about, first of all, what have you put into it?

So the way I approach networks is this, and we've all heard it before, but many people and probably a lot of people listening to this, because I know who you are, I know the type of people you are, and I know what you put into some of these groups. And for some, it's lots and for some, it's nothing. If you're part of an organization, and you don't attend things, and you don't participate, nobody really knows you exist, other than your logo appears. And now and then it's not enough. The first thing you want to do is think about, “Okay, how much can I invest in my networks, especially in a local participation type scenario? How much time can I invest?” Because as an entrepreneur, time is money. So how much time can I put in, first of all, and then how much budget can I also put in? Because, again, time is money. So there's the budget required for your time, but there's also cost. So there are membership fees. There are potential events you need to attend in the run of the year. There are sponsorship opportunities and sometimes they're fantastic. So you really need to leave room for some of this stuff to get the most out of that investment.

So the first thing you want to do is budget for your time and investment within a particular group. But you also really want to start by, if you're not already part of the group, talk to some people within that that you know. No doubt, if it's an industry group you know somebody. Ask them some questions, what type of events happen, talk to the administrator, the office manager, whoever is that point of contact, they are a wealth of information. I mean, take Kelly over CHPA, for example. I mean, she's been around forever and knows more about that organization than anyone ever come in and go into labor to learn. And if you want to really ask about how many events you need to attend, and really try to wrap your head around the time investment, someone like her in that case, or someone in that position in any group is a good free place to start. So once you've determined that, you really want to schedule and plan for attending some of this stuff, give it FaceTime, shake the hands or off the elbows, nowadays, whatever the case may be, but get in the room with these people and get to know them. And if that's still virtual for your group, well, you can still get your face on the screen, your name on the screen, your breakout rooms, your network things, whatever's going on digitally or in person, be there. Show up, get involved, understand what the group itself from an advocacy perspective, for example, is doing, understand it's you can have input. If there are issues in your industry, the best way to do anything about them is to advocate for your industry within an industry group. There are lots of people sitting on the sidelines and like to sit back at these events and have their lunch or do whatever, or have their beer, read at a social, and just sort of pick apart what other people are doing rather than have a say. So there's leaning in, in that regard. And there's also really considering what do I want? What are my goals for this network? What are my goals from this? Is it just to do business and make money? That's okay if it is, but if it is, then your approach is going to be a bit different than if you want to be a future president of that group and actually carve out some time for yourself to really step up and be an advocate for your industry or your trade. So you really need to think about it. What are my goals and motivations for being here and what am I willing to put in? Because I can guarantee you with certainty and many years of experience, when you approach it like that, what you get out on the other end will be tenfold what you could have imagined.

And then plan for your participation. Things come up. But if you're planning to attend all the luncheons, then you're going to make most of them. If you plan to attend all the events, then you're going to make most of them right. Then there's planning the side of it from a perspective of what sponsorship opportunities exist? So let's paint a picture. So on part of a group, well, let's use me as an example. I've been involved with CHPA for 20 years. I didn't mean to say that out loud. And then, I've been involved with the board. I've done two runs on the board. I've been involved in committees. I've been called upon to speak about various things, through my level of marketing expertise and things I can bring to the table. I've done work for CHPA, I've done work for their members, I volunteer, I've sold tickets, I've done beer service or bar service at Gulf toilets, you name it, I've done it and I'm known in that group. And now when someone needs a website, or needs a digital plan or needs some of those things, I'm the person they're calling because I've done the work and I've built up my reputation there even if you're new to the group for a short period of time. Who this Goodyear is? You know what I do for a living, you know what I can do to help your business because it's my job to tell you. So it's really about purpose. Again, it comes down to purpose, if you know what your purpose is for being part of an organization, you are going to get so much more out of it, so much more.

Absolutely. And I've seen you really build your reputation, build your relationships through that work. And I know even for me, I brought in a sub-trade client and a good friend of mine and got him a little bit more involved in his local Builders Association. And now, now I see, as he gets more involved and is working on committees, and now on the board, and suddenly he's working with all sorts of different builders and have all these partnerships because of that effort.

You do get the B2B side of it, I mean if I'm a sub-trade-in in any capacity, whether it's HVAC, or electrical or plumbing, whatever the case may be as a sub, for example, then spending time at those events with those builders, and renovators mean relationship strength, that will bring me business without a doubt. Simple as that. So, in the case of those situations, you're just not going to have the same impact if you're not spending time with those people and getting to know them.

Absolutely. So Denise, I know, we are nearing the end of our wonderful time together, I guess any last parting words or words of wisdom that you would like to leave with our listeners for connecting with their audience or understanding their audience better? Or on the networking side of things and building their business that way?

Sure. I think I would just reiterate, understand who your ideal customer is, who do you enjoy working with, who do you want to work with, and plan to work with them. Seek them out and do your homework. As I said, it's not near as complicated as it sounds. So you just really need to find where they are and spend time connecting with them. Likewise, whether it's a consumer or just business to business, at the end of the day, go where they are. Lean in, show your expertise, promote yourself in front of those people, both in your networks, and add in any way you market yourself, and make meaningful connections. Because at the end of the day, people call people they trust. People get in touch and do business with people they trust so build that trust.

Amazing, Denise, how can our listeners learn more about you and connect with you and Intuitive Media?

They can certainly visit my website, intuitivemedia.ca. I'm also easy to find on LinkedIn, just under Intuitive Media, or Denise Goodyear on LinkedIn. For all social channels, you can certainly look me up, but intuitivemedia.ca has all my contact info and all my channels linked from there. So that's probably the best way to find me.

Yes, absolutely. And we'll put all your contact details and stuff in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Denise, for being on the show. I know our listeners are gonna get a ton of value from this episode.

Thank you so much, Krystal, it was my pleasure.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Beyond the Tools. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcast. I'd love it if you could also share this episode with a fellow contractor who is ready to get off the tools and grow their business. And if you want more leads, sign up for our email list at reflectivemarketing.com where we share weekly marketing insights that you can't get anywhere else. I'm Krystal Hobbs and I hope you'll join me on the next episode of Beyond the Tools. See you next time!