Digital Marketing for Contractors

39. Field Marketing Meets Digital: A Hybrid Approach

• FatCat Strategies • Season 2 • Episode 10

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In this episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, Janet and Caitlyn dive into one of their favorite strategies—hybrid marketing. Designed for contractors who are beyond the startup phase and actively scaling, this episode explores how to integrate field marketing tactics (like home shows, canvassing, and signage) with digital marketing strategies (like SEO, PPC, and email nurturing).

Listeners will learn:

  • What hybrid marketing really means for home improvement businesses.
  • How to track offline efforts like signage and events using QR codes and phone numbers.
  • The importance of syncing your CRM with field data for seamless follow-up.
  • How social media can serve as your field marketing hype machine.
  • Why email nurturing after events is the missing link to more appointments.
  • A case study showing a massive lead spike from a hybrid campaign.

If you're only doing field or digital marketing—this episode proves why you’re leaving money on the table.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

Caitlyn:

Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors. This podcast is brought to you by Fat Cat Strategies, a full-service digital marketing agency based in Raleigh, North Carolina. We specialize in helping home improvement contractors just like you grow their businesses.

Janet:

Today, you're listening to a series called Build, Grow, Dominate, marketing strategies for every stage of your home improvement business. Every Wednesday, we take a deep dive into the lessons that we've learned from supporting some amazing business owners. in the home improvement industry. In

Caitlyn:

part one, we'll cover the essentials from startup to your first five million. In part two, we're shifting gears to focus on what it takes to scale your business to a successful exit and or how to dominate your market. Now let's get into it.

Janet:

Hi, welcome back. I am Janet, the founder of Fat Cat Strategies. Today, I'm joined by the lovely and talented and honestly beautiful Caitlin Noble.

Caitlyn:

Hey, I'm Caitlin, head of client services here at Fat Cat. We are talking about a, honestly, one of our favorite topics today. We are going to combine the power of field marketing with digital strategy to create a hybrid approach that's really going to drive results. So, Janet, tell us a little bit more of your business, kind is in this phase and what to look

Janet:

for. Yeah, so if you're listening to us and you are well past the startup phase. You've already tackled some of those early problems and now you're really starting to hit your stride and scale. Maybe you've got a few sales reps, you've got a brand present, you are doing some canvassing, you're out at events, you're out at home shows, and you really want to integrate all of those bits and pieces, then this episode is for you.

Caitlyn:

Yeah, that's right. Let's talk about how blending traditional boots on the ground efforts with all Online campaigns can actually help you generate more leads, build more trust, and close more jobs. So, Janet, what is hybrid marketing? I don't

Janet:

know. It sounds sexy. Okay, in all seriousness, what do we mean when we say hybrid marketing? What we're really talking about is online and offline. So your field marketing includes things like going to home shows, door-to-door canvassing, really, honestly, like yard signs, job site signage. It's got a QR code, direct mail. It's that... Offline face-to-face connection. So that's one part of the hybrid. And what we're talking about today is marrying that with the digital side. The digital side, which

Caitlyn:

is what we have spent many, many, many episodes recording about SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, the stuff we should all be doing, right?

Janet:

Right. And so when you can combine these two things together, the... offline in the real world with the digital side, then that's where the real magic happens. And you're not just doing one or the other. What you're doing is you're creating a strategy where the offline tactics and the online tactics complement each other and work together. Exactly.

Caitlyn:

More channels mean more touch points, and the more touch points usually mean higher conversions. There's so many stats out there. I've heard you might need to touch somebody at least eight times. And we're not talking about touch in a creepy way.

Janet:

usable data.

Caitlyn:

We love data. And if you can track your offline efforts in your CRM the same way you can do digitally, then you're going to get a 360 degree view of how people are moving through your funnel. Which

Janet:

brings us

Caitlyn:

to our

Janet:

first strategy. So Caitlin, what is the first strategy? Our

Caitlyn:

first strategy is promoting your events with SEO and PPC. Don't just rely on foot traffic or word of mouth. Run PPC ads targeting people near your event, near your showroom. Use keywords like window replacement event, home remodeling expo in Raleigh.

Janet:

And so you're talking about PPC, but you've also, I've seen you do it. You do it with social. You do it with paid social. Oh, absolutely. That

Caitlyn:

might be a, I think we're going to get to that.

Janet:

Oh, okay. I jumped ahead. But we are. You absolutely. I teased an

Caitlyn:

act later in this play. But honestly, though, like have that page on your website and like about the upcoming event posted. And so you can run an ad to it on the PPC side or the SEO side of things. Okay. So what's the next tactic? Okay. So next tactic is track. We're tracking signs, QR codes, and phone numbers. This is like you have to, Janet.

Janet:

Right. So, you know, we're talking about field marketing here. So field marketing means out in the field. So you've got reps in Sam's Club. You've got maybe a booth in Home Depot. You're attending these community festivals. You've got a branded trailer with you know samples of your work and small scale models you're doing all the things you've probably got signs you've got print collateral you may be handing out fun stuff on that print collateral on your signs on you know things that you're handing out you've probably got a phone number oh yeah and maybe you've even gotten slick and you've got a qr code so Why not loop all that together and make sure you're using a tracking phone number that your agency can help you set up through something like CallRail or WhatConverts. So then every phone call that hits that phone number you know came from your Sam's Club booth or came from a field marketing event.

Caitlyn:

Exactly. Or even a yard sign. Right. And to be honest with you, you guys know this. Not everyone is going to stop and talk to your field marketing reps. I... have definitely been at events maybe you know with my baby with my dogs and I'm like I just I know I need to get my gutters clean and if you're there with your

Janet:

dogs you know that you can't stop and talk to somebody not with that big ass dog you've got

Caitlyn:

if I'm there with my dogs I might hopefully have drugged them somehow so the little white one you know just rolls over but the big one I mean come on the big one is a Shetland pony so I'm still out. I'm out and about. I definitely am interested and excited. I saw your sign. I know my gutters have to be cleaned. And so what did you do? So instead of going up and approaching... with the Shetland pony. With

Janet:

a herd of small elephants on leashes and a baby in a stroller. What did you do? I just

Caitlyn:

pulled out my phone and I took a picture of the sign. It was so easy. And my husband, you know, I texted him the picture of the sign and he called

Janet:

later that day. And so that's where we're really talking about marrying your field marketing with your digital marketing. If you've got somebody like Caitlin, who is a prospective customer and is out in the world with these circus animals and a small human, she's not going to walk up to you And you probably don't want me to. Why not have a tracking phone number on the materials that you're taking out to field marketing? Then when you look at the end of the month and you look at all of the phone calls that came into your business, it is just dead simple to filter that report and say, oh, we got 26 phone calls from this community event that we sponsored.

Caitlyn:

Yeah,

Janet:

absolutely.

Caitlyn:

So no brainer. Track your signs with QR codes and phone numbers. If you don't know how to do that, your agency definitely should. Absolutely. Here we go, Janet teased this one already. Okay,

Janet:

social, that's our next tip. The hybrid approach. To marry the hybrid approach to what you're doing out in the world and what you're doing online. So social media is your field marketing hype machine. I'm obsessed. What you're doing, you're posting photos, you're going live from your event. Why not? Yeah, you're sharing behind the scenes content.

Caitlyn:

Oh my gosh, I mean, I love that. I mean, and also what we encourage our clients to do is yeah, Grab photos. Go live. Share the behind-the-scenes content. But then come back and give us those photos. Because then we can go on to blog that you attended. You mean give the agency. Sorry, give us. Give the agency your photos. Thank you. Because then we can go on to share in later posts. Did you see us at this event? Write a blog post, like I said. Like, hey, we're so excited to support this local 5K. Here's photos of us handing out branded water bottles. So also, don't sleep on Facebook events so this is something that a lot of these events so many words so many events but a lot of these events that you may be sponsoring will already have their own Facebook event page I guarantee you like they do so what you can do is go on to that Facebook event page and you can actually add it to your own Facebook a page so it like shows up like you're also going to be hosting Oh, that's a good

Janet:

tip.

Caitlyn:

through your Facebook business page, you can go and add that Facebook event to

Janet:

your page. It's free to do. So if I'm a roofer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'm doing the Southern Home Living show, I go to my roofing Facebook business page, and I add the Southern Home Living event to my business page, which makes everybody understand I'm attending that event, and you're also saying reciprocally, I show up on the Southern Home Living event page? No.

Caitlyn:

If you're a sponsor, you're probably already linked on there, but it's showing up on your Facebook page that you are going to be at that event. And if for some reason you're at a small event and they don't have, or maybe you're hosting something at your own showroom, make your Facebook event. You can promote it. There's also the free version of that too. Great tip. What's the next one? Yeah, this is fun. And we've done this for several clients in terms of capturing leads both on-site and online. You're talking about at events? Yeah, at events. Yeah, exactly. So how do they do that? I mean, you've got to obviously have a plan for lead capture, duh, if you're already paying to attend this event. How are you going to do it? Don't just collect business cards. Don't just scribble names on notepads. And we've seen, you know, you can do that. Like, it's not not successful. But let's be more sophisticated about it. Janet, we've done this for clients.

Janet:

Oh, yeah. So what we've done, depending on which CRM our clients use. Let's take lead perfection, for example. Our client comes to us and says, hey, we've got a summer chock full of field marketing events, and we want to capture leads in the field digitally, and we want them to go directly into our CRM. Hey, agency, make it happen. Well, what we do is we end up making a landing page that the field reps are using. So they have that bookmarked on the iPad that has a form on it, and that form is connected directly to their lead perfection CRM, and we've already gone ahead and thoughtful through what lead source, what primary source and secondary source. It's going to show up

Caitlyn:

in your CRM. Right. Raleigh Home

Janet:

Show. Right. And so then you can either decide you're going to train your field marketing staff to be the human that holds the iPad and stands there and asks the homeowner, homeowner, what is your first name? What is your last name? What products are you interested in? Or you can set up some sort of kiosk with a keyboard. I mean, it could just be like a wireless keyboard connected to a display or an iPad and have some sort of contest where homeowners can enter to win a free front door if they get 10 windows. Whatever your contest is. An Amazon gift card. In fact, on an earlier episode we had a rep from PerfectGift.com who has amazing ideas for giveaways. So whatever your incentive is, if you're going to try to capture information from homeowners and you go ahead and think about doing that digitally whether your reps are doing it by their they're the ones holding the iPad or you give the power to the homeowners just go ahead and take the extra steps to figure out how to get that information to go to directly into your CRM because here's what you don't want to do you don't want to fatigue your staff by going to all these events and then after they've stood on their feet in the hot sun for six hours Probably been cussed at. Yeah, they've been cussed at. They're handing out flags. That dog may have jumped on them. Yeah, Caitlin's dog came and scared the shit out of them. Now you're going to ask them to go back to your office after hours and sit and manually enter a bunch of paper slips. We've

Caitlyn:

seen it.

Janet:

Yeah, don't do that. We've seen it. There's a much easier way to do it.

Caitlyn:

And ask your agency. Like, it's not that complicated. It really isn't. And so... while you're out in the field and you're already collecting phone numbers, you're already collecting addresses, names, et cetera, grab an email because this is probably like the most unspoken secret trick. People are busy. Like I said, you know, they did make the effort to come stop and talk to you, but then they may not remember it a week later. Absolutely not. Especially if it's like at one of those like

Janet:

beer festivals that you've said. Oh yeah. We have a great beer and bourbon festival here in Raleigh and one of our bath contractors was always a vendor at the beer and bourbon festival and what's the chances that people at a beer festival remember entering to win a bathroom or makeover exactly i mean at that

Caitlyn:

point you're just having fun and so you're entering all of the makeovers yeah you're like you get a big makeover you get a roof um grab their email because Email marketing is so important. We don't probably talk about it enough. And following up, post an event with email sequence to nurture those leads is going to be critical. You've already got the staff who's going to be calling them to try to schedule those appointments. You know, we know, you're probably listening, oh my gosh, people aren't answering their phones. Follow up with an email and educate them on product info, on maintenance tips, on financing options. And not just one email. And not just one email. Whatever is going to help them move forward with the decision to remind them that you met at the beer and bourbon festival and they did enter for a giveaway and you've got these amazing financing options if they don't win.

Janet:

Yeah, so if you're doing that follow up via email, and like Caitlin said, we know if you've made it past that early scale stage. We know that your call center is calling these people. We know that. We know. And we know that they're not getting through to all of them. So, like she said, email marketing, don't sleep on it. Go ahead as part of your field marketing strategy, have some digital content, like maybe it's a blog post or a video walkthrough, you know, a blog post could be, or article, you know, how to choose the right windows for your climate or video walkthrough of a recent project. Then you're nurturing emails that are set to automatically drip over a period of days or weeks post event, then can link back to that educational content. And that way you're adding value and you're keeping the conversation going. Absolutely.

Caitlyn:

I mean, to be honest with you, the only reason I'm giving my email out these days is because I want to know about a deal or I want to be educated about something. Yeah,

Janet:

and... As I age, and I'm aging gracefully, by the way, I am thriving and doing such a bang-up job of becoming an old lady. But as I become an older lady, and by the way, don't sleep on old ladies because we've got money. Yeah, you do. And we are ready to fix up our house. But you know what we can't do is we can't remember shit. So if we give you our email address, for God's sake, use it. Because it's going to be two weeks from now, we're going to be drinking coffee in our sunroom, and we're going to get an email going, oh, my God, I totally forgot we went to that event and I gave these people my email because I do need my gutters replaced. I do. Yeah. So my windows are not. Yeah. And I forgot that I've already found a vendor that, you know, I'd like to get a price from. So use the email people to Caitlin's point. A There might be giving you a Gmail account that is not a work account, and they do it specifically because that's the email address that they use to collect information about possible future purchases. That's the only purpose of that email. So you're totally fine to send them a bunch of marketing content because they know that's what they're going to get there.

Caitlyn:

Exactly. So fun quick case study before we wrap everything up with a real-world example. We... Not we. We did not. But one of our clients hosted a weekend fair. Say it ain't so. Tell me about it. I don't think I knew about this. And they didn't host. Well, I guess they were like one of the head sponsors of a local community weekend fair. Like they offered live product demos. There were giveaways. There were on-site consultations in terms of what you could learn about the windows and doors that they sell. They promoted the event through Facebook ads and And honestly, through Google PPC, in terms of using some of those phrases like, you know, window demo near me. At the event, weird. They used templates to capture their leads and then what did they do after that? They followed up with email marketing and retargeting ads of those same events and of just their business. So what was the result of that whole exercise? A big spike in leads and a ton of appointments were set. They weren't set right there at the event, but they were set afterwards. Because of the follow-up game. Because of the follow-up. Hybrid marketing works when you do it right.

Janet:

That's an awesome case study. I'm so excited about it. I mean, listeners may not believe this, but in all honesty, I just now learned about that week in fair. Yeah, aging gracefully. Maybe somebody told me about it and I can't remember it.

Caitlyn:

All right, y'all. That's it for today's episode. If you're only doing digital or only doing field marketing, you're obviously missing out. The real power comes from combining them

Janet:

both. Okay, so next week, what are we talking about? We are talking about a powerful strategy that many contractors overlook, and that is multi-channel marketing. So specifically, what we're going to get into is we're going to tell you... Yeah. Well, that's hybrid like online and offline. We're talking about multi... Multiple. Multi-digital channel. There you go. Where you've got media, TV, radio, social, email... Digital campaigns. All these digital campaigns... can work together. And that's what we're going to be talking to you about how to do in the next episode.

Caitlyn:

That's a powerful one. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode. If you are loving this series, please don't forget to subscribe and we would really love a review. As always, check out our blog post linked in the show notes for even more resources and examples of what we just talked through. Until next time, keep growing.

Don:

Digital Marketing for Contractors is created by FACT For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.