Ways to Make an Excellent First Impression as a New Contractor

If you’re looking to get your new business off the ground, making a good first impression is paramount. This way, you’ll get more referrals, positive reviews, and hopefully even repeat business. There are several factors you need to focus on. Providing a quality service is one of them, but you also need to optimize your website, work on building an instant rapport with clients, boosting your curb appeal, and more. Here are seven ways to make an excellent first impression as a new contractor.

Optimize your website

The first place many potential clients will go to learn more about your services is your website. This is why it’s crucial in this day and age to have a top-notch site and it’s worth investing time and money in this. As well as creating an elegant design, you also need to ensure you optimize your site for user experience and engagement. This will not only make a better impression on clients, but also the search engine bots. Google’s new algorithm is largely based on page experience, which means your site needs to be easy to navigate, fast loading, full of engaging and relevant content, and glitch-free.

Improve your local SEO

Working as a contractor you’ll probably be quite reliant on local business. This means you also need to think about improving your local SEO. This will ensure your business appears at the top of the list of local online searches. For example, if a potential client searches for “construction company near me”, you want them to find you. Optimize your website for local keywords and include plenty of local content. You could also refer to local landmarks and areas of interests on your website and get involved with local businesses and events.

Boost your business curb appeal

Once you’ve built more of an online presence, clients should hopefully start coming to you. If you run a brick-and-mortar premises, you need to ensure it makes a great first impression as well. There are several things you can do to boost your curb appeal. Keep on top of cleaning and maintenance and design professional-looking signage and branding with your customers’ expectations in mind. It’s also important to tidy up your parking lot. You can hire commercial parking lot maintenance services to do this for you.

Use positive body language

After you’ve spruced up your website and business you also need to look inwardly and think about what kind of impression you’re making on your clients yourself. Be mindful of how you communicate and interact with them. Use positive body language as much as possible. This means smiling, making eye contact, and respecting their personal space. Try to be confident and relaxed, and deal with all enquiries, even complaints with professionalism.

Be transparent and open

Another important quality clients will seek in a contractor is transparency. You need to be open and upfront about pricing from the get-go and ensure the client is on the same page. Clients won’t be impressed if they discover hidden costs later on, so rather than trying to hide these, focus on selling your services and the quality of your work. This way your clients will be happier to pay what you’re charging. Trust is a very important factor when it comes to sealing the deal.

Post positive customer reviews

After making a great impression on your clients, incentivize them to leave positive reviews. This will help you make a better impression on new clients and grow your business. Many people read online reviews before choosing a contractor so it’s essential to post these on your website, Google My Business account, social media, and more. You could even set up a referral campaign. Email your previous clients with a discount or freebie in exchange for recommending a friend. These can be very effective for business exposure.

Offer excellent after-sales support

It’s important to offer excellent after-sales support. This essentially means any necessary follow-up relating to your services. This could be as little as sending a personalized email to ensure your client is happy with the results. You could even turn this into an email marketing campaign with target offers or discounts on repeat business. It depends on the type of business you run. The main thing to remember is that in order to make a great first impression, you need to focus on the customer’s needs, before, during, and after completing your job. This will leave a more lasting impression and will hopefully lead to more referrals for your business.