Home Inspection Marketing Fact: Experts Get Paid More…
So Turn Yourself Into The “Obvious Expert” In Your Marketplace And Make More Money!
I’m not telling you anything new, but in the last couple of years, a lot of home inspectors have gone out of business. However, there is still a lot of competition for fewer home inspections. And home buyers, in many cases, are choosing one home inspector over another for as little as $20.00. This is crazy because the quality of home inspectors varies greatly, even in a State with Licensing, but it happens every day.
So what are you to do?
Use proven effective home inspection marketing strategies to Become recognized as the “Obvious Expert” in your local marketing area of course!
Let me ask you this; who gets paid more, a doctor that is a General Practitioner or a Brain Surgeon? Of course, the Brain Surgeon gets paid more because the public perceives that he has a much greater degree of knowledge and skill! So what you want to do is become the “Brain Surgeon” of Home Inspections in your local marketing area! In other words, use effective home inspection marketing strategies to become recognized as the “Obvious Expert” if you will.
Ok, I can hear you saying to yourself, Ken how in the heck am I going to do that?
Hey, I’m glad you asked!
I own a home inspection company in Atlanta, Southern Home Inspection Services, and for the last couple of years we’ve embarked on using innovative home inspection marketing strategies to becoming recognized as the “Obvious Expert” in our local marketing area and it has worked like a champ for us. So, in the paragraphs below, I’ll share with you some of the home inspection marketing strategies we’re using to make it happen.
Home Inspection Marketing Strategy: Video
I have our inspectors send me pictures of outrageous things they see while they are out on their inspections. Then, I take those pictures and using a free software program from Microsoft, “Photo Story 3” I turn those pictures into a video.
Next I bought each one of our inspectors a Flip Video Camera. You can get one from Amazon or other retailer for less than $120.00. So, when our inspectors come across unusual things while inspecting, they make a quick video. The videos they shoot run between one to two minutes.
Home Inspection Marketing Bonus: Here are a few topics that have real interest to home buyers: roof problems, anything to do with mold, termite damage, large cracks in foundation walls and anything that’s unsafe or unusual, like a big colony of bats in the attic, etc.
Here’s the formula we use for the script for all our videos: Introduce yourself, tell them what they are looking at, tell them why you are showing it to them and finally tell them what action they should take.
Home Inspection Market “Gold Nugget:” Below is an example of a script we would use for a quick video.
“Hello I’m Ken Compton from Southern Home Inspection Services and you’re looking at a Federal Pacific electrical panel. The reason I’m showing you this electrical panel today is that in many cases, the breakers in these types of panels failed to trip when they needed to and that situation could cause an electrical fire. So take a close look at the panel I’m showing you and then go look at your own electrical panel. If you have a Federal Pacific electrical panel in your home, I would recommend you have a licensed electrician evaluate it as soon as possible.”
It’s that simple!
Home Inspection Marketing Strategy: Audio
There are a couple of ways you can go with audio and I do both. There are two services I use to create audio and they are both Free! One is FreeConferenceCall.com and the other is Blog Talk Radio. Which service I use depends on what I’m going to do with audio. For this article, I’m just going to discuss Blog Talk Radio.
My first home inspection marketing audio strategy was to list fifty topics that I thought would be interesting to home buyers and started doing a Blog Talk Radio Show (BlogTalkRadio.com) on each one over the next 24 months. I put the list in priority order and set out to find local experts to be my guests on the show.
I started with a local foundation water proofing and repair contractor. Home Inspection Marketing Tip: I asked him to give me ten to twelve questions that customers regularly ask him so that I could ask him those questions on air. I set my shows up for one hour each and I spend that hour asking my expert guest the questions he furnished me and I come off looking like an expert and all I did was ask him his questions. You could also have someone interview you on your show as well.
Now that we have produced the audios and videos here are a few home inspection marketing strategies that employ with the audios to create that Obvious Expert status we are trying to achieve:
1. We put the videos on YouTube and other video portals. We put them on our web site. We put them on our video blog. We allow others to put our videos on their web sites and blogs.
2. Our Blog Talk Radio Shows stay up forever on that platform and we advertise them. We put the audios on our web site. We give copies of the audios to our expert guests so they can put them on their web sites. We have the audios transcribed and we make articles from them to distribute to the online article directories.
Home Inspection Marketing Bonus: Here’s another great thing about doing audio and video; the search engines index my work and when someone types in my keywords, my audios, videos and articles can show up in the search results. Sweet!
How do you eat an elephant…One bit at a time! And that’s how you need to approach this project. Put a quick home inspection marketing plan together that lists how many audios and/or videos you’ll produce over the next 12 months and what you’ll do with them. In just a few months you have a growing body of work that will help establish you as the Obvious Expert in your local marketplace.
Home Inspection Marketing Fact: Experts Make more Money Than Generalists!
