If we were starting a trade business today, here’s how we’d approach marketing
Starting a trade business comes with a very long list of things you could spend time and money on. A website, vehicle signage, professional photography, social media, ads, branding, SEO. The list goes on.
For this blog post, we’re talking specifically about B2B trade businesses, where your customers are other businesses rather than homeowners. Think a concreter looking to work with builders or developers. Marketing directly to homeowners is a different game, and we’ll tackle that in another blog post.
If we were starting that kind of trade business today, we wouldn’t try to do everything at once. We’d get the foundations right, start putting ourselves in front of the businesses we wanted to work with and build from there.
Here’s how we’d approach it.
Key takeaways
Secure your business name, domain, professional email address and social handles early, even if you’re not ready to use all of them yet.
Get clear on who you want to work with, what you’re selling, where you’ll find those customers and what makes you different before deciding where to focus your marketing.
Spend your early marketing budget, both time and money, on the things that will make the biggest difference, like branded workwear, site signage, setting up your Google Business Profile and getting a simple website live.
Start documenting and posting your work straight away, spend time building an audience and learn the basics yourself until it makes sense to bring in professional help.
Secure your name
Before you start thinking about logos, websites or social media, make sure you can actually use the business name you want.
Check that the business name is available, but don’t stop there. Check the domain name and the major social media platforms at the same time. Ideally, you want a name you can use consistently across all of them.
Once you’re happy with the name, secure it. Register the business name, buy the domain and grab the social handles, even if you’re not planning to use every platform straight away.
While you’re setting up the domain, create a professional email address from day one. We still see plenty of businesses operating from Gmail, Outlook and even Hotmail addresses. It might seem like a small thing, but an email address that matches your business and domain immediately feels more professional, particularly when you’re introducing yourself to builders, developers or other businesses for the first time.
Know who you actually want to work with
Before deciding which platforms to focus on or what content to create, get clear on who you’re trying to reach.
If you’re a concreter, saying you want to work with builders is a start, but you can go further. What kind of builders? Residential or commercial? What size projects? Which areas? Do you also want to work with developers? Who within those businesses actually makes the decision to engage you?
You don’t need a 20 page ideal customer profile. You just need a clear picture of the people and businesses you want to work with. Once you know that, it becomes much easier to work out where to find them, which platforms are worth your time and what you need to say when you get there.
Think about the business you’re building
It’s worth thinking about where you want the business to go, even if you’re starting on your own. Are you planning to stay a sole trader, largely work by yourself and bring in the odd subbie when you need one? Or is the goal to eventually have a crew working across multiple projects?
There’s no right answer, but it will influence how you present the business. One of the simplest examples is whether you talk about “I” or “we”. If your goal is to grow into a crew based business, start talking about “we” from the beginning, even if right now it’s just you.
You’re not pretending to have 20 employees. You’re simply building the business with where you want it to go in mind.
Get clear on what you’re selling and what makes you different
You know what you do, but can you explain why someone should choose you over another business offering the same service?
Think about what you’re actually selling, the problem it solves for your customer and what makes your business different from your competitors. It doesn’t need to be revolutionary. It could be the type of projects you specialise in, your experience, the way you communicate, how you run your projects or the type of clients you work best with.
The important thing is being able to clearly explain what you do and give someone a reason to choose you.
Get the basics of your brand in place
You need enough of a brand to get started, but you don’t need to spend months perfecting it. Get a logo, choose some basic colours and fonts and think about how you want the business to look, sound and be perceived.
Be prepared for it to change too. The business you’re starting today probably won’t look exactly the same in three years. We’ve changed the way cre8t marketing looks and sounds as we’ve grown. Around our first year in business, we even changed our logo because the original one no longer felt like us.
Get the basics right and get moving. You can refine things as you learn more about your business, your customers and where you want to take it.
Spend your time and money where it matters
For a trade business, some of the first things we’d invest in have nothing to do with social media.
We’d start with good branded workwear. It doesn’t need to be expensive, but get it done properly. When you turn up to site, you want to look like a business. If you eventually have a crew, you want them to look like they’re part of that business too.
Next, we’d get a stack of site signs printed. They’re relatively inexpensive, and every project you work on becomes another opportunity to put your business in front of builders, developers, other trades and anyone else passing the site.
Good branded workwear and a stack of site signs will cost significantly less than wrapping a vehicle and can start doing a job for you straight away. Vehicle signage is great, but it can come later. The point isn’t to spend money for the sake of looking established. It’s to put your time and money into the things your potential customers are actually going to see.
Give people somewhere to find you
Once you’ve got the basics in place, make sure someone who hears your business name can actually find you.
Set up your Google Business Profile and build out the social profiles that make sense based on the customer you identified earlier. These things might not cost you money, but they do take time. Complete them properly, keep your business information consistent and make it easy for someone to understand what you do and get in touch.
Your website doesn’t need to be huge either. A simple one page website is enough to get started. Explain who you are, what you do, who you work with, show some of your work and give people a clear way to contact you.
If the website is going to take a little longer, set up something simple like a Linktree in the meantime. It gives you somewhere to send people and brings your key links and contact options together until the website is ready.
Start posting straight away
You don’t need a full content bank before you start posting. If you’ve got something worth showing, start, and at the same time, get into the habit of documenting your work.
Take the before photo, the progress photo and the after photo. Film short clips of what’s happening on site. Save the questions builders and developers ask you. Screenshot good feedback and keep a note on your phone with questions, conversations and ideas that could become content later.
Before-and-after carousels, project updates, videos from site and answers to common questions can all become content. Your library will build naturally as the business grows, but you can’t go back six months later and take the before photo you forgot to take.
Whatever you’re already posting to your social channels, start sharing relevant updates to your Google Business Profile too. You’ve already created the content, so get more use out of it.
Don’t try to make your social media look too professional
This might sound strange coming from a marketing agency, but if you’re creating your own social media content, don’t try to make it look like professionally produced branded content.
You don’t need your logo in the corner of every photo. You don’t need a logo animation at the end of every Reel, and you don’t need to turn every project photo into a Canva graphic.
If you’re going to create authentic content, let it be authentic. Show the project and the work, talk to the camera, answer questions and film what’s actually happening on site. That doesn’t mean your brand disappears. It’s already in your workwear, your signage, your website, your profiles and the way you communicate. You don’t need to stamp a logo across every piece of content to remind people who you are.
Learn how to create good content with your phone
You don’t need to buy a camera kit to start creating content. Your phone is more than enough, but a few simple things will make a big difference.
Use the back camera rather than the selfie camera where you can and clean your lens before you start filming. If you’re going to talk to camera, buy an inexpensive wireless mic so people can hear you clearly and a cheap phone tripod so you can set your shot up properly. Good light, clear sound and a clean lens will get you a long way.
Then learn how to use CapCut or Edits. You don’t need to become a professional video editor. Learn how to cut clips together, add text and captions and put together a simple Reel. There are plenty of free tutorials that can teach you everything you need at this stage.
Make consistency manageable
When you’re starting a business, marketing is competing with everything else. You’re quoting, invoicing, doing the work, chasing payments, ordering materials and answering calls. The work bringing money into the business today will often take priority over the marketing that could bring money in tomorrow.
We know that because it happened to us. We obviously had an advantage because we were already a marketing agency and knew what we should be doing, but when we were trying to grow cre8t marketing while delivering client work, our own marketing still got deprioritised. Client projects were paying the bills, so that’s where our time went.
We’ve changed that now. We invest in our own marketing much like we do for our clients, but it took us a long time to get there, and we’re a marketing agency.
So make it manageable. Batch some content and schedule two or three posts a week if that’s what helps you stay consistent. We don’t generally recommend scheduling everything and then treating that as a substitute for actually spending time on the platforms, but in the early days, scheduling can take one job off your plate. Use it to stay consistent, then get onto the platforms when you have time and actually spend time there.
Don’t just post, build an audience
Social media isn’t just somewhere to publish content. It’s somewhere to find and build relationships with the people and businesses you want to work with.
If you’re a concreter and you want to work with builders and developers, find the ones you actually want to work with and follow them. Look at the projects they’re working on, engage with their content and leave genuine comments when you have something to say. Get familiar with their businesses and give them a chance to become familiar with yours.
Don’t post three times a week and sit back hoping the right builder eventually finds you. Go and find them.
Learn how to put some money behind your content
Once you’re creating content and starting to understand your audience, you can experiment with putting some money behind it.
If you’re going to boost posts on Instagram or promote videos on TikTok, spend some time learning what you’re actually doing. Don’t automatically accept whatever audience the platform recommends. Think back to the customer you identified earlier and build your audience around the people you actually want to reach.
If you want to go further and start running Meta ads, learn how to use Ads Manager. Do a short course, watch tutorials, read a book or listen to an audiobook while you’re driving between sites. You don’t need to become an ads specialist. You just need to understand enough to know who you’re targeting, what you’re spending and what you’re trying to achieve.
Start collecting proof
From your first few projects, start building proof of the work you do. Ask happy clients for Google reviews, save testimonials, take before-and-after photos and keep records of the projects you’ve worked on and the problems you’ve helped solve.
A Google review might not be the thing that wins you your next major contract, but it all adds up. Over time, you’re building a body of work that shows potential customers you’re legitimate, you have experience and you can do what you say you can do.
Those early projects can eventually become stronger website content, case studies, social content and sales material as the business grows.
Then start buying back your time
If we had the budget from day one, there are absolutely things we’d pay professionals to do. But plenty of businesses don’t start that way. We didn’t either.
If money is tight, learn what you need to learn and get moving, then pay attention to the point where doing everything yourself stops making sense. If you’re spending four hours editing a Reel when you could be quoting work, working on a project or doing something else that generates revenue, the maths has probably changed.
That’s when you start bringing in help, whether that’s professional content creation, social media management, a better website or someone to manage your advertising.
Your marketing should grow as your business grows. You don’t need to market yourself like the business you hope to be in three years. You need to market the business you have today, properly.
Get the foundations right, look professional where it matters, start showing people what you do and put yourself in front of the businesses you want to work with. Then keep building from there.
