Put down your pistol and load up the cannon. Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing.

There's a phenomenal saying in marketing, and that is when you fire bullets at the target and it starts to hit, that's when you load up and you start firing cannons. And the reason is you stick a toe in the water at the start, you can see something's working, and therefore you hammer it home because you know it's gonna make you more profit and will get you more time or create more revenue for your business.

Where I see electricians mess this up the most is they start off not with a gun firing bullets, they fire cannons. What I mean by cannons is I am relating that to money. They start getting money and they throw it at avenues that some Joe Blow recommends them. They jump on it and then they're disappointed because that doesn't work out. And the problem with this is they're going in blind, they're going in without a strategy, or most importantly, they're going in without a target. In this case, a target market.

Electricians are generally afraid to hone in on one target market or one specific person because they're afraid they're gonna lose out on work. However, the opposite happens, I can guarantee you. The clearer that you know your target market, the deeper you can go inside their head of their problems, the more likely you are gonna get more of your ideal clients coming to your electrical business.

How granular do you have to actually get with knowing your ideal client? Extremely granular is my answer to that. So for example, I know the hair colour of my target market, I know their age, I know where they live, I know the style of house they're in. I know if they've got a dog, I know if they've got kids, I know if they've got a husband, I know what the husband's into, sport-wise that is. I know what the wife is into, what they get up to on weekends. And you might say, "That's psychopathic, Alan. Why the fuck do I need to know that much detail?" Because when you know that much detail about your target market, you can solve their problems quicker than they can solve their problems. You know exactly where to find them. You know the kind of language and lingo that they speak.

Let's say for instance, it's a male and he's a golfer, and you know that your ideal client is a golfer. You can use that jargon, the golfing jargon, let's just say a birdie, hole in one, whatever. You could technically use that in your messaging, which is a completely different podcast, to target that individual, because it will tweak their interest and get their attention. And this is why it's extremely important that you have one target market.

Now, will this limit your work? Not necessarily, because by the time you've got all this in place with your target market, they will know, like and trust you because you're speaking directly to them, and as long as you've got your messaging hammered down, they will come to you for their electrical work.

Where this is most evident and electricians go wrong is on their website and their socials. So they're giving real mixed messages of who they actually work for. So for example, electricians consistently have it on their website that we do everything, but they kind of state that they're experts at several different sectors. They might say they're experts with industrial, commercial, domestic service and maintenance. You cannot be a specialist in all of those. You can only be a specialist in one sector. You cannot go to a heart surgeon who's gonna work on your knees as well. That shit just doesn't work.

The other sector of this is social media videos. Now, there's electricians that cannot help but shake off the electrician in them, and they make content and videos not for their ideal target market, but purely for electricians, and almost to get street cred from electricians, thinking that that's what they need to do. And it's the blind leading the blind. I'm seeing electricians making electrical content and videos, and then other electricians are copying them.

Now, to this point as well, some electricians or electrical contractors genuinely want to make electrical content that they can showcase to other electricians that they are proud of, and that's perfectly fine if that's your end goal. But I don't know about you, but I would be using the power of social media to generate money and revenue and profit for your business. So in my opinion, if you wanna do this for the good of your health and you wanna have a profile and a load of followers and vanity metrics on your profile for doing electrical work, that's perfectly fine. But I don't believe in likes, shares, vanity numbers. I don't give a fuck if a YouTube video or a podcast gets 10 listens or 10 views. One of the views or listens on that will be undoubtedly one of my ideal target market that has seen it, because I'm being extremely specific.

How many times in this podcast did I say electrician? Why do you think I said that? The reason I say electrician in this podcast a lot is because I'm speaking directly to you, the electrician. Now, if you're not an electrician, you're in the wrong podcast, and I will never work with you.

If you're a diehard listener and you've been there from the very start of the podcast, you've been listening from day dot, you will remember the podcast was called Simplified Tradie Marketing, and this was me being an idiot. This was me thinking that there wasn't enough electricians out there to work with, and this is the exact same mindset why people claim to do all things for everyone. You need to get hyper-specific, and when I specialised into electricians, it got a lot easier for me to attract electricians. I could speak ultimate electrical jargon to them, and as well, it's more fun to work with electricians because I am an electrician, so we click the best. And this is why being specialised to a target market is extremely important.

It's up to you what you wanna do with your electrical business, but from studying so many different electrical businesses and seeing what works and what doesn't, I'm basically giving you the keys to what you should be doing inside in your electrical business, and it isn't doing all things for everybody. It's being very specific to one particular person. When you nail that down and get that 100% right, you will watch the money come into your electrical business. I'll catch you next week.

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