Since many of the traditional marketing tactics are no longer working, everyone is searching for the silver bullets. Our friend, Leah Thayer, asked remodelers to share their best marketing tactics with her in her Daily5Remodel.
Many of the responses she received were from our Remodelers Advantage members. Check out what these savvy business owners had to say, below:

• Cold-calling architects & regular follow-up landed me a freelance job that I’m still in. Least successful marketing effort: I participated as an in-kind donor in 4 charity silent auctions. Only 1 was purchased & used. It did manage to get me an in-home meeting with a potential client, but it has not panned out into a paying project.
• In addition to jobsite signs, truck graphics and having raving fans, our clients
  benefited from highly targeted jobsite mailings, e-newsletters, print newsletters
  and SEO as well as integrating them all. In some areas for some remodelers,
  homeshows also do well.
• I can’t declare one singular Marketing effort that was the most successful as my
  goal is to create a broad based awareness of who we are, what we are about
  etc..through a thoughtful multi faceted approach of media, technical savvy
  advertising / marketing (social media), person to person marketing, event
  marketing, direct mail and PR. The key to our Marketing program is an integrated
  campaign that ensures everything we do points to another area of our Marketing –
  advertising points to social media, website, projects etc..direct mail points to
  website, social media and workshops; website points to community service,
  workshops, employee owners, events, educational articles, projects; Advertising
  points to all of the former; events point to advertising, employee ownership,
  knowledgebase etc… Everything we do in Marketing points to another facet of Marketing / Advertising!
• I dropped my radio ads after a long time with the station….they could not produce
  ads to make the phone ring. I continue to do a couple of home shows each year
  and found that my plumber sent me an amazing amount of leads/work this year
  and we are now trying figure out how we can grow further.
• Our website is one of our biggest assets and was responsible for the majority of
  our leads last year. This knowledge is fueling how we drive people to our website
  in 2011.
• Newspaper ads (5 per week) are still working. We have been running them now
  for about 20 months. They work for us. Facebook ads are working well in the last
  60 days.
• Since Facebook’s population of users is now estimated to be roughly the fourth largest group of people on the planet, right behind the populations of China, India, and Indonesia, more and more clients are seeing the importance of being clever with this marketing avenue.
• . . . Angie’s List was very successful.
• My most successful marketing effort was improving my website and adding a blog
  site.
• In some ways, we’re 20 years behind up here in northern Wisconsin, but many of my clients are located in Chicago and Milwaukee, so we finally had a new website built for us last year. Prospective clients expect a good quality website that not only works properly, but also provides information about what we do, has quality photos of our previous work, and offers easy means to contact us. We’ve found that having a good website provides the prospective client with reassurance that we do great work and they’ll be happy when they hire us. Our website pre-sells the job.
• We have concentrated our marketing efforts to specifically relate to women ages 35-65. Our website has been relaunched with this focus at the forefront. We will be holding Informational Seminars in environments that simulate “girls” night out. They will be geared toward having women feel they are more empowered during a process that is typically dominated by men.

You may see some themes here that are echoed throughout our community — digital and internet marketing is becoming more and more important to successful companies. Remember that increasingly, your social media presence and your web site are the windows to your company. Be sure you’re investing enough time and money to make these shine.