A lot goes into running a business, especially in the tiny homes and accessory dwelling unit (ADU) industry. While our mind may go to the everyday tasks, budgeting, and overall business management involved, there’s one important aspect that often goes overlooked that could make or break your business: marketing. However, how can you possibly handle all the marketing yourself or eat the expense of hiring a team of marketing professionals when you’re already focused on working with your customers to get their tiny house projects completed?
When you join a franchise, rather than scrambling to manage marketing on your own, you instead receive a variety of tried-and-true marketing systems in addition to an established brand and a Franchisee support team you can turn to when you have questions. At Anchored Tiny Homes, we take it one step further and handle much of the marketing for you. Let’s take a look at what it takes to market an ADU franchise business and how the ATH team supports your marketing needs.
Launching a business and knowing how to run it are essential to get started and manage the day-to-day work, but without marketing, you’ll never see the new customers you need to keep your business alive. Marketing can come in a wide variety of forms, like print advertising and publishing a website, but it even encompasses your branding and any word-of-mouth your customers may provide. With the Anchored Tiny Homes model, there are a few key types of marketing that need to be regularly managed. Once these are in place, you’ll be able to launch successfully, get your name out there, and keep the phone calls coming to help you thrive and grow!
If you were to start your own company, one of the first – and most time-consuming – items is to create your brand and develop a strategy and “bible” around your branding. Without this, even if you’re the best at what you do or if you have the best product on the market, no one will know who you are or trust you enough to pay for your product/service. Thankfully, when you invest in a franchise, you’re also investing in a business with an established brand, including all the logos, verbiage, and graphic design elements you need to establish a recognizable brand in your territory.
There are few businesses that can succeed without some form of online presence. Today, 98% of consumers use the internet, whether that’s through a Google search or a scroll on social media, to research local businesses to help them decide who to work with, per a Bright Local 2023 Local Consumer Review Survey.* This doesn’t apply to just restaurants, shops, and other brick-and-mortar businesses – construction and home service providers similar to Anchored Tiny Homes also rely on a well-rounded online presence to connect with customers who wouldn’t otherwise know they existed.
When we talk about a company’s online presence, we’re referring mostly to its website and social media accounts, but profiles on directory websites, like Angi’s List, can also contribute. Since the vast majority of prospective customers use the internet to perform research before working with a business, having a website gives your audience a way to familiarize themselves with your brand and your services, helping you build credibility even before your first phone call. Social media profiles on sites like Facebook and Instagram provide a similar opportunity, but it also allows you to connect with your community that a website doesn’t. With well-maintained social profiles, you gain another platform for lead generation.
Building a website and establishing yourself on social media are great places to start, but if these platforms aren’t properly set up, then no one will be able to find your business online. That’s the exact problem online advertising and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) were built to solve.
If you have a long list of competitors that rank before you on Google when you search a phrase like “tiny home builder near me,” you can rise through the ranks by implementing SEO best practices to help search engines like Google rank your website higher in their search results. Similarly, you can opt to start a paid search or paid social media advertising campaign, both of which will get your name in front of your potential customers in a way that simply publishing a website can’t.
Plenty of businesses have grown simply because someone told someone else, who then told another person, that they could trust a specific local company. Word-of-mouth marketing, while often harder to quantify than most other methods, is essential to maintaining a consistent pipeline of new business. When a customer shares their thoughts and opinions on their experience with a business, they’re indirectly helping you with your brand awareness in your area and solidifying their loyalty to your business.
If all this talk of advertising and an online presence has you worried about how you’ll manage running your new ADU business and run all this marketing on your own, you’re in luck – at Anchored Tiny Homes, our corporate support team cares as much about your success as you do. That’s why our corporate team will handle the majority of the marketing for you. Here are just a few of the ways we support our Franchise Owners:
When you join the Anchored Tiny Homes franchise, one of the first steps to launching your new business is to go through training to learn everything about the business and what it takes to successfully run a tiny house franchise. During this time, we’ll walk you through all the systems we’ve put in place around marketing to help you get familiar with our brand, the platforms we use, and the processes involved with each. This way, you’ll understand how your day-to-day work with clients and your team will impact or shape the marketing initiatives behind your business.
Once you understand how and why our marketing works and your return to your territory, you’ll receive full support from Anchored Tiny Homes’ in-house marketing team on everything from scheduling appointments and qualifying leads to paid ads, social media management, and more. Essentially, our team will handle the first point of contact a customer has with your business and schedule appointments with you or your sales team, effectively managing your calendars on your behalf.
At the end of the day, Anchored Tiny Homes Franchise Owners will have a support team to handle much of the marketing, leaving them with only local marketing on their plate. This means Owners will have the freedom to choose whether or not they want to start any additional initiatives, attend in-person events in their community, and anything else they may learn about in your community.
Since the introduction of social media sites like Facebook, and Instagram, it’s been considered a requirement across industries that businesses create and regularly post to social media accounts to keep their customers updated and engaged. If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is. Luckily, the Anchored Tiny Homes team has extensive experience managing our entire network of social media accounts, posting on behalf of Franchise Owners so you can focus on building connections with your clients and getting their ADU builds finished instead.
Google is the foremost search engine across the globe, so getting your business on the first page of search results is one of our highest priorities. Whether we do this through organic SEO best practices or we set up a paid search advertising campaign, our marketing team’s priority is to make sure that people searching for your service in your area can find you.
While the Anchored Tiny Homes business model is home-based, our marketing team knows that you’ll need physical collateral to help show your customers why you’re the ideal tiny house builder for them. We provide high-quality, professionally designed hand-outs, one-pagers, business cards, and more, so you can feel confident about handing out collateral wherever you go to represent your new ADU business.
The Anchored Tiny Homes corporate team is there to ensure your success, so we curate monthly training topics to help you stay up-to-date with changes to our processes and learn more about how marketing contributes to your overall business growth. In addition to these regular training sessions, you’ll also have direct access to our Founders and the entire marketing team should you ever have questions or want to learn more about how you can contribute.
With all the marketing support you receive when you join Anchored Tiny Homes, you’ll rarely need to worry about anything other than making your customers happy! If you get excited about being hands-off with your marketing and more hands-on with scaling your business, you’re in the right place. Take our one-minute qualification quiz today to see if you’re the ideal fit for your own Anchored Tiny Homes franchise.
