You lose a job to a competitor. You know your work is better. You have the reviews to prove it. And the customer still picked the other guy. When I was in Real Estate (yeah I did that for a while), I saw it time and time again. I said to myself more than once, “Why in the world are they getting all the listings? I know I can do better work than they can.” But they weren’t getting the business because they were better. I think they were getting more business because people found them and recognized them.
That was hard for me to take. Every time someone picks someone over you it stings. The first thing most business owners do when they see that is assume the customer made a mistake. But the customer didn’t compare your work to your competitor’s work. They never saw your work at all. They compared what they could see. And what they could see was your competitor. They could see you, too, if you show up consistently on video.
You might say, “I have a great website.” That’s a great start, but video does things that a website by itself doesn’t do.When someone watches your competitor talk about a job for sixty seconds, something changes inside them. They have heard his voice. They have seen how he explains things. They have watched him solve a problem that looks a lot like theirs. By the time they pick up the phone, they are not calling a stranger. They are calling the guy they already feel like they know.
That feeling is what you’re after. People hire who they trust, and trust comes from familiarity. Your competitor is not winning because his work is better. He is winning because he is familiar. He shows up in the feed, and you do not.
Another thing is that videos that win jobs don’t have to be fancy. That is the part that surprises people. It is a phone on a job site. It is a two minute answer to a question customers ask every day. It is a finished project, shown the way it actually looks when the work is done. Just you talking about your work like a person.
What separates him from you is not budget or talent. It is the habit. At least one video every week, whether he feels like it or not. Customers ask him a question, he answers it on camera. He finishes a job, he shows it. He is the face people recognize when they need what he sells.
You do not need to outspend him. You need to out-show-up him. Talk about the job you just finished. Answer the question you hear every single day. Show what a good result looks like. That should be the first step in your strategy, and it is the one your competitor is already running.
The customers are out there. The only question is whether they see you first, or your competition.
If you don’t know what to film, check out this post about your first business video. It will give you an exact framework you can copy to make your first video this week. And if you want even more, I gave a talk about a framework for making videos for your business.