Cool Contractor

Cool Contractors

There are hundreds of thousands of contracting businesses in the U.S.- an estimated 90,000 landscape contractors alone. What makes you stand apart from them?

Our cool contractors series will showcase contractors doing something cool, creative and share-worthy for their contracting business.  By doing so we hope to stimulate ideas and provide inspiration for doing cool things in your business.

Whether it has to do with sales, marketing, operations or management, the Cool Contractors series will present real life examples of contractors who stand out.

Stewcare Inc. Maximizing Brand Exposure with YouTube

As I was adding descriptions to our YouTube videos for increased search engine optimization, I stumbled upon a video by Stewcare Inc., a full service landscape company out of Delaware, Ohio that offers a really clever, seemingly simple way to market a contracting business.

3,000 YouTube Views And Counting

Mike Stewart Jr., President of Stewcare, has basically created his very own reality show, Mowing Pains. He has filmed upwards of 50 episodes- some of which have over 3,000 views. Can you say brand exposure?!

Mike Jr. is the star and narrator of most of the Mowing Pains episodes in which he offers tips, tricks and a behind the scenes look at the day in the life of a landscape contractor.

Show the People What You Do!

Out of all the Stewcare episodes to choose from,  I initially watched Stewcare Mowing Pains Episode 20. It started out with Mike Jr. and Mike Sr. passing the time during the slow winter months Midwestern contractors dealt with this season.

The father and son team worked together on Mike Sr.’s motorcycle, Mike Jr. spoke on the less than favorable winter conditions Stewcare faced, and towards the end of the video a little excitement occurs when a small snow storm is forecasted to hit  Stewcare’s market.

I think it must have been fate that I stumbled upon this particular episode because right as I was about to watch another one, the frame flipped to Mike Jr. and Mike Sr. in the office planning their snow event strategy on Go iLawn. Thanks Mike & Mike for exposing the Go iLawn brand!

Anyhow, take a look at the episode below to get some ideas of how Mike Jr. uses YouTube to maximize his downtime, strengthen his brand and share his expertise.

Search Engine Optimize Your YouTube Channel

Stewcare sets a great example on how to use technology to increase brand exposure on the web.  They have a link the Stewcare YouTube channel on their company website, which gives SEO traction to web searches, plus each video on the Stewcare channel has a description with keywords and tags, which increases their traction even more. Nicely done guys.

But, Mike and Mike can extend their reach even farther by optimizing their YouTube channel. YouTube allows you to provide a description about your channel and attach links to your company website, Facebook fan page, Twitter feed- or wherever you would like to link viewers for that matter.

See the example of  Lowe’s YouTube channel optimization. The Lowe’s Channel offers a link to the Lowe’s website, Facebook fan page, Twitter feed and Lowe’s Creative Ideas.

If you have a YouTube channel or you are going to create one, be sure to take the time to optimize it. Adding a description for your channel and links to important places is simple and takes about five minutes or less.

So what do you think? Is this something you would do to help get your brand out there in a creative way?

If you would like to be the Cool Contractor of the month, get in touch with Alle- [email protected], and tell her why you are cool.