Marketing for SMEs: Wes Towers on Full-Stack Marketing for Trades & Construction

I’m Jeremy Yang, founder of Digital Goliath, an Australian paid advertising agency. On this episode of Marketing for SMEs, I sat down with Wes Towers of Uplift360, a full-stack marketer who’s spent the last two and a half decades niching into trades and construction.

I run Google and Meta Ads for SMEs, but Wes goes deeper into websites and SEO for that same market. This one’s about how he built trust with a group of clients who are famously jaded about marketing, and what niching down actually costs you versus what it gives back.

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Finding a Niche in Trades and Construction

Jeremy Yang: Another reason I wanted to talk to you is because I do advertising, that’s my specialty. Advertising touches on landing pages, that kind of thing. But you’re more full scope, and you found your niche, which is building tradies and building companies.

Wes Towers: That’s right.

Jeremy Yang: Which I find hard to do, because I’ve done tradies, but I think the tradies I’ve been doing might be a little too small for advertising. And the building companies I’ve done are usually more of a branding game. So I’m just looking to learn from you, how you got through it, how you deal with them.

Wes Towers: Yeah, for sure. There are some key ways of working with a tradesperson as opposed to a lot of other office-bound businesses, and some shortcut ways to get to success.

Wes Towers: Unlike yourself, where you had an actual trades background, I didn’t at all. I’m useless at picking up a hammer, I’ve got no idea which end of the screwdriver to hold. But for whatever reason, I related really well to these guys, the founder-led businesses.

I think it’s because I avoid techie jargon, that’s a massive part of it. I don’t bog them down with things that are unnecessary, I just talk to them practically. They’re pragmatic, down to earth, hands-on, they just want results.

For something like advertising, you get an immediate, measurable result. So it’s an awesome opportunity to tap into, but it is a slightly different way of working with them.

Jeremy Yang: And if they’re too small?

Wes Towers: Yeah, that’s a massive challenge, because if they’re tiny, there’s just not enough meat in it, not enough budget to do a quality project for them.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah, you have to turn the ads off too quickly as well, because as soon as they get busy they can’t handle it.

Wes Towers: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I’ve got a few clients where we do a little bit of ads in trades, mostly the guys doing emergency-related work, because it’s immediate. They’ll call whoever they can get their hands on straight away, the plumbing’s leaking everywhere or something.

The need is so amplified they’ll just call whoever comes up first.

Working Through COVID

Jeremy Yang: Was it before COVID that you started niching down, or during, or after?

Wes Towers: It had already started occurring, but probably accelerated. We changed a lot of messaging on sites, simply because there was work people could continue with and work they couldn’t. Repairing things was still considered mandatory work, if someone’s roof is blown off, they’ve got to get it fixed.

Companies usually focused on bigger projects suddenly aligned their messaging with what they could provide right then, to keep the money flowing through the door. Curiously, some of the people who made that pivot never really went back.

Jeremy Yang: And it’s crazy right now too, we’re living through a new form of disaster and crisis with building materials.

Wes Towers: Yes, with everything going on in the world. Depending on what they’re doing, some of them are really feeling the crunch. There’s two ways of looking at that.

Some just cut all the marketing costs they can cut. But the other way is to dial it up, because there’s less work out there, so you need to fight a little harder to get it.

Jeremy Yang: I’ll tell you a bit about my situation. I started ads probably two years before COVID. In COVID, with e-commerce, you couldn’t put a foot wrong, man.

But then slowly you had to match expectations in the years after, as things went back to normal. Clients still wanted the COVID-era results.

And I think that’s also the benefit of niching down, because during these times with building materials, they don’t have to talk to someone who’s ignorant about it. Wes knows the situation, the environment, the landscape.

Wes Towers: Yeah, that’s always the advantage, having a greater depth of knowledge about their circumstances because you’ve seen it across other clients. You can perceive what’s likely to produce the best value for them quickly.

Jeremy Yang: A lot of tradies I’ve met from those cowboy years are jaded by the word SEO, jaded by the word marketing agency. How do you quickly overcome that to build trust?

Wes Towers: I’m just really clear with expectations. We do a lot of SEO, and it is a long-term game, and it’s not cheap. So I have that conversation up front.

If you’re wanting quick results, you’ve got to get on ads, that’s almost immediate. SEO is a powerful play for the long term if you’ve got the capacity to take it on. The longest SEO client we’ve got is probably twelve years.

Jeremy Yang: That’s insane, you would have seen so many changes.

Wes Towers: Yeah, it’s crazy, because everything changes all the time. Some of those long-term clients, when traffic started diminishing, it’s because people don’t need to go to websites anymore when they’re researching. They’re jumping straight onto their AI platform of choice and asking questions.

But that’s not to say the information on the website isn’t necessary, it is, because it fuels AI. If you want to show up in Google, you want to show up in large language models too.

Niching, AI, and Levelling the Playing Field

Jeremy Yang: It’s like the saying, horses for courses. If you’ve got your one-man-in-a-van air conditioning guy versus your big building projects on the top end, it’s a different package altogether.

Wes Towers: Yeah, that’s right. If you’re selling something high value with good margin, you only need one or two additional clients a month to well and truly compensate for the cost. The starting package we do is $1,000 a month.

For some of the building materials guys, that’s just a drop in the ocean compared to what they make. On the flip side, if you’re more of a handyman type and a job’s only a couple hundred bucks, you’re going to need a few to make it worthwhile.

Jeremy Yang: Even beyond SEO, because you’re full stack, you help with the website too. I heard you on a podcast talking about content helping people know it’s a human. If you’re reading something and you don’t even know if a human’s checked it, that’s a real moment.

Wes Towers: Yeah, it’s so true. Everybody’s got access to a $20-a-month AI subscription now. You can’t trust anything anymore, whether a human’s checked it or not.

We could never fully trust marketers or people talking about their own businesses, but that’s a massive challenge. You’ve got to build authority and trust in all the right places, so when someone’s looking to buy something, they can qualify you online.

Jeremy Yang: Do you go as far as creating videos with people, do you have that kind of crew?

Wes Towers: Yeah, we refer that out quite a bit, depends on the location. Most of our clients are around our region in Victoria, but we’ve got some scattered throughout Australia and internationally.

Wes Towers: When I’m looking for external parties to do things, I’m looking for brilliant technicians, not marketers, that’s the key distinction, a very different skill set. When I started out in the industry I was probably more of a technician than a marketer.

But I quickly realised there was a greater level of skill I could learn and apply, and there’s higher value in that. There’s so many decisions you can make right now, a confused mind can’t make any decision.

Jeremy Yang: Getting a bit more technical and geeky now, I hear a lot about WordPress versus GoHighLevel. Do you have a school of thought on that?

Wes Towers: Yeah, I love GoHighLevel, it’s great value, we use it for our own business. But we do WordPress websites for clients, simply because they’re more polished, custom design, 100% flexibility.

Big brands have style guides that are pretty rigid. Smaller businesses can do whatever they want, that’s fine, depends on the nature of the business.

Jeremy Yang: It’s a wild world we’re living in with vibe coding. That’s where you use AI to build, design stuff, and put it back into WordPress?

Wes Towers: Yeah. There’s a few tools that do that, they’re still fairly clunky, but eventually these things will be ironed out and be really useful. My business has had to evolve, realising the trajectory of where things are going, we can’t rely on just making pretty websites anymore.

Jeremy Yang: I’ve got a blog article I was thinking about, Warren Buffett was saying there are some inventions that add value to a business. And there are some innovations that just even things out, the value gets passed straight on to the consumer. I think that’s AI.

Wes Towers: Yeah, I think that’s 100% true. I think the levelling of the playing field is going to occur, and already is, for massive entities competing with someone like me. It’s levelling the playing field because we have the capacity to do a lot of what would have taken massive teams to do previously.

And it’s not just us, trades and construction people can also adapt what they’re doing behind the scenes.

Wes Towers: The beauty of it with trades and construction is your competitors probably aren’t pushing ahead that much either. You’ve only got to be better than your competitors. If you’re an electrician in a small town and there’s only three other electricians, as long as you’re better than those three, everything’s cool.

Jeremy Yang: And in a bigger city?

Wes Towers: In a bigger city, you can’t just rely on being better than the few there, because there’s so many. That’s when you think about niching, being specific, being the best in a certain lane. Like what me and you do, we compete against everyone in the world.

Jeremy Yang: And you’re B2B only?

Wes Towers: B2B only. We did a website late last year for a steel company, building materials, global enterprise, everyone in the game would know them.

We could only do that work because it was in our wheelhouse, there was no chance in hell I’d win that job otherwise, but we know that game, we know steel really well.

The “Shadow Work” Technique

Jeremy Yang: I heard you talk about Shadow Work on one of your episodes. Tradies and builders are in vans all day, jaded, they haven’t got time to work out this value stuff, they all give you the same generic answer. Tell us more about it.

Wes Towers: Yeah, Shadow Work, it’s a psychological understanding of how people’s minds work. The concept is there’s always light and darkness, and understanding the darkness from a human perspective helps reveal what the light is. That sounds a bit woo-woo, so I don’t speak of it in those terms to clients, but that’s literally the philosophy behind what I bring to the table.

Wes Towers: In real terms, when I’m talking to a new client, it’s almost like a venting session. I’m getting them to complain about everything they can possibly complain about, their competitors, the industry, everything wrong with the world. It’s a massive dump, because as humans, when we get into that rhythm and get permission to do that, we find it super easy.

I used to go in and ask, “So what makes you distinct? What’s your point of difference?” And you’d get that generic answer every time, “we really care about people,” “we leave the site clean and tidy,” all the same.

Wes Towers: But once you start hearing them complain about something that’s not quite right in the industry, you look at all the darkness, the negative stuff. Then what we do is flip it around and look at it from the positive, because the darkness is highlighting what’s truly important to them.

It’s a quick hack to discover what truly sets you apart, what genuinely makes you unique. We’d never say those things publicly, it’s a closed Zoom call, a bit of a bitching session, I’d describe it as.

Jeremy Yang: It’s quicker though, because you get the information, you can put the bullet points on the website, and it comes out thick and fast.

Wes Towers: Yeah, that’s good, I’d never heard of that until you talked about it.

Jeremy Yang: It works really well with tradespeople, because they’re high pressure, high stakes, stressed out often, driving from site to site, dirty and hot and sweaty, timelines all blown out, everything’s a bit of a mess usually. So they can easily vent.

I was talking to another builder the other day, he told me something I’d never thought about, that they’re exposed to the elements all day long, the noise, the drilling, the yelling, the road rage. We’re sitting down, we’re chilled. They’re exposed to that all day long and it does their head in.

Mission, Values, and Momentum

Jeremy Yang: This is something I’ve had trouble weaving into my own business, my mission and values. You talk about yours a lot. How did you arrive at that, and do you find it impactful commercially?

Wes Towers: Yeah, I think the way to think about it is momentum. Just get started, get momentum, you kind of have a vision for where you’re going, and you kind of know where you are right now, but the middle part you just don’t know, the world keeps throwing different things at you.

Podcasting is awesome for that, I’ve been on a heap of podcasts. Even articulating in different ways what it is that I value has been really helpful, because people throw slightly different questions and you think about it in a slightly different way.

Your message, your purpose and direction doesn’t change, but the way you shape it does.

Working With Wes

Jeremy Yang: As we wrap up, tell the people your ideal client profile, how they find you, what’s the starting point?

Wes Towers: Well, uplift360.com.au is the website, you can book strategy calls with me there, no obligation, just a 45-minute session over Zoom. So we start with that initial call, see where we can provide the best value.

Typically it’s around overhauling the website, there’s usually a couple of problems, not enough traffic, that’s SEO, or not enough conversions. Ideal clients are trades, construction, building materials, industrial brands, that’s who we serve, and globally as well, mostly Australia, but that’s not mandatory.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah, when I heard you I thought, man, let this guy talk. He sounds like a friendly guy, and you are. So look, I really appreciate you coming on the show, man.

Wes Towers: Yeah, for sure. If anyone’s on there, if they use socials, I’m most likely to respond on LinkedIn, that’s the way to get me.

• Niching down amplifies opportunity rather than cutting it off. Wes found that specialising in trades and construction felt like a limiting decision at first, but it actually let him bring a depth of knowledge to a market that generalist agencies can’t match.
• Trust is built through honesty about timelines, not sales pitches. Wes is upfront that SEO is a long-term, expensive play, while ads deliver near-immediate results, and lets clients choose based on their actual capacity rather than overselling either option.
• AI is levelling the playing field for small agencies competing with big ones. Both Jeremy and Wes agree that AI tools are giving smaller operators the capacity to do work that used to require large teams, but the same forces mean businesses can’t stay static either.
• The “Shadow Work” technique surfaces a client’s real point of difference by starting with complaints, not pitches. Getting a client to vent about competitors and industry frustrations reveals what they actually value, which is faster and more honest than asking directly what makes them different.

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This conversation is from Marketing for SMEs with Jeremy Yang, founder of Digital Goliath, an Australian paid advertising agency helping SMEs grow with Google and Meta Ads. Available on your preferred podcast app and YouTube.