Marketing your field service company can seem like a foreign notion. Let’s break it down into 6 tips that can help your business continue to grow.
1. Know your market
Understanding your customer is the first step to developing a strategic marketing plan. You can ask these two questions to help determine groups that you should focus on:
Who uses your service?
Look at the customers that already do business with you. Understanding who they are can help you target a demographic that has proven lucrative for you. For example, if you’ve noticed that most of your customers are restaurant owners, you can target restaurant owners in surrounding areas.
Also Read: Using Marketing Automation to Segment Your Buyers
Who needs your service?
Taking a step back and asking this question can help you identify demographics you may not have thought of before. If you are a landscaping company and have been working primarily with schools and young families, asking “Who else needs a landscaping service?” could help you realize that elderly homeowners are a growing market.
Understand your market and use this understanding to your advantage. This can help you focus your marketing efforts, develop targeted promotions, and look for new leads.
2. Be reachable
If a potential customer can’t contact you, they will instead contact a business they can more easily reach. These days, a business’s reachability comes down to online presence. In the field service business, your profits can hinge directly on how easy it is to find you online.
Improving your reachability means using all available methods, including both your website and social media. Some might dismiss social media as unprofessional, but you want your plumbing service to show up for searchers regardless of where they conduct their search.
Look up your business through various services (Apple and Google maps, Google search, Facebook, etc.) and check your listings for errors or outdated information. Create social media accounts for your business. Even if you can’t update them all the time, they can still link to your website and host your contact information.
Check your website. Is your contact information readily available? Do you list several ways someone can contact you? Make it as easy as possible for potential customers to find you on the platforms they use, and they will contact you.
3. Use your people
For field service companies, every job represents an advertising opportunity from the uniform your technician wears to the car they drive to their interactions with the customer. Be visible and be memorable. A memorable brand means when somebody has a broken AC unit, they’ll think of your HVAC company first and hire you.
Your field service company works in the field. This means eyeballs on your work and workers at every job. Invest in unique uniforms, vehicle paint jobs and decals, a catchy slogan, and a sleek logo. What makes your company look better? A technician with a tattered clipboard in a dirty flannel shirt, or a technician in a pristine uniform with a high-tech field service app on their tablet?
The face time technicians get with customers represents a great opportunity to promote your products and services. If your techs don’t do this on their own, consider giving them a script to follow at the beginning or end of their customer interactions to help guide the conversation.
4. Engage your customers
Continued engagement is vital to customer retention. Start an email subscription list featuring articles from your website’s blog, exclusive promotions, and upcoming events. Make sure customers can easily subscribe to your company’s emails when they land on your website or social media outlets or when they engage with one of your technicians.
5. Online presence is vital
An online presence is a source for potential customers to learn more about your company. Going online is vital for any business, but particularly important to marketing your field service company. It is crucial to understand the value of a good website, tidy social media, and positive reviews.
Website
As a field service company, your website is your storefront. You want people to come in and stay a while, and you want to inform customers of what your business offers.
Where your website falls in the search engine results page matters. When someone searches “Lawn care in [your city],” you want your business to be the first on the list. However, because there are hundreds of lawn care businesses in your city, you have to fight for that prime spot. Maintaining a blog on your website can increase your keyword content and raise your visibility on the web. Research shows that companies that published blog posts at least 16 times a month got 4.5 times as many leads as companies that blogged only 0-4 times a month.
Social Media
While social media can seem like small potatoes, it establishes a wider awareness of your company. If a potential customer can’t find you, they can’t choose you. Don’t give a reason for a person to pick a different business. Social media can also help you develop relationships with your customers and establish trust. Forty-one percent of people say they have discontinued engagement with a company due to poor personalization and lack of trust.
The three main social media platforms you should focus on are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Each of them can be utilized in a slightly different way. Facebook can be used as a source for reviews, customer interaction, messaging, and basic operational information. Twitter is a place where companies can directly interact with potential customers and the model works well for customer support. Instagram can be an excellent form of showing your company culture or displaying the work you do.
Reviews
Yelp. Facebook. Angie’s List.
There are many places where people can share their experiences with your company. Word of mouth can be the deciding factor for someone trying to choose a service company, and these days, word of mouth primarily passes online. Shoppers want to hear your customers’ story: 61 percent use reviews and others’ experiences to decide on a purchase.
Encourage your customers to like you, follow you, and rate you on reviews apps. This will establish a continued relationship between you and your customers and encourage others to check out your business.
6. Target your ads
Knowing your markets lets you target your ads to them individually. You can save money on advertising by pinpointing the people most likely to need your service. Target your online ads to people who have looked up keywords relating to what your company offers, or use a remarketing tool to serve ads to people who have already been to your website.
Test your targeted ads to differentiate your promotions and discover what works and what doesn’t. Run different promotions for different target markets to learn how you should better advertise in the future.
Key Takeaway
Taking a step back and evaluating your company through the eyes of a potential customer can help you develop and implement a strategic marketing plan. Invest in areas where your company can grow quickly and take advantage of free tools like social media. Marketing can be confusing, but with a solid marketing strategy, your field service company will continue to grow and flourish.
Mahrukh Karimi is a marketer for the field service management software Smart Service. In her free time, Mahrukh enjoys painting, cooking, and going on road trips.
