5 Marketing Tips For Service Businesses

When it comes to large businesses, tech businesses and online businesses, marketing is always held as a top priority. Although there is an unfortunate theme among smaller service businesses like the local plumber, electrician or lawn care companies. They seem to either not give enough time to marketing or completely skip over the topic all together.

Well we are here to fix that, with five tips to improve your service business marketing efforts.

5 Service business Marketing tips

  1.  Refine your customer list
  2. Branding: Do it and keep it consistent
  3. Go online, the right way
  4.  Make it easy for your customers to leave reviews
  5.  Advertise with a purpose

Number 1. Refine your customer list

Of course our first tip is right in line with the first rule of marketing, which is to know who your customer is. It has been said if you say that “if everybody is your customer, then nobody is your customer”.

Once you know who your customer is you need to intentionally focus on that customer. There are a couple of ways to go about this, which depends on what type of business you have.

 

 

Lead Qualifying 

If you have a business that is primarily one time service calls, a plumber coming to fix a drain for example. You really only need to focus on the process of qualifying NEW leads as they come into your business.

This can be done pretty easily with a simple script that is used during the first contact with a new customer. Below  are some common things that you may want to gather.

  • Geographical location
  • What issue the customer is looking to solve
  • How serious is the customer
  • Are  they looking for a professional company (and the  cost that comes with it), or a handyman.

This last point here is a really important one. A lone handyman out looking for income for himself or herself is going to have much cheaper prices than a company with all the bills that accompany it.

A lot of time is wasted in business completing estimates for customers that really wanted an uninsured handyman, that would fix their leaky faucet for $40 and are completely blown away when you hand them an estimate for $100 service fee just to look at it.

 

Lead Qualifying AND List Cleaning

If you have a business that is a repeat service provider, there will be a little more work involved in this step. An example of a business like this would be a lawn care service provider, that maintains the customers property on a regular basis.

With this type of business as leads come in you will still need to qualify those leads the same as mentioned above.

Along with lead qualifying, an honest look at the list of customers that the business is servicing must be done.

Things to look into when analyzing current customers could be the following..

  • Where are they located – are there any other jobs near them and are they in the areas that you want to work?
  • Are the jobs profitable – after labor and materials is the company making an acceptable profit?
  • Are the customers “good customers” – the fact is not all customers are created equal. Some customers do not respect the time of your company or your employees, and insist on always finding a problem with the service. These customers will suck the profits out of the company and sometime the moral out of you employees.

 

 

 

Number 2. Branding: Do it and keep it consistent

The craziest thing that I see from many smaller companies is a complete lack of company branding. The simple things like a logo on vehicles and trailers, or company shirts on the employees.

In the service industry it is common practice for a company vehicle to be parked in a customers driveway for half an hour to multiple hours. This is a lot of wasted advertising if you don’t have any branding on your vehicles.

Keep It Consistent, pick a color scheme and logo that you intend to use on all of the things that your customers will see. This will include company vehicles, business cards, websites, social media, and clothing.

 

Number 3. Go Online The Right Way

It is essential that if you want to be successful in growing a substantial business in the modern market, you will need to be online. The absolute necessities in todays world would be a Google My Business listing, and a branded website.

People are busy, and when it comes to needing a service provider, your potential customer is going to look for someone on Google or one of the other search engines (but mainly Google).

 

Social Media

When it comes to social media sites it is important to remember what the users of each platform expect.. 

Russel Brunson has a great breakdown of what customers expect on each platform and how to treat them in his book “Traffic Secrets” a brief explanation is below.

Facebook- “The talk show” – Facebook can be considered the talk show platform, people want to interact and see a conversation. Try not to be to sales focused. People aren’t really there to buy your service, you would be much better off to create engagement with customers. This will hopefully make you first in their mind when they need a service like yours.

Instagram – “Reality TV” – This is where you can showcase interesting things that you are doing in your business.

YouTube – “The Sitcom” – YouTube is where you would want to post videos that are more in depth. These videos can be made to explain how to do something or provide deeper knowledge into what your company is about.

Number 4. Make it easy for you customers to leave you a review

As mentioned above 9 times out of 10 your customers will be searching for your service on Google. When they find your companies listing the first thing they will want to know is “what are others saying about you”.

There is a 4 step process that can greatly improve you chances of getting a review from you customers

  1. Obtain their email address as soon as you can, this can usually be done by letting them know that you need to have an email address to send them their invoice.
  2. Once you have completed the work you will send them an email that will include their invoice as well as a link to leave you a review on Google. Google explains how to get a review link here https://support.google.com/business/answer/7035772?hl=en
  3. Providing you have performed the job to the standard agreed upon, your happy customer will leave you a raving review.

The reason this process works so well is because a lot of customers a very happy with the work of a service provider, but without the direct reminder that they can leave a review, the idea will never cross their mind. 

It is your job as the business owner to remind them, your customer is busy and the growth and success is not usually the first thing on their mind.

Number 5. Advertise With A Purpose

So when it comes to advertising you have a couple of options.

Brand Marketing –  This type of marketing is like the above mentioned section on branding. You are creating an image of your company to be seen by the outside world. A lot of advertising that you see is “Brand Marketing”. Almost all TV commercials are “Brand Marketing”. 

When you see a Dorito’s commercial on TV their main objective is to remind you that they exist so that the next time you want a chip you think of them.

Direct Response Marketing – Direct response marketing is “Advertising with a Purpose”. Brand marketing works well when you have millions of dollars in the marking budget like Dorito’s does. But it doesn’t work so well for smaller businesses. 

For a smaller business you will want to focus your advertising dollars on more action provoking advertising.

For instance if you choose to run a Facebook ad for your plumbing company an ad with the headline.. 

 “15% off all services booked Between January 1st and January 30th. CALL TODAY”

This would be considered advertising with a purpose,

there is a specific ACTION to perform,

to get a specific OFFER,

within a specific TIMEFRAME.

With this kind of advertising the customer knows exactly what they are getting and how to get it.

Compare that to the following ad copy..

“Johnson Plumbing, We have been serving the state of Georgia for over 50 years”

This ad copy talks about the company but it doesn’t spur the customer to do anything.

It’s not that it is bad to inform your customers about your company, but this can be done if free ways such as a Facebook post. When ad dollars are being spent you always want to try to receive a return on investment that is measurable.