A strategy check-in for marketing leaders, sales leaders, and contractors in field service
The importance of branding and awareness
The forefront of your company’s path to obtaining market share, and the best way to break through in an often saturated market is by investing time and resources into your awareness marketing channels. Here, you can try dynamic, creative tactics to find your audience and build the top of your funnel.
The XOi marketing team likes to think of this as starting up a conversation. Through that lens, the tactics you use to create fans of your brand are limited only by your creativity. Which brings us to the downfall of awareness marketing: the expectation of exact measuring. The required (and yes, important) reporting and attribution process often prohibits a company from trying anything they can’t perfectly measure.
It’s a delicate dance between optimizing your strategy for “viral,” or catchy moments and creating content that actually converts. It takes time to build a great awareness and content strategy, and immediate feedback is not guaranteed. But beware of relying too heavily on vanity metrics that do not relate to growth.
Continuously trying to optimize awareness channels through vanity metrics and serve them ever more cheaply is going to reach an inflection point. While the “winning” messaging may result in high engagement numbers, or even as far as a push down the funnel to conversion, eventually that same messaging becomes stale. You need to be nimble, dynamic, and creative; constantly A/B testing the way you speak to your audiences.
Vanity Metrics include:
Likes
Impressions
Comments
Email Subscribers
Video Views
The average attention span for an adult internet user is 8.25 seconds and declining. Creativity and personalization in messaging and content is the best way to combat fatigue, find opportunities with expanded audiences, and keep prospects engaged throughout your marketing and sales funnel.
Health check: Is your marketing strategy generating revenue?
5 tactics to align your strategy with measurable growth.
1. Understand Your market and create personalized campaign content.
Personas mapping: Research your audience and create marketing campaigns that address the pain points of those personality types.
Competitor Comparison: Differentiate your services in a competitive market.
Customer Advocacy: Collect and leverage customer testimonials, reviews, and case studies to showcase your expertise. Your customer’s voice is even more powerful than your own at times.
Future Marketing Trends AI and Automation in Field Service Marketing:
AI should be able to help you personalize your content and serve a persona-specific journey through the funnel. Look for opportunities to have AI tools help you generate multiple forms of content such as blogs, FAQs, infographics, listicles, video execution ideas, and more from a single longform piece that your team has created.
2. Determine the marketing channels through which personalized content will be served, and determine metrics on which to gauge success.
Channels Include:
Social Media
Emails
Referrals
Google Ads
Display Ads
ABM Channels
Events
Growth Metrics Include:
Number of Conversions
Leads generated
Number of opportunities created
Marketing Contribution to Monthly or Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR,ARR)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
TECHNOLOGY TO INVEST IN:
CRM Software
Marketing Automation Tools
Social Listening Tools
Email Marketing Software
Reporting Software
Digital Asset Manager
3. Reinvest in your best performing channels.
Determining best performing will take some testing, and success should be determined by marketing’s role in reaching overall sales goals.
Which channels are generating the highest number of leads?
Which channels are generating most cost effective leads?
What is the ROI for each channel?
What is the marketing contribution to MRR/ARR from that specific channel?
4. Analyze outbound strategy.
How can you boost outbound success? Look at where you may be missing opportunities to generate cost-effective leads.
Do you have an effective upsell strategy to identify leads from a jobsite? Technicians hold a lot of power in being able to identify new maintenance/PM opportunities.
Once you’ve identified jobsite leads, make sure you have a marketing motion in place to engage these leads and capture them quickly and relevantly.
TECHNOLOGY TO INVEST IN:
XOi Core and Premium
5. Identify new lead sources from your existing customer base
The equipment your company services holds a goldmine of information about how, when, and why they may fail, but you may not know how to extract that information. Using technology that can extract equipment information such as age, refrigerant charge, and service bulletins, you can pinpoint highly strategic lead opportunities from your existing database of customers.
For example, you may identify replacement or PM contract opportunities for serviced equipment approaching or beyond end-of-life status. Having a database of end-of-life equipment with active service bulletins at the scale of your entire business, you can proactively advise your customers for replacement or maintenance, and automate a powerful, strategic stream of revenue.
TECHNOLOGY TO INVEST IN:
XOi for Sales
