Question: Should we advertise during the peak season or turn it off?

Gary Elekes; Founder, EPC Training:

It depends on your budget and your ability to develop advertising. One thing that the question doesn’t presuppose is what kind of advertising you’re doing. If you can afford to, it is generally a good idea to advertise during the peak season. If you’re at full capacity, you’re obviously not going to want to run discounts. You wouldn’t want to run a promotion that would give a customer a reason to call in.

The call to action is already occurring with broken units, which is driven by the weather. It could be a plumbing repair, a broken HVAC unit, or in some cases hail storms that absolutely wreck outdoor equipment. So, the idea of promoting doesn’t necessarily help us.

One of the things you want to do is look at your marketing and advertising calendar and define when your ramp-up season starts. Typically, your media campaign will begin two or three weeks before your peak season begins. That’s when you would use traditional media to support your digital platforms. You want to drive traffic to your website and you control the promotional side based on your capacity.

If you have a full dispatch board, or you have a backlog of service calls, you don’t want to go out and promote. However, the idea of brand awareness – creating and positioning a dominant brand in the marketplace – should be a real goal. So, if you’re in a competitive marketplace and have the budget, I would suggest continuing to advertise your brand to remind people that you’re the company of choice. That could be affiliated with a case based on social media, that could be tied into a brand strategy, or the launch of a new product or service as part of a new vertical.

I have a good friend who is launching a plumbing service in 90 days. We looked at his database and he doesn’t have enough emails to launch an effective email campaign. Rather than deploying his resources there, I told him it would be more effective to call center those folks with a coupon and go out with some broad-based media to the marketplace. He needed more customers and more visibility on his brand strategy that ties into the new vertical of plumbing.

That’s a good example of advertising in a peak season because there’s a reason to do it besides just selling an HVAC system. If you don’t have the budget, you should obviously turn off your advertising but if you can advertise year around and be the dominate media player in the markets that you’re in, that’s always preferable. That’s the mindset that you have to have.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

A successful call center is the cornerstone of any great contracting company.

In part six of a continuing summer series, Brigham Dickinson gives you the tools to build a world-class team of CSR’s that consistently books calls.

Plus, Gary Elekes helps your service techs set goals and Weldon Long gives your sales advisors the first two steps in his proven five-step sales process.

All that and more, on this week’s episode ofCracking the Code!

Pricing your service agreements is a science and should be treated with care.

In this “Clip of the Week” from Cracking the Code, Gary Elekes teaches you how to properly price your service agreements for optimal return.

Watch the clip below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show.

Question: What is the best way to use social media for my contracting company?

Gary Elekes; Founder, EPC Training:

Obviously, using social media will be the first step. People in the trades aren’t typically social media users. So, they don’t believe that social media is something anyone else would utilize to look at a brand or determine the value of a company. I don’t necessarily mean monetary value, I mean, “Do I like what people are saying about you in terms of the community relationship?”

Step one is use it, step two is to get out of your own way. Most people don’t know how to use social media to build a brand or a company because they’re in the business of selling and creating leads using social media. Lead generation will come from social media. On Facebook and Instagram, you have the ability to retarget. If you visit my site, I can chase you around your social media with targeted ads.

You have the ability to establish Pinterest, YouTube accounts, Twitter – there’s a wide range of social media platforms. The important aspect is to engage in all of them but what you need is an overarching digital strategy. A lot of people will have someone inside the business – a son, a daughter, or a wife that’s likes social media – run their accounts. Just because they use it in their personal life doesn’t mean they’re good at the business aspect of it or have a well-thought-out digital strategy.

When we absorb a lot of accounts that come to us after realizing that they’re not getting any results, we see a lot of activity on the accounts but it’s not directed with a strategy. There’s no thought behind posts in terms of creating engagement. The number one rule of social media is creating interest and engagement. I’d rather have 2,000 engaged users than 4,000 users who think I’m antagonizing them with posts.

If you really understand social media, you realize that you’re not trying to sell something instantaneously today. Yes, you can do that but what you need to do is create some sort of a cause and tie your brand to that cause marketing. You need a strategy with the idea that nine out of 10 posts need to be interesting posts, content that is community oriented.

July 4th is a good example, what’s going on in the community? People are interested in that because they want to know what’s going on. Maybe there’s a parade. Where are the fireworks going to be? These are all more relevant than, “Oh, Gary is having a birthday on July 11th.” While it’s nice to send out a Happy Birthday recognition, that’s more of an internal company communication. Consumers may be interested in that but after a while, it’s not going to be interesting to them. You need your strategy to have an overarching purpose and have all of your social media platforms tied to that strategy.

There are very expensive software platforms that we use as an agency that moves a strategy through all the social media platforms so that everyone using those platforms are exposed to that strategy. I like the idea of having a social media calendar as well. Most clients will be able to tell me what events should be on our radar so we can schedule their social media posts related to those events. Those posts will tie into the overall strategy and create interest. Interest is what we want. Engagement is what we want. We want people to become passionate advocates for our brand. Not only will people like your posts, they’ll also share your posts.

When people start sharing posts from your page, that’s when you’ll notice lead generation coming from the branding side. It’s very difficult to put lead generation numbers on social media at this point. We get lots of leads from social media but it’s hard to determine whether that came from a specific Facebook post or because we advertised somewhere else and they happened to see us on Facebook. The answer is, probably a little of both.

My final comment is that there are very few companies that have anyone on staff who is capable of all that in the way that any agency would be. I advocate that you pay someone to manage your social media so you can hold someone accountable for the work that’s done. Typically, when you’re doing your own social media, it’s cheaper but not as effective and you end up losing the brand acquisition. So, be sure to engage, be on all the platforms, have a digital strategy, organize that around content that is community oriented, create calls to action, and consider paying someone to manage your social media.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

In the June 2019 Snapshot Survey, we asked contractors how they resolve issues with unhappy customers. Here’s one survey question and its results from the summary report, which is now available in its entirety to EGIA members.

Question: What is your most commonly received customer complaint?

Even though we do our best to provide great service, there will be times customers are not fully satisfied. 38% of contractors who took our survey reported that service complaints are the most commonly received customer complaints, followed by scheduling issues at 24%. One notable response within the “Other” category (19%) was complaints based on pricing of goods and services. Sales expert, Weldon Long, suggests communicating the value of your goods and services to customers to justify the price. For more information on how to overcome the price objection, watch this clip from Cracking the Code.

Here’s just a piece of what Weldon has to say in the clip:

“People fundamentally know that it doesn’t make sense to buy the cheapest of anything. If we have an honest conversation about price early on, we can reduce the chances of price becoming a deal breaker.”

Login to access the full research report on Resolving Issues with Unhappy Customers.

For a deep dive into customer service and related topics, access training materials, recommendations and education pieces in the Contracting Best Practices Library, available in your EGIA Member Dashboard.

Success is the result of a positive mindset and when you choose to be successful, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.

In part five of a continuing summer series, our team of contracting experts focus on CSR, technician, and sales training to help you set and accomplish meaningful goals.

Plus, Gary Elekes talks about the importance of offering whole-home services to your homeowners, and Weldon Long teaches you how to overcome the closing conflict.

All that and more, on this week’s episode ofCracking the Code!