How and Why You Should Connect Socially with Your Market

In this month's episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, Justin Jacobs is flying solo and talking about how to keep your phone ringing during the upcoming slow season. Key Lessons Learned: Marketing Your Service Business The HVAC world is and always will be driven by weather, and there is nothing we can do about that. When the AC isn't running full blast all day, the chances of failure goes way down. There will always be peaks and valleys in your lead counts, but good marketing makes everything more consistent. There are two ways to keep your lead flow consistent, a strong maintenance agreement plan and strong customer engagement. Your Service Business on Social Media Social media is not just for teenagers. According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of US adults have a Facebook account, and two thirds of those people visit the site at least once per day. In many ways, the adults have taken over Facebook and driven the kids away. Now they're on other social networks like Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Facebook may not like it but it's great for service businesses. In 2018, the average age of Facebook users was 55. Along with being older those users skewed towards medium to high income. Facebook is becoming one of the fastest growing search engines in the world, but what people are searching for is completely different from search engines like Google. People are on Facebook to be entertained and catch up on other people's lives. That doesn't mean that you can't capture someone's attention, you just have to use a different strategy to stand out. Any posts on social media need three things: they have to be engaging, it has to be relevant, and it has to be interactive. Our eyes decide what's worth out time before we ever read a line of copy. Spend time on the design of your post and you will see your interaction increase. You can have the most beautifully designed post but if the person doesn't care about it, it's not going to matter. If you don't have a plan to add value to your audience with your posts, don't bother. People want to hear about things that will benefit them, and if you can do that without being pushy and salesy, people will interact with you. A customer is 82% less likely to drift to a competitor if they feel like they have an ongoing connection with you. Social media gives them that forum and allows them to be heard. Dealing With Negative Feedback You can't please everyone, there will be some people that complain on social media but it's better to know about the problem so you can fix it. When a problem does pop up, interact with that person and try to make it right. When other people see that you handle complaints in a professional manner and in good faith, it can actually work in your favor. 76% of people will give feedback if they are given an easy way to do so and they're asked. Social media makes it easy because people are willing to talk about their experiences. Common Social Media Mistakes Advertising to an empty room. Your follower number is the maximum number of people who will see your posts organically, but if the only people that follow your page are employees and family members it's not very valuable. It takes some work on the front end to build up your follower count but it's worth it. Consistently posting on social media is a challenge for many contractors. It's common to see business pages with only a handle of posts each year and it's not enough to keep that business top of mind with their customers. Most people don't want to hear from their contractor everyday, the best frequency is once per week and only as long as the information is valuable and useful to the homeowner. Be careful where you are sending your audience, when you share a link to another website you are pushing your customers to someone else's business. The best scenario is sharing articles that are on your website. That makes you the expert while also contributing to your search engine rankings. With the right marketing strategy and a little bit of effort you can see a lot of return for your money and time. Putting these little systems in place will smooth over your slow season and make your lead flow a little more consistent and reliable. Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes! Links to Resources Mentioned [email protected] [email protected] https://hudsonink.com/ Phone: 1-800-489-9099