Learn the Secrets of Direct Marketing From A Master Strategist
Who Works With $50 Million+ Businesses
Does your service business marketing strategy include direct marketing?
Learn the secrets of direct marketing straight from the master.
Here’s something you may not know about service business marketing.
It’s actually pretty simple to market a plumbing or HVAC business. Sure, it might not feel that way when you’re struggling to get leads and bring new customers on board.
But with the right strategies, you can create an awesome pipeline of new leads. Plus, you can retain existing customers and get them to repurchase from you.
You just need someone with amazing marketing experience to show you the way.
During a recent episode of the CEO Warrior podcast, we spoke to an absolute expert in the art of service business marketing.
Brian Kaskavalciyan can show you the direct marketing secrets that you need to start using today.
Who Is Brian Kaskavalciyan?
What makes Brian such an awesome resource for service business owners?
For a start, he’s worked with everyone. We’ve spoken before about how you can take the techniques used in other industries and put them to good use in a service business.
Brian’s just the guy to show you how to do that.
He’s a marketing strategist who’s worked across over 20 different industries. From service businesses through to accountants, he’s worked with them all. And he’s helped them sell to both customers and other businesses.
Brian’s range of experience runs the gamut in terms of company size too. He’s just at home working with startups as he is working with $50 million+ businesses. And he understands the challenges facing businesses at each stage of their growth.
His job is to help business owners achieve their wildest dreams. Brian helps people to find the thousands, or even millions, of dollars that they’re missing out on because they’re not marketing well.
He knows what works and how you can use it. And, he points to direct marketing as being crucial for your service business marketing strategy.
Why Is a Great Direct Marketing Strategy Vital to Your Business?
It’s all about staying ahead of your competition.
You’ve got a bunch of people in your location that offer similar services to you. If you’re not marketing well, you’re just another name in the crowd. A customer isn’t going to look at your business and see anything different.
There’s no connection, which makes you disposable.
In fact, it’s this that often causes service business owners to start competing on price. That’s going to hurt your bottom line.
Brian says that direct marketing helps you to stand out from the crowd. You communicate messages that your competitors don’t give to your customers. That helps you to:
- Gain new customers.
- Increase the average transaction value per sale.
- Get your customers to buy more often.
- Increase Lifetime Profit Value per customer.
Direct marketing will help you become an essential partner over the long term for your customers. That means no more competing against the other service businesses in your area.
Your customers fall in love with you and don’t even think about going with somebody else. Plus, you get those all-important second (and third!) sales from these customers.
How do you use direct marketing to make that happen?
Brian was kind enough to share five direct marketing tips for service businesses on our podcast.
Direct Marketing Secret #1 – Use Direct Marketing to Educate
It’s not enough to just throw an offer at a customer. One of the secrets of direct marketing is that it’s an amazing educational tool. You can use it to tell people why the offer’s great, rather than just telling them that the offer exists.
It’s also a great tool for telling customers about services that they may not realize you have.
For example, you may go into a customer’s home to install an air conditioner. If you do the job and leave, that’s basically a transactional relationship. The customer doesn’t think about you again unless something goes wrong.
But you probably offer a maintenance service as well as the installation. They’re not going to know about that if you don’t tell them.
You can use direct marketing to educate the customer about that service. For example, you could run an email campaign targeted at recent installs. Your emails tell them about the maintenance service and why it’ll help them.
You’re staying in touch and gently pushing towards that second sale.
Direct Marketing Secret #2 – Play Prospect
How can you know if your direct marketing efforts hit the mark?
Brian says you need to think about things from your customers’ perspective:
“One of the best things that you can do as a business owner is shopping your own company. Play prospect. Play customer”
Go through the entire customer journey yourself. Get your marketing materials sent to you. You could even roleplay as a customer to see how your people interact with real customers.
The idea here is to get inside the customer’s head. Is there something in the process that annoys you or just doesn’t work?
If you’re thinking that, you can bet your customers do too. Play the prospect to get a different insight into your marketing strategy.
Direct Marketing Secret #3 – Use Multichannel Marketing
Why not just send out an email? Or just make a phone call?
Those are the sorts of questions that service business owners ask when creating their marketing strategies. They think that hitting one touchpoint with a customer is enough.
It’s not. Frequency is the key when it comes to getting people to make that second purchase.
Brian says that multichannel marketing is the way to go:
“You go into the best run and most profitable businesses and they’re going to take a multichannel approach. You can’t just rely on any one thing.”
Multichannel means you multiply your customers. You’re not looking to bombard them with so many messages that they get sick of you. But you do need to use several channels to up the frequency.
Think about it like this.
What if someone gets a ton of emails every day? The one email you send could get lost in the mix. If you’re not trying to reach that customer through other channels, you’ve lost them.
Direct Marketing Secret #4 – Evaluate Every Direct Marketing Method
Having said what we’ve just said about multichannel marketing, it’s also dangerous to go for every channel available.
Some of them might not work for your avatar. For example, an older avatar might not use email or social media. If that’s the case, investing in those channels costs you money with very little return.
You’ve got to evaluate every channel that you use.
If you run an email campaign, dig into the data behind it. Find out how many people opened the emails and track the conversions.
Return on investment is paramount here. If the channel isn’t making money, stop using it.
Of course, you’ve got to test the channels to find that out. Run email, SMS, phone, online ads, and social media messaging campaigns. Keep a close eye on the responses and the raw numbers for each.
You’ll soon see which work and which don’t. You might even get a pleasant surprise from a channel that you’d assumed wouldn’t work.
Direct Marketing Secret #5 – Make Customers Feel Appreciated
A customer’s going to stop caring if you just bombard them with offers all of the time. If you’re all “sell, sell, sell”, they’re going to start hating you.
There’s a fine line to tread between effective direct marketing and spamming the customer.
A little focus on the relationship can help you to tread that line. Brian says it’s a good idea to make customer appreciation a part of your marketing efforts.
“What we’ll do is we send out on <our client’s> behalf a thank you card…we call it our grandma envelope.”
The idea behind that card is to make it look like something that grandma would send you for your birthday. It’s in a stamped and sealed envelope. And when the customer opens it, they get a thank-you note and a little gift card.
They’re getting something in return for interacting with you. That’s going to make them so much more receptive to your marketing messages.
Consistent and Quality Marketing
The key to all of this is to maintain consistency. That goes for both the content of your marketing messages and for how often you contact the customer.
These direct marketing tips for service businesses can help you to do that. Your marketing isn’t just about trying to sell somebody on a service. A great service business marketing strategy educates and builds relationships.
That keeps the customer happy and makes them more willing to listen when you do tell them about a service or an offer.
And of course, you’ve got to use multiple channels and keep evaluating your campaigns. If something isn’t working, cut it and move on.
These are just a few awesome service business marketing secrets. CEO Warrior can show you how to put them into practice and so much more.
