Whether you’re a small company focused on a single trade and residential customers or a growing enterprise offering multiple types of services for commercial and residential properties, the basic goals of marketing are the same. Attract and convert more leads. Engage customers and increase their spend. Track and improve your return on investment (ROI).
» Enterprise companies employ 10 to 100 technicians and often specialize in more than one skilled trade. Some service both homeowners and commercial customers, while others expand residential services to cover several markets.
Ryan Gay watched his father, Frank, grow his home services company from a one-man local handyman operation into a large-scale enterprise serving residential and commercial customers across central Florida.
Gay worked in various positions at Frank Gay Services before landing in his current role as marketing manager for the plumbing, electrical, and HVAC business, which employs over 100 people at three locations. He admits digital marketing has changed a lot in his 15 years of experience.
“I kind of found my niche to be marketing,” Gay says. “I got [Google] AdWords certified in 2006. They have Google Local now, and how they rank web pages is totally different. That’s been interesting to see.”
Gay says company leaders attempted to keep pace with the evolution of technology as they grew, but the different software platforms they tried limited their potential.
“I prided ourselves on being ahead of the curve technology-wise, but then we kind of fell behind,” Gay says.
When the service company split its residential and commercial divisions in 2019, they switched to ServiceTitan field management software and used the platform's Marketing Pro features to build the commercial side. Gay credits the switch to ServiceTitan with increasing revenue.
“Once you have all of these customer experience features in place, it just kind of makes your business run smoother and you don’t miss out on as many opportunities,” he explains.
Increase sales opportunities with Marketing Pro
No matter the size or scope of your company, ServiceTitan Marketing Pro simplifies and amplifies marketing efforts with a comprehensive automation solution built for the trades. Improve your marketing results and grow your revenue with these Marketing Pro features:
Email Marketing: Leverage your customer lead data to send automated, targeted emails with professional templates. Apply data tags to segment audiences and send relevant, timely content that resonates. Track ROI for all marketing campaigns and adjust accordingly.
Direct Mail: Set triggers within the software to automatically send hyper-targeted postcards to certain customers—instead of your entire mailing list. Easily design postcard campaigns using Marketing Pro templates. See exactly how many calls, booked jobs, and revenue each direct mail send generates.
Reputation: Manage and respond to customer reviews from multiple sites all in one place. Find out which technicians receive the most positive reviews, and which sources deliver the highest quality reviews. Business directory information entered in Marketing Pro will automatically update your company’s profile on more than 60 websites, so it’s always accurate and consistent.
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Challenges of enterprise marketing
While blessed with bigger budgets and robust teams of experienced marketers, enterprise companies still face enormous challenges when it comes to implementing successful marketing strategies. Marketing managers must overcome hurdles that don’t exist in the “let’s just see what happens” mentality of smaller service companies, such as:
Consistently meet high expectations and hit stringent KPIs
Gain buy-in from various management levels and marketing team members
Siloed communication and business data spread across departments
Prove exact ROI across multiple channels to justify pricing, all while executing the marketing strategy with an emphasis on efficiency and versatility.
Even seasoned marketing experts acknowledge the perplexities that come with navigating the plethora of internet marketing platforms, figuring out the best ways to invest marketing money, and the tricky variables that go into SEO and pricing marketing campaigns.
"Right now, marketing is pretty difficult," says Megan Bedford, owner of Mugyver Consulting, which works with companies in the trades. "The cost per lead is rising, and there are lots of different ways you have to stay relevant with your customers."
Soar over all of the enterprise marketing hurdles and beat the competition by implementing an all-in-one automated, integrated technology solution built specifically for the skilled trades. To win first place in your respective residential and commercial markets, choose a software service with these enterprise-level features:
Personalized marketing content that leverages customer data
Data tagging to segment and target specific customer audiences
Automated email drip campaigns to nurture leads and existing customers
Integrates with marketing channels and business operations, like job booking and dispatch
Helps manage online presence through customer reviews and local business listings
Leverage customer data to retarget existing customers
For Josh Campbell, founder of Dallas-based Rescue Air Heating and Cooling, marketing to existing customers—who already know, like, and trust your company—delivers the most bang for his marketing bucks.
“I’ve always been a huge fan of previous customer marketing,” Campbell says. “I think it’s the most important piece of marketing you can do. The revenue stream’s higher. They’re easier to close on.”
Rescue Air started using ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro a month before the pandemic began. As the country locked down, the HVAC company geared up its marketing efforts to homeowners using Marketing Pro to reach previous customers through emails and postcards.
The automated marketing pieces touched on timely topics such as indoor air quality and air purifiers. The company also promoted its extended financing program, a free estimate second-opinion service (for those homeowners limiting visitors), and the air scrubbers they began installing with every new HVAC system, which gave their air conditioning and HVAC technicians an added revenue stream during uncertain times.
“From a sales perspective, our salesmen are doing fantastic,” Campbell relayed in a trades webinar about protecting the bottom line during the early months of COVID-19. “So, market anything you can to get you into people’s houses for free estimates, like second opinions. Boom.”
Email open rates skyrocketed as customers stuck at home suddenly had more free time to read relevant, compelling marketing content from a home service company they trust. Helpful to readers, the weekly emails and direct mail also kept Rescue Air in front of regular customers, who were suddenly using their air conditioners around the clock. If the air conditioning unit suddenly died and they required emergency services, Rescue Air was top of mind.
Narrow the sales funnel with segmented audiences
To cut through the cluttered inboxes of residential and commercial customers, Chloe Davis, Chief Marketing Officer at Express Plumbing, Heating & Air in Boise, Idaho, suggests going beyond basic SEO tactics. She's had success mining company data to automate hyper-targeted email marketing campaigns.
Davis, who’s pursuing degrees in marketing and entrepreneurial management, started at her father’s plumbing and HVAC company as a CSR four years ago and fell in love with working there. Now the CMO, Davis says content creation presents the hardest online marketing challenge, because not all customers share things in common.
She uses data tags within ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro to segment the audiences she wants to target with specific messaging, such as customers with plumbing problems or those who may be interested in installing hands-free faucets in the wake of the pandemic.
“Marketing Pro is honestly one of the best funnels that I’ve been able to utilize,” Davis says. “That’s how I look at audience building—it’s a funnel. You can get super, super narrow, but if you get too narrow, you’re not going to be able to cast a wide-enough net. But if you’re too broad, you’re going to have less relevance.”
She explains how crafting a well-planned audience funnel makes content creation easier, because you can then build more relevant campaigns and increase customer engagement. Marketing Pro grades a company’s audience segmentation on the software’s dashboard to guide users and provides templates to help create professional emails that hit their mark.
Davis attributes a “major increase” in open rates and revenue to the HVAC and plumbing company’s automated email nurture campaigns through Marketing Pro. While the industry average open rate ranges between 15% and 20%, Express had a 38.4% open rate for a recent email marketing campaign sent to all customers with unclosed estimates—accounting for nearly $34,000 in attributed revenue and a 31:1 ROI ratio for the company.
“Get the whole team involved for higher open rates,” she says. “Getting techs and CSRs more involved impacts the results. Customers knew what to look out for, and they were excited to follow up on their estimates. With marketing, a lot of times, you’re marketing your company, so you also need a lot of engagement from other teams and the excitement behind that.”
Targeted email marketing campaigns deliver results
Given the rising cost per lead for digital marketing channels like pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, Bedford advises her clients to launch targeted email drip campaigns that automatically nurture leads and existing customers. She advocates for email marketing because it not only costs less per lead but also receives a much higher rate of engagement than social media or other marketing channels.
Targeted emails convert at such a high rate, Bedford estimates a recent customer email campaign she facilitated through Marketing Pro cost just $12 per lead and says that per-lead pricing can dip several dollars lower, depending on the audience and timing.
“I don’t know too many other types of advertising right now you can do in home services that have a cost per lead under 12 bucks,” Bedford says.
All-in-one software integrates marketing with business operations
By choosing an all-in-one automated software solution that integrates various types of marketing with your service company’s customer data and business operations, you’ll drastically reduce the amount of manual work required and increase revenue.
ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro offers plumbers, electricians, and HVAC companies of all sizes a comprehensive suite of connected tools to effectively deploy a multi prong enterprise marketing strategy. In addition to automated email tools, the integrated marketing features include:
Instant job booking through Google Local Services Ads. Customers can schedule service through a company’s Google Local Services Ads displayed at the top of a Google search results page. The booked jobs, based on real-time availability, automatically show on the software’s Call Booking Screen.
Direct Mail targets existing customers with traditional marketing. Not every customer demographic prefers digital messages, and direct mail gives your company’s brand the opportunity to stay top of mind every time a marketing piece lands in their mailbox. Marketing Pro makes it easy to reach a specific subset of existing customers. Postcards are mailed automatically based on hyper-targeted triggers set within the software, such as new installation customers due for maintenance service or first-time customers.
Manage online reviews to engage customers and boost SEO. Marketing Pro's Reputation feature gives contractors the ability to generate, monitor, and respond to customers’ online reviews all in one place. Companies can automate review requests sent to customers via SMS text messages or email. The software also allows contractors to update business listing information and ensure its accuracy across more than 60 websites.
Track true ROI to make informed business decisions. Data analytics tools built into ServiceTitan’s software give companies clear, actionable ROI insights into how each marketing campaign performs. They can track which techs generate the most positive reviews, see who closes the most sales tickets, and where the various teams could improve overall.
On average, Marketing Pro users experience a 12% increase in annual revenue and 15% percent boost in membership renewal rates. Not only does the ServiceTitan software improve an enterprise trade company’s efficiency and bottom line, it also makes it easier to provide a better customer experience through professional, timely, and targeted communication.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
