Marketing Your Business for Success.
By Dean Landers
I am amazed at how lackadaisical many appliance service business owners, both large and small, are to their overall marketing strategy. We will spend a lot of time on the development of our core advertising program and virtually ignore the common everyday stuff, such as our service tickets, business cards, stickers, magnets, uniforms, Web site, truck lettering, letterheads, envelopes and … well you get the point. I’m not picking on anyone who spends time thinking about and designing the core piece of their advertising. I think it is very wise to spend a boatload of time analyzing and perfecting your chief marketing tool to maximize its effectiveness. That is where you spend the most money and we should always follow our advertising money closely. It is one of those expenses that can get away from us if we are not very careful.
For most independent service companies their core advertising program tends to be either the dreaded Yellow Pages or some type of a direct-mail program. But the majority focus on the Yellow Pages. I will save the Yellow Pages and Internet discussion for next month. This month I want to talk about the other “stuff.”
Let me quickly add that if you are a big manufacturer or third-party warranty service provider and spend little or nothing in the Yellow Pages or any other marketing tool, and are simply relying on the referrals from those sources and/or your local retailers, this article is going to apply to you as well as to the rest of us.
Marketing your business is one of the most important things you can do to enhance your company’s market share. Makes sense, right? Certainly reputation plays a critical role in your company’s growth and overall success, but to really experience long-term success requires that you attract as many people as you possibly can to use your services. Many years ago I attended a marketing seminar held by William Joseph Lynott, a giant in our industry. Mr Lynott said something I have never forgotten. Everything you do has an effect on your business, either positively or negatively. So time, energy and resources should be devoted to ensuring that virtually all aspects of your business are thought through, defined, carefully implemented, refined, and reviewed regularly. He spoke specifically about logos, truck lettering, slogans and uniforms. Since then I have enlarged that scope and have tried to look at each part of my business as if that was the only point of introduction a potential customer may have with my company.
We are going to start with the one marketing instrument that will be seen by more people than anything else, but first let me outline some basic rules you should follow for your marketing plan. If you don’t have a logo consider getting one. If you don’t want to spend the time and money developing one, don’t insert something on a whim that you found on the Internet one day without waiting a couple of days to make sure you still feel the same way about your great find. Also get several other people’s opinion about the intended effect of the logo. Logo’s matter! A lot!
Slogans carry a message to your potential customer and are worth considering including in your marketing strategy. Slogans do not need to be cute or catchy or witty. They can simply describe some aspect of your business philosophy or service delivery system (such as “We get the job done right” or “Repairs when you need them,” etc.). And don’t get fooled into thinking that more information is better than less info. Sometimes less IS more.
Now let’s think about the one marketing tool that tens or hundreds of thousands and often millions of eyes will see over the course of a year. I have seen a decided shift over the last ten years in the attention servicers are giving to their truck fleet and the message they convey. This is a very good trend! Think about the various fleet designs you have witnessed over the years. Make a list of the things that struck you the most about them. Naturally the color of the vehicle can have the initial impact of setting you apart from everyone else. Remember though that colors need to be carefully chosen because they can often times diminish the effect of the message we want to convey based on the lettering and overall design. I’m sure everyone can remember the flat green Sears trucks from several years ago. In my opinion they were very distinct but very ugly, which wasn’t a bad thing for Sears because they were the dominant player in the appliance industry and the color and the name alone spoke a very loud message to everyone. Now with rapidly shrinking market share and their unknown A&E service entity (who, according to customers I speak with are further hurting Sears’s reputation) they have gone to the same format you and I try to employ … selling our services. The design you select for your service vehicles can be expensive or less so but can still speak a powerful message to potential clients. The new shrink wraps that companies are starting to use are very sharp looking. A high quality design with the wraps or the traditional sticker/paint application can cost $1,500 to $3,000 but worth every penny. Don’t let the initial price tag chase you away from this investment. There are too many impressions and potential opportunities to capture a customer using a well-designed vehicle message! I still see some vehicles that utilize a magnetic door sign that at least lets people know something about what you do and how they can get in touch with you. This is better than some company owners who choose to leave their trucks blank. How dumb is that?! Regardless of the time and money you intend to spend on designing your truck lettering, make sure you at least give people the basic information about your company. Don’t pass on this tremendous opportunity to impress so many eyes! Vehicle signaler should be a very important part of any overall marketing plan.
Most companies have begun issuing uniforms to their staff. This is a vast improvement from the t-shirt clad industry we were a part of just a few short years ago. I don’t mean to insult my brethren because any uniform is better than no uniform. However, since we are entering into people’s homes, some thought should be give as to the professional impact on our customer from the clothes we choose. Oftentimes we select uniforms that make us look like auto mechanics. Now I’m not picking on auto mechanics, but they are subjected to a much greasier environment than we are, plus they seldom leave the confines of the garage. We, however, enter into the homes of our customers. Therefore I think a trendier, neater type of uniform should be selected to clothe your staff. For pants, blue and black tend to present better than grey. Shirts can be a wide variety of colors but should not mimic the auto mechanics colors and design patterns. Shirts with colors always trump those without. Short or long sleeves should be left up to the individual wearing the shirt. Using embroidered logos and names is better looking than patches sewn onto the shirts (this also applies to hats, jackets and any of clothing your company supplies). If people on your staff wear hats, then uniform hats should be designed, selected and issued to everyone. Don’t let a great uniform be ruined by someone wearing a hat representing anyone but your company. Not only does it pose a potential fashion conflict but you miss out on creating a powerful professional image in front of your customers, both current and potential! The only exception to the hat rule is if your local team is in season. It can be a great community builder to support the efforts of your home town or local teams by allowing your staff to wear the hats of these teams. But there should be a beginning and an ending date for these exceptions. I suspect many of you think I am nitpicking, but impressions matter and we need to make every effort to speak professionalism every chance we can. The uniform is a big part of our outward effort to impress our customer. A great source offering a wide variety of uniforms is Wear Guard at www.wearguard.com
The last piece I’ll talk about this month is the invoice we leave with our customer describing the work we performed and showing the amount of money we have collected. It is not only our service ticket or invoice allowing us to track what we’ve done to serve our customer. It is the customer’s receipt, which typically means it is going to be kept and probably looked over at least one more time, maybe more before being filed away. Think about the potential impact this little document can have on your customer. I think the national service companies are making a big mistake in using the hand-held thermal printers to generate the customer’s receipt. It is hard to read and the info typically provided is scant. I totally get the practicality of this type of receipt, but I think there is a huge gap left is doing so. I can see the trend changing toward this venue for the younger generations since they are so used to getting only credit-card-size receipts. However, the up and coming generation are not who constitutes the overwhelming majority of our market, at least not yet. For now and the foreseeable future, I would recommend that you use a large-size service invoice. If you are going to begin using in-vehicle printers, consider doing so using an 8-1/2-in. x 11-in. document. It will give you more space to advertise your services and any promotional specials you may be offering, display your logo, list what you’ve done, and tell about your warranty, in readable size print! The size and design of your ticket is a simple yet clever way to create an advantage for your company in your marketplace. Make sure you are encouraging your technical staff to be as wordy as possible. Customers like to be able to track along with some degree of understanding concerning the repairs to their appliances. A wordy description of their repair helps! Don’t make your invoice too busy or too light on information. Include your logo and slogan on all of your marketing materials. Try to look at this document from the customer’s vantage point. Several good sources to help you design and print your paper products are: NEBS at www.nebs.com or call 1-888-823-6327. Another good company is Miller Image at www.millerimage.com or call 913 432-8837. Ask for Jack.
As I’ve suggested earlier, ask a non-biased person to give you their opinion. Send me a copy and I will enlist the opinion of several others in our industry. At your request we can publish the info or keep it private.
Have fun designing!
