Anchor Ups Marketing Efforts with Billboards

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. — After going through a rebrand, Anchor Pest Control decided to go full force in putting their business and its services on display through the use of billboards and other marketing strategies.

Anchor Pest Control Owner Carmen Reino said his business has pivoted towards the residential market and has upped its marketing to grow that segment.

“We just wanted to get that out there,” he said. “Basically, what we did is strategically picked places all along our service area and got pretty aggressive with the billboards in those areas.”

For the company a key part of the use of billboards was keeping the message as simple as possible.

“We've kind of studied outside the pest control industry what works for other large HVAC companies and different events around the country,” Reino said. “You don't want to put a lot of words on there, so we just put our three main services. We want them just to remember the name.”

James Haidacher, vice president of Anchor Pest, said the company hopes to use the billboards to further create brand recognition.

“I think one of the biggest things that we didn't have previously looking at our marketing strategy is people calling in saying, ‘Oh, I recognize the brand’, or they recognize the logo or the trucks when they're in the neighborhood,” he said. “We had white and blue trucks; they didn't really stand out that much. If you really looked at it quickly, you didn't know what we did.”

By using billboards and other marketing with the new branding, Haidacher hopes the communities in the Anchor Pest service area will remember the company and its services. He said Anchor Pest has received positive feedback on the new logo while out in the field.

“It's eye-catching,” Haidacher said. “They like the logo, and it's actually driving some leads slowly already. So, I'm excited once we get into peak season, what that really looks like.”

Reino said last year Anchor pest did not spend much on marketing. This year, he said they are paying attention to branding.

“So last year, we cut our marketing spend by a lot and we still grew like 25 percent,” Reino said. “This year, we tripled it. People are like, ‘Oh, why would you do that?’ Well, because now we want to grow 50 percent.”

This year Anchor Pest’s strategy is to have billboards on main highways, and local roads, while also including some bus stations to have a line of travel where their brand could be seen. In total the business will have close to 30 billboard and bus station ads in its service area.

“We're usually really aggressive with anything we do; we like to go all in,” Reino said. “What we learned through the years is you have to be able to track it. A lot of people stay away from billboards because it's hard to track [leads]. But I will say this, if you know how many direct searches you had last year and then you put up a billboard campaign, you’re going to see an uptick in direct searches. We already had a lot in the first two months of the year.”

Both Reino and Haidacher are excited to see how the new branding and usage of billboards impacts Anchor Pest’s growth.

“This is going to be a big indicator at the end of the year, on how much market share did we get because of the new branding and being part of the community,” Haidacher said.