[Marketing Tips] Big 12

Let’s face it, marketing probably isn’t your favorite activity, but without it, your business may suffer! From 10 years of helping pest control companies market their services, I’ve compiled some common marketing mistakes as well as how to correct them.

Mistake #1. We don’t need a plan. You decide to take a vacation with your family, pack everything in the car and start driving. You don’t know where you’re going, you just start following the road.

Running a business without a marketing plan is like that — you really don’t know where you’re going, you just go. The results may be disappointing.

The Solution: Set measurable goals and objectives, then create the strategies to meet them. Hire a qualified marketing expert to help create your plan.

Mistake #2. We don’t have a marketing budget. We just spend what we need to. Without a marketing budget, it’s difficult to keep spending in check. And it’s also difficult to know what’s realistic when it comes to marketing expenditures.

The Solution: Develop a marketing budget based on a percentage of your revenue or based on what you spent the year before. To grow, spending seven to 10 percent of your revenue is realistic. Learn the true cost of marketing by considering development, production costs, space and time.

Mistake #3. We know how good we are and try to tell everyone we meet. You know how excellent your service is and this is reflected in your marketing. The problem is that your marketing is all about you — not what you can do for your customers. People don’t care how long you’ve been in business. They care about themselves and what you can do for them.

The Solution: Describe in your marketing why the benefits you provide are important to your audience. Avoid talking about your company and know what makes you unique.

Mistake #4. We want new customers so we focus our marketing on getting them. This doesn’t sound like a mistake, does it? It’s when you allocate the majority of your resources towards getting new customers that it is a mistake.

The Solution: It costs five times as much to obtain a new customer as it does to retain one, so it makes sense to devote a lot of your marketing budget toward up-selling your current customers with other services. Your current customers already know you and have confidence in your work. Launch a keep-in-touch campaign with your customers and send a newsletter, a letter or keep in touch with them in other ways. With quarterly service frequency, it’s not uncommon to have little or no contact with the customer all year.

Mistake #5. We spend most of our marketing dollars in the Yellow Pages. A lot of pest control companies I talk with spend the majority of their marketing dollars in the Yellow Pages, leaving little left over for marketing to current customers. Granted, it is important to have a presence in the Yellow Pages, but some companies are spending more than $100,000 a year in this one marketing medium. This can leave little for other marketing efforts.

The Solution: Like Integrated Pest Management, integrated marketing is best. Divide your marketing budget pie into several slices for various marketing strategies.

Mistake #6. We tried sending out a postcard last year and we didn’t get enough cards returned so direct mail doesn’t work. It’s tempting to create a single-focus marketing effort such as sending out a postcard, but an isolated mailing will not be effective. Many companies declare that "marketing doesn’t work" after a meager attempt.

The Solution: Repetition is the key when it comes to marketing of any kind, but particularly for direct mail. It takes up to seven "touches" with a potential customer before potential customers remember your company name and what you do. These touches can be letters, postcards, Web site visits, television ads…each time they see your firm’s name.

Mistake #7. Most of our customers come to us through referrals. We don’t have to do anything but provide excellent service. Referrals are the lifeblood of the pest control industry but many companies do little intentional referral generation. Rather, firms wait for referrals to come in.

The Solution: Ask for referrals and reward those who refer you by giving them discounts on their next service, a gift certificate to a restaurant, whatever incentive you can think of. If you do nothing else, remember to THANK those who refer you!

Mistake #8. We create our own marketing materials using Microsoft Publisher. Unless your major responsibility is graphic design, you’re probably spending a lot of time creating your own brochures, etc., that could be spent actually working on the business.

The Solution: Hire a professional graphic designer who will use an objective, outside view of your business to create and/or maintain a consistent, professional image. Each element of your marketing should show consistency so that if someone sees your truck, then sees your ad — they’ll know it’s from the same company.

Mistake #9. We think you have to spend money to make money — that’s why we don’t do any PR or other no-cost marketing efforts. A newspaper article carries more credibility than an ad and it’s often the result of a well-crafted press release. The cost of creating a press release is small compared to the potential return.

The Solution: When anything new happens in your company, write a press release and send it to your local press.

Mistake #10. We try to market four times a year. Marketing should happen every day, not just four times a year.

The Solution: View every time your company comes in contact with a customer as a marketing opportunity. That means phone calls, trucks on the street, technicians, mail, e-mail, networking and Web site. Then build these activities into your marketing plan.

Mistake #11. Our main benefit is that we’re the best pest control company in the area. Says who? You? Sorry to say, that’s not good enough. Anyone can claim they are the best for a variety of reasons. The more alike two businesses are, the more important the differences are.

The Solution: Discover how you are different from your competition and emphasize these differences in your marketing.

Mistake #12. We hate advertising because sales don’t increase when we advertise. You probably think that a frantic flurry of marketing activity will result in increased business. It won’t. Marketing and advertising can do three things for your business: 1) They can increase awareness and visibility; 2) They can create an image; 3) They can generate response. Notice the word is response, not sales.

The Solution: Create follow-up protocols to use when leads come in from your marketing.

The author is owner of Compelling Communications, a firm specializing in helping pest control companies attract and keep customers. She can be reached at 800/779-0067 or e-mail at jvankaleren@giemedia.com.