Digital Fatigue

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For many consumers, the need for pest control is immediate. They aren’t looking for a service provider until they find an unwanted pest threatening their home. Then, they rush online to find a company to solve their problem.

For this reason, digital advertising — namely paid search and local service ads — always will play a key role in pest control company marketing efforts. The higher up your company places in the online search results, the more likely a consumer will call or click through to your website and buy your service.

Digital advertising still works. “At Triangle, it’s still our number one lead generator. It still produces,” says Donnie Shelton, owner of Triangle Pest Control in Raleigh, N.C., and founder of Coalmarch, a digital marketing company now owned by Workwave.

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But digital advertising is not the cheap, sure bet it was a few years ago. Back then, you were pretty much guaranteed to reach potential customers without shelling out huge amounts of cash. Today, it is far more competitive, expensive and complicated.

Consumers are burnt out. The pandemic forced people to do more things online — work, school, grocery shopping, visiting family — and advertisers followed. In 2021, digital ad spending increased a whopping 35 percent, reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an association of online advertisers.

The constant barrage of solicitations, video meetings, emails and texts left people exhausted at work and home. According to a 2022 survey from hybrid experience company PFL, 63 percent of remote workers said they experienced digital fatigue and nearly 55 percent of employees said they felt overwhelmed by the volume of digital promotions. A 2022 Deloitte study found 24 percent of consumers felt overwhelmed by the devices and subscriptions they needed to manage.

“Even though the world has progressed digitally, the pandemic has increased the interest and impact of direct mail.”
— Chip West, director of category strategy at marketing agency Vericast

To cope, some people installed ad- and content-blocking apps. In the second quarter of 2022, 34 percent of U.S. internet users aged 16 to 64 used tools to block advertising for at least some of their online activities, according to research from GWI, an audience research company.

Industry experts say digital fatigue is less likely to affect online advertising for pest control, compared to e-commerce companies, given people’s urgent need to find a solution to their pest problem.

“I think where it gets concerning is that users have a little less patience than they did before,” says Alanna Young, search engine marketing director at Coalmarch. She says metrics for time spent on websites and pages per session are decreasing as people rely more on reviews and other trustworthiness indicators to make purchase decisions.

“People aren’t going to spend as much time browsing around doing their own research to find a company,” she says.

Digital ads require more $. As competition for online advertising has increased, especially from national pest control companies with big ad budgets, so has the cost of bidding on keywords used in paid Google search and pay-per-click ads.

No surprise, the cost of a digital lead has increased. For Coalmarch clients, leads typically cost $70 to $100 and run closer to $130 in saturated Florida and Arizona markets, says Young.

The introduction of local service ads on Google Maps and the proliferation of paid search ads mean organic search results are getting pushed further and further out of view. “Google has gotten very good at monetizing its platform where almost the majority of the clicks are coming from some sort of paid advertisement,” says Shelton.

Don’t expect your tried-and-true digital ad strategy to continue to perform. “The markets have changed so much,” says Young. In some, what worked five years ago doesn’t work anymore, she says.

HOW IS THE INDUSTRY ADAPTING?

Pest management professionals are meeting these challenges by embracing various strategies.

Building the Brand. Brand advertising helps people remember your company. It can involve radio, TV, digital and billboard advertising, service vehicle graphics and other marketing activities that establish what your company does and exemplifies.

Brand advertising supports lead generation. People actively searching online for a solution to their pest problem may see your paid search ad and click on it because the company is familiar to them.

They also may search specifically for your company name, not generically for pest control in your market, thus avoiding paid search ads altogether (both your ad and your competitors’).

Branding is especially important in competitive markets like Virginia’s Hampton Roads region. That’s why Getem Services spends most of its marketing budget on branding, emphasizing its local, 100-year history of serving customers and being an award-winning Chamber of Commerce member. It also is a big backer of community events and youth sport teams.

“People want to know what you’re about, not just what you say you’re about. They want to see you do what you say,” says Carley Church, who leads marketing and human resources at the company.

Branding is what sets you apart from competitors. “Fundamentally as a business, you cannot play the same game as really large companies. They will pummel you. You have to play a different game and branding is one of the ways that you can do that,” says Shelton, who invested in brand advertising in 2022 for the first time in years.

Branding also can waste a lot of money if you don’t do it right, he cautions.

Even with a small budget, PMPs can do very targeted brand advertising on digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and NextDoor.

Mixing New and Old Ad Tactics. Only doing digital advertising might not be the best approach long term, however.

“Even if you are a smaller company, doing some offline marketing methods in addition to your digital presence can really complement and boost your digital efforts. For bigger companies, it’s a must to diversify and invest in both areas,” says Young.

That’s the philosophy at Adam’s Pest Control in Medina, Minn. “I believe that successful advertising is a mix,” says John Lonsbury, the company’s sales and marketing manager. About 40 percent of his budget is spent on digital advertising, which is “performing exceptionally well.” The rest is spent on things like vehicle graphics, outdoor ads and TV, both broadcast and ad-supported streaming services.

Traditional broadcast TV reaches a wide audience, while streaming TV lets Lonsbury precisely target potential customers — people who attended a home show and live in a certain neighborhood, for example — by running ads in the shows and on the services they stream. “Streaming television is really big, and it’s getting bigger in my budget,” he says.

Truly Nolen added direct mail back into its marketing mix a few years ago. “The cool thing about direct mail is it’s very cost effective and variable printing is probably one of the newer technologies that have changed compared to the direct mail of old,” says Chris Brainard, marketing research analyst at the company.

Instead of mailing postcards to everyone in a ZIP code, variable printing lets you serve as few as 25 homes or thousands of homes with tailored messages and images. Unique QR codes track conversion rates for households, neighborhoods and different calls to action. Software programs make it easy to personalize, track and distribute direct mail pieces quickly so they’re in-hand when seasonal pests are an issue.

Most important, direct mail makes an impression with young homeowners more accustomed to digital solicitations. “It’s kind of nice to get a physical item,” explains Brainard.

In fact, a 2022 survey by Lob, a direct mail automation platform, found 72 percent of consumers read direct mail immediately or the same day they received it and 62 percent acted after reading a direct mail piece, such as by visiting a brand website.

“Even though the world has progressed digitally, the pandemic has increased the interest and impact of direct mail,” says Chip West, director of category strategy at marketing agency Vericast.

A November 2020 survey from Vericast found 49 percent of households with incomes of $100,000-plus were more excited about receiving mail and 44 percent of millennials spent more time reading direct mail promos than before the pandemic.

“The mailbox isn’t as noisy as the email inbox or the social media feed. Direct mail is also a true one-to-one engagement with an individual, which can leave an impression on the recipient that strengthens recall and brand awareness,” says West.

Choosing Channels Wisely. Spending your entire digital ad budget on paid Google search may have worked in the past. Today, it’s wiser to advertise on multiple digital platforms, says Young.

The most popular paid digital ad options remain Google search and local listings, but Facebook, Instagram and in some markets, Microsoft Bing, also deliver results. “Those have the highest search volume while also being the best places to reach [your] target audience or market,” says Young.

That said, Getem Services reduced its digital ad budget and channels during the pandemic without losing leads. It now mainly runs video ads on YouTube, which helps it reach young, new homeowners looking for handyman advice. “We’re all using YouTube to learn how to fix everything,” says Carley Church.

Targeting New Customers. When every ad click costs money, the last thing you want is current customers or people who never will be customers clicking on your digital ads.

As well, you don’t want to target people who would have bought your service anyway, even without seeing your ads. “The key to making advertising pay is getting people to buy your goods (or donate to a political campaign or take a vaccine) who would not otherwise have done so,” writes Sinan Aral, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on the Digital Economy, in a 2021 Harvard Business Review article.

The only way to do this to deeply understand who your customers — and your best customers — are.

“We know the customers we want and that’s who we go after. And those customers may also be worth more so we’re willing to bid more for them and use our resources to make sure we’re getting the customers that we want,” says Lonsbury, Adam’s Pest Control.

To guide this strategy, he relies on the expertise of outside experts who specialize in data analytics and audience segmentation. Companies with smaller ad budgets can do the same. “You can be smart about this and there are people out there who will help you. Trust your experts, and your experts, by the way, are not the guys who are trying to sell you something,” says Lonsbury.

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Creating a Solid Base. Digital advertising won’t be successful without a solid foundation on which to build it.

That starts with your website. “Let’s make sure the website can do everything you need it to do,” says John Jordan, co-founder of Go Local Interactive, a digital marketing agency.

It’s important your website achieves customer interaction goals and collects data to provide a true representation of customer behavior, says Jordan, who shared his insights in a six-part video series on PCTonline.com.

Next, claim ownership of your company listings on online platforms like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp and Facebook. “Local listings are your best way to establish local relevance with the search engines,” says Jordan. Make sure information in the profiles match, as consistency boosts confidence with search algorithms and increases the likelihood your listings will be displayed to customers.

Third, make it easier for Google to read and interpret your website using search engine optimization (SEO). “SEO is probably the most commonly misunderstood part of digital marketing,” says Jordan. In addition, create website content by analyzing web user search queries and answering those questions.

Another way to build trustworthiness with search engines and consumers is through online reviews. Getem Services has about 1,200 customer reviews on Google. “That has really put us at the top of many searches without having to pay ads,” says Church.

Tracking ROI. The biggest mistake PMPs make is not knowing the source of their digital leads, says Shelton, Triangle Pest Control. “You have to invest in the technology to understand what’s driving the numbers. You can (waste) a lot of money in digital, and really any marketing platform, if you don’t understand what’s coming from where,” he says.

© kanoktuch | AdobeStock

Truly Nolen spends about 60 percent of its marketing budget on online search. It tracks return on investment using a system that integrates data analytics, CRM and VoIP phone software. “We can absolutely tell you how many units we’ve sold and the dollars we attribute to that particular campaign,” says Greg Bohne, vice president of sales and marketing for the company. This helps Truly Nolen target ads more effectively and control costs.

Closed-loop marketing like this offers huge promise. “You can take a customer all the way to a click. You can understand, this is what they searched, this is what they clicked and this what they bought. The more insight you have into that, the more money you can direct into the right bucket and pull from the buckets that are not generating anything,” says Shelton.

Jim Stavropoulos, president of Eco-Tech Pest Control in Niles, Ill., grew so frustrated with tracking the ROI of digital ads that he worked with a developer to create his own integrated closed-loop software program, called RouteDashboard, which he is selling to the industry.

Using distinct phone numbers, tracking numbers and website landing pages also can help you attribute leads generated by digital and offline marketing activities.

Being Creative. For John Lonsbury, digital fatigue has a lot to do with creativity. Namely, the lack of it.

“I believe digital fatigue happens when we’re boring. Digital fatigue is when we keep doing the same, rote stuff and throwing it out there the same as everybody else. The way to beat digital fatigue is with good advertising and good branding,” he says.

Lonsbury says companies not only need to provide information, but to motivate, entertain and engage people along the entire customer journey.

Getem Services prides itself on attention-getting marketing. To celebrate its anniversary, the company ran billboards upside down in some markets. “That continues to get a lot of buzz with people calling in and saying, ‘You know your billboard’s upside down?’” says Carley Church.

A post card mailed to key ZIP codes highlighted the firm’s century of service as a local service provider and cautioned recipients: “Urgent: Due to corporate acquisitions, your pest control company may have recently changed!”

The author is a regular contributor to PCT.