Marketing Your Service Business for Spring
Do you offer home services? Automotive Services? Business maintenance services?
A great time to market is the change of the season from winter to spring when the warmer weather is just ahead.
Speaking of weather: Weather influences nearly every consumer purchasing decision. Understanding the relationship of weather on consumers can have such a great benefit for businesses who sell services. In fact, weather data can be leveraged to market products at exactly the most profitable time, and in a way that will maximize impact. What we eat, our choice of apparel, the type of car we drive and what home we buy, can all essentially be determined by studying fluctuations in the weather.
With the spring season in mind, here are a few marketing tips for starting your warmer weather advertising on the right foot.
Take advantage of competitors’ lack of planning.
At the beginning of the year, the sooner you can start your marketing, the better – You’ve got to get in front of your customers before your competition does! Good news for you: Advertising traffic slows down during the winter months because many service industry business owners don’t have a set marketing plan. That means there is less competition for advertising space!
If you’re running pay-per-click (PPC) or paid social media campaigns, your costs-per-click (CPC) will typically be less and your impression/share trends higher. That equates to more visibility for less money!
Create a relevant sense of urgency.
Advertising with a sense of urgency is important, especially for your service business. You should be marketing time-sensitive services based on seasonality.
Some examples:
– If you’re in the HVAC or Automotive industry, you should be sending coupons and specials for spring maintenance and tune-ups.
– Home Cleaning Services: Spring Deep-Cleaning
– Business Maintenance: Roof and grounds inspections and maintenance
– Lawn & Garden Care or Pest Control: Spring clean-up, planting, fertilizing, and beautification. Termite prevention, wasp, ant, grasshopper, gopher, roach etc…
Time is of the essence. Don’t Miss Out!
Ok, Let’s take Lawn Care, for instance: These services will typically have a higher ROI (aeration, fertilization, spring cleanup, etc.), but the time to have them done in the spring is limited– and so are the amount of hours you’ll have in a week.
When running your spring service ads on your direct mail, flyers, postcards, Facebook or even on door hangers, stress a sense of urgency.
For example:
“A thick, healthy lawn begins with SPRING Aeration and Fertilization
15% OFF! – Call now before our schedule fills up!”
There are four simple elements to this ad copy:
The Intent: You’re stating the service and what the ad was for.
Your Offer: You’re providing an appealing incentive with 15% off.
It’s Relatable: The ad copy is related to the customer’s wish for a healthy lawn.
Sense of Urgency: The importance of taking action NOW incentivizes the customer to call sooner than later.
All of the elements are needed for the most effective sales ad, but urgency is the most important. Urgency is what prevents your customer from forgetting about you. “Don’t wait!” “Call now!” “Space is Limited!” Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) helps prevent your competitors from getting to your customers before they call you or take action.
