With over 3.96 billion social media users worldwide currently, you wouldn’t want your field service business to miss out on this massive potential market. You must understand how important it is to be visible where your potential customers are hanging out, and the chances are high that some of your customers are on one or more social media platform. (1)
Further to this, statistics show that people spend an average of two hours and 25 minutes daily on various social sites. You want to capitalize on such traffic to showcase your products and services as much as possible. (2)
As such, here are some valuable tips for using social media marketing for your field service business:
- Automate your campaigns
Lifehack’s Paul Dickinson suggests that a good starting point for automation is those little monotonous tasks that eat up a considerable part of your day. This includes running your digital marketing campaign. Take advantage of intelligent software that can make significant efficiencies in this area like Jobber’s field service app for HVAC for example. This specialist business management software allows you to sync your clients with an audience through MailChimp, letting you design and publish social ads through one platform – making you look like a professional marketeer, even if you are just starting out. (3) (4)
- Take photos and videos
Research shows that strong images and interesting videos capture the attention of people more than text. Consider how to use these forms of media strategically so they can deliver the maximum benefit in terms of having a positive impact in engaging your target audience. (5)
One good approach is taking photos and videos of your field technicians or empowering them to post images or videos of themselves at work. This adds a high degree of authenticity and is an excellent way to create a personification of the brand.
Customers always like to see the faces behind the brand and interact with them one-on-one. By sharing real and personal experiences, your audience will feel that much-needed emotional connection that helps to influence their purchase decisions further down the line.
- Engage your followers
The 80/20 golden rule of effective social media marketing should serve as a good standard to help you engage with your audience. It states that about 80% of your social media posts should entertain, educate, and inform your followers, and the remaining 20% promote your business. (6)
If you follow this guideline, you’ll avoid the mistake of overselling, which is a major turn-off for your audience. The public wants to feel that you care for them by helping solve their day-to-day problems rather than taking them as objects to make quick profits.
Additionally, make a point of replying and reacting to some, if not all, of the comments on your posts. That shows that you listen to your customers’ suggestions and feedback. And not only the positive ones, but the negative ones too.
You can also consider posting user-generated content on your social media pages. For instance, if you provide heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) maintenance services to a customer and they post on their social networks the before-and-after images, you can share the same on your pages and tag the original creator. Your audience feels more appreciated this way.
- Track your performance
As you enforce your social media marketing strategy, you can track the performance of your campaigns so that you know what works and what doesn’t work. One excellent plan of attack is to utilize Urchin Tracking Modules (UTM) parameters on the landing pages links on your social media platforms. (7)
This way, you get to know the amount of traffic coming from each of your social sites and, therefore, the conversion rates. If any of the sites seem to underperform, you can decide to tweak your strategy to generate more traffic or abandon it altogether.
You may also want to install social media tracking software to measure metrics, like bounce rate, average session duration, social engagement in terms of comments, likes, shares, and the number of people who clicked on your links, among others. These help you to know whether your marketing strategies for your field service business are worth the effort.
Going Forward
Social media marketing can prove very useful for your field service business if you apply the appropriate strategies and tactics. On this end, there are useful apps that you can use to make your work a little bit easier and devote more time to making money. And if you don’t have the time to effectively build your online presence, you may want to hire a remote social media guru to do the work for you.
Reference
- “Most popular social networks worldwide as of July 2021, ranked by number of active users,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/
- “Daily time spent on social networking by internet users worldwide from 2012 to 2020,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/
- “The Benefits of Automation,” https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/the-benefits-of-automation.html
- “Facebook Automation Tools that Make Managing Your Ads Easier,” https://medium.com/@Hanapin/facebook-automation-tools-that-make-managing-your-ads-easier-5792c17efd82
- “Videos vs. Images: What Should You Be Promoting on Social Media?,” https://www.inc.com/young-entrepreneur-council/videos-vs-images-what-should-you-be-promoting-on-social-media.html
- “The New 80/20 Rule of Social Media Marketing,” https://www.inc.com/tanya-hall/the-new-80/20-rule-of-social-media.html
- “The Basics of Tracking Social Media Performance Using UTM Parameters,” https://ilfusion.medium.com/the-basics-of-tracking-social-media-performance-using-utm-parameters-24440158a3b3
