Field Service Marketing: 6 Tips for Small Businesses

In the service industry, a big focus is growing your business.

You might be a business owner, manager or employee that wants to expand. That might be by growing your customer list or taking jobs further away from your main office. With so many options out there, from advertising to word of mouth, it can be difficult to know where to start.

Marketing is a big part of any business. There are so many outlets and media forms nowadays, so there are bound to be avenues to explore that suit your business set-up. Whether you’re a team of one or one of many, marketing can help spread your business’ message to more people.

If you’re new to running a business or want to get stuck into marketing for your company, we’ve compiled a few starting points for you to consider. Here’s what we’ll be going through in this post:

What is digital marketing?
Why is marketing important to your business?
Top tips to get started with field service marketing
Marketing terms for beginners

What is Digital Marketing?

Marketing refers to different forms of media that promote your business and educate new and existing customers about your services.

According to Forbes’ definition, digital marketing, also known as online marketing or internet marketing, involves communicating messages through digital channels accessed via electronic devices such as phones, computers, and tablets.

Marketing is all around us. It’s in the emails you receive from your favourite brands, the social posts from the company profiles you follow online and it’s there every time you search for something on Google.

Marketing has grown exponentially over the years, with traditional methods such as TV ads, billboards and print ads taking a backseat to more modern alternatives (although it is still a good route for some industries).

Nowadays, digital marketing is much more prominent and widely used as it gets your business in front of a wider and more selective audience. With digital marketing strategies, you can promote your services to new prospective clients and bring in more sales.

Why is Marketing Important to Your Business?

Marketing is vital to grow your business and get new clients.

That said, not every marketing technique is going to be suitable for your business. When it comes down to deciding where to start, it’s important to understand where your target market spends time when they search online.

When marketing in the right place for your specific audience, you are more likely to attract qualified leads and new customers.

Top Tips to Get Started With Field Service Marketing

Field service marketing entails companies promoting their products or services by directly interacting with customers within a specific geographic region. The primary objective is to enhance brand visibility and advertise products or services through in-person engagements and demonstrations. Technology, data analytics and knowledge of digital marketing play significant roles in enhancing the effectiveness of field service marketing.

If you’re a newer business wanting to hit the ground running, or if you want to boost your presence online, we’ve got a few tips for you to get your head around some basic digital marketing tactics. We’ll go through some basic marketing strategies for service companies to get started with.

These steps work for almost any business, so whatever trade industry you work in, you’ll be able to find some new ideas for your next step. Whether you’re looking for marketing for electricians, plumbing marketing, refrigeration marketing tips or anything in between, these tips will help your road to effective marketing for your business.

1. Create a digital home for your business

These days, a website is a key element to getting started with an online presence. Without it, potential clients won’t be able to find you easily and returning customers might look elsewhere.

Your website provides one central location to show off your previous work, outline your full list of services and provide contact details so prospective clients can get in touch. It’s the best place for you to take control of the information about your business and show off your business branding.

It doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg to build a website. And by ‘build a website’ we don’t actually mean you have to construct it all yourself. Thankfully there are so many website-building options out that to cater for every budget and business size. These will have specific tools for you to easily build web pages, add imagery and customise your business branding.

Website builders and CMS (content management systems) tools can give you everything you need to create website pages, add imagery and host your site without having to be an expert at coding. Examples include WordPress, Squarespace and Wix, but make sure to do your research to find the best website builder solution for you.

There are different price options out there for CMS tools, but you can easily find a free version to get you started. If you then decide to put more budget here, you’ll be able to customise your website even more, with a custom URL, more template options and more design choices to explore. All of this can help your visibility on the internet and brand recognition.

An important aspect of your website is to make sure it is mobile-friendly. With a website builder, a lot of this is taken care of for you, so you don’t need to be a pro web developer to create a functioning site.

2. Get social

There are many ways to connect with your customers in this digital age. The most prominent one is social media.

With so many different social channels out there, it can be a difficult landscape to navigate if you’re new to tweeting, sharing and tagging. If you’re starting from the bottom, your ROI (return on investment) might be slow to start with, but once you’ve established a decent following, it will be well worth it. You’ll be able to share updates, introduce new services and interact with your clients and prospects.

First, it’s important to work out which platforms you want to use. With so many new social networks becoming popular, you might feel like you need to be using all of them for your business. But if you’re just starting out online, it’s worth dedicating your time to the right places first, before expanding to other sites.

Make sure to research your industry and find out where your potential clients are spending their time online. Then you know where your business also needs to be and what kind of content is best. Whether that’s Instagram to post images of your latest wiring work or X (previously Twitter) to share polls and chat with other individuals in your industry. TikTok is increasingly used as a search engine, especially by younger generations, so it’s definitely not one to overlook.

On social, you then have new avenues to explore to bring in new leads. You could run giveaways or competitions and host live events to get in front of new people. There is also the opportunity for running digital ad campaigns (we go into more detail about this below).

Social media now serves as a valuable asset for attaining success in field service marketing. Utilising social media platforms to disseminate customer reviews and testimonials allows your business to establish credibility and trust among your audience. Furthermore, this practice encourages word-of-mouth marketing as satisfied customers share their positive experiences online.

3. Communicate with your clients

Communication is key for any successful business. It’s important to keep clients in the loop with service announcements or news. There are a few different ways that you can produce a consistent stream of communication with clients, and it all revolves around email marketing.

What is email marketing? Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that engages your audience with your business. It is typically used to send communications to people that interact with your business. This promotes your business services and builds a relationship with your audience.

There are so many forms of email marketing that you can use to your advantage in your field service business. Here are a few prominent ones to consider:

Confirmation emails
Newsletters
Lead nurturing emails
Service update emails
Offer emails

If you want to send out more general news and updates on your business, you might want to set up a newsletter subscription. This involves providing the option for website visitors to sign up and provide their email addresses in return for regular emails from your business. When creating sign-up and lead gen forms on your site, make sure to consider data protection laws, such as GDPR.

4. Request and respond to reviews

When looking for a product or service, you would want to know what other people think about it before making the purchase. That goes for anything from a new toaster or washing machine to socks and – importantly for you – the services that you provide. It’s a great way to build trust and give social proof to potential new clients who are looking at choosing between you and your competitors.

There are so many platforms online that gather reviews from real customers so your prospects can see just how great you are. A lot of these are free, so you just need to be aware of where your business is being talked about and respond to every bit of feedback you get.

A great place to start will be Google. It’s the most used search engine and will be the first place people will turn to once they’ve heard your business. Google Business is a free listing for your company to display important information such as opening times and location, as well as a place to gather and respond to reviews. It’s a great way to increase your visibility across Google Search and Google Maps and will help you get discovered.

Once you’ve established your chosen review sites, encourage happy customers to leave their feedback and increase your presence across these sites. Other places like Trustpilot or TrustATrader are also good places to explore and sign up. These review sites might have different plans for businesses, so be sure to find what’s right for your business and your budget.

Make sure to respond to any review you receive too. With Google Business, you will be notified any time someone leaves a review, so you can follow up appropriately. It’s important to acknowledge any feedback you receive – whether it’s good or bad – so you can improve your services in the future and let other people know that you care about providing the best possible service. Remember that the online space is incredibly public, so tread carefully when responding to reviews and be sure to always be respectful of other people’s views.

That said, word of mouth is still a powerful tool for bringing in new business. It’s the offline equivalent of user reviews. Happy customers mean more exposure for your business if they recommend you to a friend, colleague or family member.

5. Reach the right people

When you work in particular areas in the country, it’s vital to get your business in front of the right people. As great as it is to get as many people as possible to look at your website or social posts, if they’re not the right demographic for your services, they are unlikely to convert to customers.

If you’ve got some budget to put into your marketing efforts, it’s worth looking into running ads. Ads are images, text or videos that promote your business across different sites and search engines to drive traffic to your site and encourage viewers to take a specific action. When someone performs this action, it’s called a conversion.

Adverts can be run across a number of different platforms on the internet. Nowadays, it’s more than just TV ad spots, billboards and magazine spreads. Social media can be a great place to start. Once you’ve established your chosen networks and you know where your audience spends their time, you can boost your posts and run ad campaigns.

6. Measure your results

It’s all well and good taking on these new initiatives, but you won’t know if your time is well spent unless you take the time to analyse and measure your results. The way you do this depends on your goals for your marketing.

If you’re looking to increase the number of enquiries from prospective clients, a good place to start is to track metrics such as form submissions or clicks on a ‘contact us’ call-to-action (CTA). Seeing how many people fill out a form on your website could then indicate whether it’s successful or if changes need to be made to optimise it further.

There are so many free tools available to analyse your website performance and report on key metrics such as page views, impressions and much more. You can use Google Analytics to set up goals to help you track conversions. Google Search Console is a tool that tracks your site’s visibility and performance on search results.

Marketing Terms for Beginners

New to marketing or just starting up your business? Not sure what all the terminology means? Here are some important words to take note of when approaching marketing for your new business:

Impressions – A statistic that records the number of times your website, post or page is shown.

Keywords – Keywords are words and phrases that are associated with your content and services that help Google put your content in front of people searching for similar words.

Clicks – A statistic that counts the number of times your post or page is clicked on. This is prominent when running ads and linking your website to social posts.

Bounce rate – The percentage of sessions on a webpage that leave without interacting or only viewing one page.

Call-to-Action (CTA) – In marketing, a CTA – or ‘call-to-action’ – refers to an enticing link that calls your viewers to perform an action. This is typically a link to another web page or form that then encourages people to become leads for your business. There are many forms a CTA can take, including buttons, text links, images and more.

Search engineer optimisation (SEO) – Search engine optimisation refers to the methods used to improve your website’s search engine ranking. We all strive to get at the top of Google when someone searches for your services, various SEO techniques can help you stand out in the SERPs.

SERP – SERP stands for ‘search engine results page’ and refers to the results page that appears after searching on a search engine such as Google. SERPs can vary for each user depending on a range of factors such as location.

This is not an extensive list of common terms in marketing but can be a good start to learning more about how it all works. Check out the other links at the bottom of this blog to find out more.