By David Crary  

Earlier this week, we wrote a blog post with 5 tips for starting a green industry business culled from our recently released Green Industry Benchmark Report. Today, we’re going to look at 5 tips for marketing your green industry business suggested by respondents to that same survey. 

By David Crary  

In our recently released Green Industry Benchmark Report, we found that only 61% of green businesses surveyed use email to market to their prospects and customers. Honestly, we thought that was a little low. Email is a great, inexpensive way to touch multiple people quickly and easily. At HindSite, we use it extensively to interact with customers and prospects. We do everything from sending monthly newsletters to keep our customers aware of what’s happening at HindSite, to sending very targeted emails to leads in specific industries with very specific messages.

By David Crary  

Ready or not, the holidays are here.  You may not be thinking now is the time to focus on your small business, with the hundreds of gifts you still need to purchase for family and friends, but now is the perfect time to look at your small business growth strategies. The holidays provide your small business with the opportunity to not only get out and help your community, but also to help you build your business.  How you ask?  Through participating and volunteering for charities around your community.

Besides the obvious reward of helping out those in need, donating your time to charities also benefits your business.  Your involvement helps you meet new and potential customers, while also getting your name out there to those who may have never found you any other way.  You get to get out of the office and talk with members of your community.  You can find their pain points, offer services, or perhaps even team up in business, all while working for a good cause.  When you sponsor an organization or event, they usually place your company name on their flyers, brochures, etc.  It’s like advertising for a good cause!  How can you not do it?

By David Crary  

Note: This is the third in a series of blog posts with tips aimed at helping field service businesses improve during seasonal slow periods.

The offseason is a great time for you to review your marketing activities, review your marketing strategy, and plan for a successful busy season. 

In my experience, you should examine and define the

Yesterday, we discussed marketing touch points and what they mean to your field service business.  In case you missed the article, you can read it here.  Touch points are key connectors between you and your customers, so it only makes sense that the message behind the touch point be of high value.

Marketing expert, Mike Ratchford, discussed what kind of messages you want to communicate with your customers in the recent HVACChannel.tv program, Marketing Your Touch Points.  You can view the entire program here.  For today’s post, we are going to focus mainly on the message of the touch point.

We touch people every day.  In fact, we touch A LOT of people every day just by being business owners.  Yes, even you!  This isn’t something you can run from, so if you don’t like touching people – tough! 

Yesterday, we talked about how your field service business needs to deliver happiness or run the risk of losing customers to your competition. Today, we'll show you the fun part - how to leverage Twitter to do it.

Over the past week, we have been defining the people surrounding your business.  We discussed clients, customers, and our most recent post discussed prospects.  All of these are within your marketing bulls eye, which you can learn more about here.  We have finally reached the outer ring of the bulls eye, the suspects.

Suspects can be a difficult term to try to pair with the field service industry, and if you are like me, you probably never even heard of anyone described as a suspect outside of crime shows.  But I decided to listen to Mike Ratchford, marketing expert, when he explained what suspects were and how they related to marketing in the field service industry.  He actually made the term work and he made it make sense!  You can view Ratchford’s entire discussion of marketing and suspects here, but for this post, we will strictly be discussing what suspects are and how they relate to your marketing tactics.

Prospect, lead, consumer, user, the list goes on and on for what the field service industry calls potential clients.  No matter what you title them, they are still out there and if you aren’t already, you should be working towards getting their business.  For the purpose of keeping things consistent, we decided to use Mike Ratchford’s definition and terminology of prospects.  Ratchford is a marketing expert and you can watch his entire discussion on prospects on HVACChannel.tv’s “Marketing Your Services Correctly.”

What is the difference between clients and customers?  Honestly, it’s in the eye of the beholder, but we have found it actually helps to separate the two for your business’s sake.  You can choose different titles to classify these people who interact with your field service business, but Mike Ratchford, the marketing expert, uses clients and customers, and so will we.  Ratchford explains in detail how customers differ from clients in HVACChannel’s Marketing Your Services Correctly program, which you can watch here.