Summer Marketing Tactics: How to Build a Multi-Channel Peak Season Flywheel | Podcast Ep. 95

I think any good marketing campaign needs to be running for several weeks to months to be actually be effective because you have to get out and market. There are times where you can feel like you're being very reactive, and I would caution you not to be as reactive as you think you need to be. Trust the process, trust your campaign. Don't be changing creative every week because you don't think it's driving results.

Welcome to Mastering ServiceTitan, where you get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Lew, and today I'm joined by Paul Balesis, the Growth Marketing Manager here at ServiceTitan, and we are talking about marketing strategy for the summertime. So Paul, welcome back to the show.

Hey Josh, how you doing? Thanks for having me.

This is your third appearance, uh, on the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast, and we are talking about such a timely topic. We're talking about marketing specifically for the summer. So I know you've got a lot prepped for this and you've been at multiple Toolbox Lives giving presentations on this topic, so Why don't you, um, walk me through how you strategize your marketing for the summer?

So marketing in the summer, this is busy season and this is where it can make or break your company's financials for the whole year. And when it comes to the marketing strategy, you want to be very thoughtful about how you're spending your money because you want to make sure you're hitting the right customers and you want to make sure you're driving a lot of the right types of jobs that make you revenue, all while just being financially cautious because you don't want to be overspending because that demand is relatively there. So what I would say is leading into peak season, which we're in, and going through peak season is really good to drive some awareness in market. And this can look a little bit different for any type of contractor in the market. If you're a larger contractor, you might be doing larger ad buys such as broadcast television, billboards, or maybe some other like large radio stations, sponsorships at baseball stadiums, maybe some different things. If you're a little bit of a smaller contractor, you might be looking at just some different channels or like a scaled-down ad buy. Maybe it's a couple digital billboards in your market or static billboards. Maybe it's a smaller buy on television. But the main goal here is, no matter your business's size, is getting your brand name out there so that when something happens with the customer, they remember, they seen, they heard about you, and they pick up the phone and they call you or they book online. So that's the main name of the game in terms of brand awareness. Now what I think we want to talk about a little bit more is how we start getting more into those hyper-targeted markets because you have all these customers that know about your brand, but we want to make sure that we're targeting the right customer to drive the highest value jobs.

At one of the Toolbox Lives you mentioned, and I thank you so much for sharing your, your deck with us before we started talking, but there was this great slide where it shows like your active target market and have it, example of Denver and it's huge. It's like, it's a giant target market. So how do you go from looking at this huge area that you service to where specifically in that city do you start to target folks?

Yeah, that's a good question. And really this can apply to any target market no matter where you are in the States. So I'm in Denver, Colorado. We have millions of people that live here. Obviously not every single person that lives in this market is the right customer for you. They may live in a high-rise, they may be a renter, they may be of lower income, so they might not necessarily be the right customer. So you want to make sure you're focusing your more hyper-targeted marketing efforts at those customers that are the right ones with the higher value jobs. So there's a couple ways you can do this. One way to make sure that you're doing this is using tags within ServiceTitan. So let's say one of your technicians goes out to a job, it's at an older home, and they basically just had an AC system that broke down. AC system is 15 years old. It's really important for your technician to tag that in the service Titan so that way you know that that system was older. Likely case scenario, if your technician is doing a really good job, that system turned into a $15,000, $20,000, $25,000 system replacement, which is a huge ticket size for you. So that being said, as a marketer or an owner, you need to be working with your agency or you need to be working within MarketingPro to take those tags and start activating campaigns within those neighborhoods. So some of the ways I would recommend doing that, one thing, make sure your content is extremely personalized. One of the things that we tested is having more generic content in market. The other thing I tested was making sure that we got down to the town level. So let's say the town here, there's a really affluent one called Cherry Creek. In all of our advertisements, we would put offer for Cherry Creek residents. And one of the things we would do is make sure that offer is very attractive. It wasn't like buy a new system. It was more, here's a $79 clean and check, or here's a $50 safety inspection, or we'll come and check your water heater out for $75. So you can turn that $100 service call into multi-thousand dollar system replacement.

So we talked about using the tags within ServiceTitan to start to target these replacement opportunities and neighborhoods similar or close to that. What are some other sources of data or ways that people can start to zero in on specific zip codes or neighborhoods?

So there's always the US Census data, which is updated every few years. So you're able to see household income, the amount of people that are renters versus homeowners there, and a lot of that type of data, as well as home age. You can always find online as well. But in the age of AI, I'm not sure I would take that route of like trying to go down rabbit holes of government information. Maybe just ask your AI assistant of what's like— if you have that good neighborhood that you think is going to be a good opportunity for you to market to, throw that in AI and understand the demographics in that neighborhood so that way you can get rock-solid information quickly. I think that would probably be the best option for you.

And then I know ServiceSign has a lot of data as well. You know, one source you mentioned is the tags, like maybe people are tracking equipment age across different things. Is there any other like data sources within ServiceSign that people should be paying attention to?

If you have a good amount of customers in a certain zip code, I think without having too much market penetration, that zip code obviously all of a sudden becomes attractive because you're constantly rolling vans into that neighborhood. So I think it's just important to know how many customers you have in any given area. I would say also if customers are using you for more than one service in that area as well, that can also be attractive. So let's say— and you can also find this information online as well. There's a neighborhood that has a lot more water softeners. That means historically that has very hard water and there's a good chance that the other homeowners are going to need water softeners as well. So makes sense for you to target some water softeners in that area generally.

So yeah, we've got the US Census data, we have service time data, and then we have AI as well to help triangulate, I guess, some of these opportunities. Or areas. Once you have those neighborhoods or zip codes locked in and you know you want to target those, how do you think about the different channels that you want to use to market to those folks?

So no matter what, you want to put yourself in your customer's shoes. So by understanding a lot of those demographics and that data, you can start understanding who that customer and that picture of that customer is a little bit, where they might be, where you might be able to reach them. Historically, what I've seen work is digital channels allow you to get extremely refined.

So let's talk about a couple of digital channels that you consider doing.

You have your streaming radios, which I'm not sure if a lot of people have tried or not, but we've had great success with streaming radio. You can do Pandora and Spotify. It's extremely easy to set up an ad. You do not need to go to a big agency and have them create an ad for you. Both of these streaming radio services allow you to create an ad using AI within their platform. So what you're able to do is type out a script. You can pick the voice and tone of that voice that you want. It has background music and then it automatically creates that MP3 ad for you. You can export that and you can use it on Pandora. You can use it on Spotify, so you can use it cross-platform. In addition though, it has the same size display ads, and that's what the user will actually see on the ad as your display ads that you're using on Google. I believe it's 300 by 300, so you can actually repurpose that ad on Spotify or Pandora. That also said, if you do have any TV commercials that you're running specifically, you can also use those as well within those channels. So it's about creating more and more layers here. As you can see, another channel that you can use is Meta. Meta is great because it's both Facebook and Instagram. And what are people doing many times at night at 9 o'clock? They're likely scrolling Facebook or Instagram. So you have the ability within these channels, if you're doing it yourself, you know, you can target down to a 1-mile radius. You can also target by home age. You can target by household income. You can target if they're renters or homeowners. So those are the targeting criteria that you want. You drop a pin on this neighborhood, 1-mile radius, and you have that ad set with those targeting criteria. You're going to be hitting them on both Facebook as well as Meta. Another one you can consider is obviously Google, the big one. You want to be making sure that you're ranking for SEO, HVAC repair or AC repair near me or near that neighborhood location. So make sure you're ranking for those key terms. In addition, with Google, you have the display ads. And remember when I said earlier that you want the ads to be very localized and specific, this is a great opportunity. So we used the Cherry Creek example earlier. So you can have that offer with Cherry Creek in it on the Google display ad. And that ad can get down to a very, very similar to Meta where it's a very small subset geographic location. So you can do that with Google display ads. You can also do that with retargeting ads. So anybody that gets to your website, they'll start seeing that same ad over and over again. And then you can also do that on YouTube.

Now, we're going to keep on going here.

Another one you can do is the Weather Channel. And this is a really good one to invest in. You usually do this through Google Display Network. So you would just want to put that in the type of the URL you need to be targeting. And Google will be able to start showing that ad on there.

You can also buy advertisements directly through the Weather Channel. So what do most people do in the morning when they wake up? They want to figure out what they have to wear that day. They want to figure out how hot or how cold or if it's going to rain. So the Weather Channel is a really great opportunity to get in front of those customers, especially on your hotter days.

So you have those digital channels. In addition to digital channels, you also have some of your traditional channels.

Don't forget to have yard signs in the yard when your technicians are leaving the job. We used to do Spiffs for that. The technician put a yard sign in and took a photo, they get a $25 Spiff. Or you can even incentivize the customer. Customer puts it in their yard, maybe takes a photo and sends it to you. And/or maybe post it on social media, they get some money back too. So those customers in that neighborhood are going to start driving by and they're going to see that customer proudly served by X, Y, and Z heating and cooling company or plumbing company, and their neighbors are going to know that they trusted you with their services.

You can always do door hangers.

I know it sounds a little old school, but it's always an option. You can always walk around the neighborhood, interact with customers or potential customers, and do door hangers. Just be mindful, some Some neighborhoods do have no solicitation laws, so you want to make sure you're not violating any of that. And last but not least, a really good option is direct mail. And you can do this directly within ServiceTitan. You have that neighborhood, you know exactly where you recently did work, and you can send a mailer where in your neighborhood, give them that unique offer. Remember to always make it as personalized as possible to that unique neighborhood because they're just going to resonate with it more. And we're seeing a lot of contractors have a lot of success case with direct mail. So moral of the story, you're driving a ton of awareness in market with your billboards, your television, your radio, but then you're narrowing in on these specific neighborhoods and you're doing multi-channel marketing here. You got Pandora, Spotify, while people are working, listening to music, they're hearing this. You have your Google Display ads, your YouTube advertisements, your Meta, your Instagrams, and then they're getting that postcard in the mail and they're seeing the door, they're seeing the yard sign. So you see how all these layers and all these layers have the same offer, same look and feel, same messaging about the local neighborhood. And that's starting to resonate with the customer and all those touchpoints are going to drive that job for you.

I'm getting a sense here, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm getting a sense that once you start to hyper-target into a specific zip code or a specific neighborhood, that's where your budget can get stretched way farther because you can hit all these different channels in one neighborhood rather than like getting spread too thin. Is that the right way to think about how to mix up the channels and the budget?

Absolutely. And what we would do is we pick generally the top 5 zip codes in each of our target markets. We had 5 branch locations.

We picked the top 5 zip codes and we'd go after them.

So that's 25 zip codes that you're being very intentional about penetrating. And what we would watch is we would make sure that we were checking the numbers every single day in those zip codes to see, oh, are we actually seeing our return on ad spend? Are we starting to see those jobs come in?. And time and time again, the answer was yes. We were making penetration in those neighborhoods. We were getting jobs that were— we were running the $79 clean and check. We were getting those, but we were also seeing those $15,000, $20,000 system replacements come in those neighborhoods. We were starting to see more memberships in those neighborhoods because we would offer that as part of those replacement plans. So you start seeing how the flywheel works when you get and, and you start doing this hyper-targeted, multi-layer marketing and the results was very successful.

Can you share a little bit of advice on how to come up with that offer? I feel like that offer is so important on which one you decide to do. What offers have you found to be helpful and maybe what data people can look at to decide what offers to, to send?

Yeah, so it depends again what trade you are. If you are in the HVAC industry, we did a $79 clean and check, which basically means our technician went out and inspected the unit. It also matched our dispatch fee at the time. One thing I would challenge a lot of people to do and not think about it this way is sometimes it can be the race to the bottom. And I've seen people do $29 maintenances, $10 maintenances. Your customers know that they're not getting a full-on maintenance for $10 or $20. So I would think about being attractive with your offer and knowing what your competition is doing, but also making sure you're continuing to provide value for your customer. Because if you actually do get that customer, you don't want to have them feel like they got bait and switched either. You want to make sure you're actually providing a good service to them. So we did the $79 clean and check. A lot of times during shoulder season when things became really hard, it's the middle of February or March, we would do a full-on safety inspection for homeowners. That's really important with furnaces or anything that is, has combustion going on within it. But in addition to that, we would also check the water heater a little bit. We check the smoke detectors, we check the electrical panel just to make sure it was safe. So we also experimented with that a little bit. So those were two main offers that we did. Another one that we did was a $99 membership. That one didn't perform as well just because I think it, the customer needed to become a member for a year. And I think that barrier to entry was a little too high for the customer.

So we found what worked best was a $79 clean and check. You could also call it a maintenance if you want, and that, especially with the seasonality, seemed to work out really well.

And how long do you guys typically run these campaigns for and how do you make adjustments like throughout the summer?

I think any good marketing campaign needs to be running for several weeks to months to be actually be effective because you have to get out and market and then your customers have to remember that look and feel. And there are times where you can feel like you're being very reactive and I would caution you not to be as reactive as you think you need to be. Trust the process, trust your campaign. Don't be changing creative every week because you don't think it's driving results. Now, after 2 months, if it's not driving results, you definitely need to be looking at that because there's an issue there. So I would say run these campaigns for at least 3 months. That's what we would do on the seasonal side, just because we felt like that gave us enough traction to have an impact. But then as the seasons changed every 3 months, every 4 months, we would be able to transition with the seasons. So as you go into the fall maintenance season, you might want to switch your look and feel. I want to switch your offer. You might want to switch how much money you're spending, whether it's digital or traditional, and then maybe throttle back down or up as you go into the winter season where it's actually— you're getting that demand for heating calls. You need to have your finger on the pulse of how many leads are coming in, where they're coming from, and how they're also finding you. So make sure you're using ServiceTitan and lead sources through that. You can also use certain calling numbers as well. So all those things are very important. So that gives you more of a holistic view of how your marketing is performing.

And I know last time you came on the show, as you're— we're gearing up for the springtime in preparation for the summer, you talked about some of the more advanced features within like Marketing Pro and Scheduling Pro. Can you talk about what features may be really helpful for people to pay attention to now for like measuring or converting those leads that are coming in?

One of the unique things that you could do in particular with Scheduling Pro for a campaign, as I'm mentioning, is that you can create unique schedulers that you can link to from all your marketing campaigns. So for these campaigns in particular, you know, the customer's coming in usually for this type of offer. Reduce the barrier to entry, collect the information that you need to collect to make sure that you're successful, but make sure you're monitoring that scheduler and seeing where there are any drop-off points so that way you can make sure you're converting that customer. So I would say that's important. With Scheduling Pro, you can also be able to set up if someone abandoned the scheduler, Let's say they started booking the job, but someone came to the door and they had to put down their phone of what they were doing. You can set up Scheduling Pro to send that customer an automated text message so that way they're able to book the job very quickly. In addition, one of the other things that I would think of with customer scheduling is Scheduling Pro is a really cool feature with dynamic dispatch fees. And what you're able to do is for certain job types, certain zip codes, certain rules, you're able to fluctuate that dispatch fee. Think about an Uber or Lyft, supply and demand. You really want that job because you know it's going to be very valuable. Maybe they're not calling in for the offer. They're actually calling in because their system broke. Throw that dispatch fee down to $25. Make sure you get that job versus them having to pay the full $100, $150, whatever it may be, because you're going to get that $15,000 system replacement out of it. So Play around with these types of features. They're very important. So that way you're able to get the, get the most return on investment.

Awesome. Yeah, that's super exciting to hear. Cause I remember last time we talked, I think dynamic dispatch speed was still like early access and maybe same with the text follow-up. So it's cool to hear you come back on the show and those features are out now. So it's cool to see you server-side implementing those features pretty quickly. So yeah, we talked about, um, your market, how to hyper-target into the market, your channel mix, how to manage that, how long to test these campaigns out for, how to come up with a great offer and convert those leads here in the summertime. Anything else people should be paying attention to in the summer? I don't know if there's like extra hot days or like if it slows down a bit, like how people should make adjustments throughout the summer as we, as we like move through peak season.

So one of the things that I think is important to keep in mind during the summer is that, yes, the service call is here now, but you're trying to convert that customer into a lifelong customer. And this goes for any type of customer that you're getting, not just the ones we just talked about with the hyper-targeted campaigns. If someone comes into you as an HVAC customer, you need to be starting to cross-sell them on plumbing and electrical services depending on whatever services you may offer. So that's going to add a ton of value to your business and you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck from that customer in the end. So what I'd recommend is setting up some campaigns that are designed for cross-selling. If it's a new customer, maybe it's a new welcome email. Maybe it's a new welcome mailer with another offer for plumbing or electrical or whatever service they didn't use. Because they're like, they're likely going to need your services. And think about the small things. When your technicians are in the home, make sure they're putting the sticker on the unit. If your competition has a sticker on the unit, maybe put your sticker over top of that sticker just to get in front of the customer. So I think there's like little things, or have your technicians hand out a magnet to the customer so they can put it on the fridge.

And remember you.

There's little things you can be doing to make sure you're driving a lot of long, lifelong customer value. So think about those and invest in those because you're going to get a lot more investment back from them.

Wow, such good advice. If you think back, Paul, like to the, the previous summers at Howler, like, do you miss those times when you think back to it? On one end, like, I've never been there, you know, inside a, a shop, like during the summer. I imagine it's just crazy, but also maybe it flies by quickly and it busy all the time, like, do you, do you miss that time? And yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the trades are always important to me. It's like a family and the family is going through a stressful period of time and it's all hands on deck and it was a lot of fun. I always enjoyed seeing a lot of the guys come into the shop, but they were always so super busy. And I tell you what though, I would rather have busy season than shoulder season. Shoulder season's not so much fun as a, as a marketer. This is when you kind of get to reap the benefits of what you've prepared for all season long. And that's another good point, is always making sure you're preparing. You should right now as a marketer, yes, you should be doing all these strategies. You really should be switching gears into fall season already. You should be planning that. You should plan your creative. You should be planning your channel strategy. You should be at least planning 2 months in advance at a minimum. So I would consider, keep that in the back of your mind. Enjoy the summertime now. It's busy. It's crazy. This is where you make your dough. But think about shoulder season around the corner, the next one, and be starting to gear up for that.

Amazing. I would love to have you back on as we gear up for shoulder season because I imagine a lot changes on the marketing strategy side. And so, yeah, thank you so much for coming back on. We talked about the spring. Now we're here in the summer and then we'll have you back on for the fall for more adjustments in your marketing strategy.

Wonderful. Always a pleasure, Josh. Thank you.