Marketing success in the electrical service business used to come from a double truck ad in the yellow pages, but these days — with all the digital options for getting in front of customers — things are more complicated. How much do you spend on digital advertising? How do you allocate your overall budget? How fast do you want to grow? How much is a click worth? How much is an impression worth? These questions may seem endless, but let’s work our way through some of these terms you might not be familiar with.
An impression is simply your message being put before an audience that more than likely isn’t looking for your product at the given time, but if they see it often enough it will make a memory in a person’s mind. Impressions are most often considered in digital media and are similar to circulation numbers for a newspaper.
Clicks are more desirable than impressions, because a person is actually looking for you or a specific service you perform and has come to your online site to investigate further. But you must bid for these clicks so there is a much higher price associated with them — even though they still don’t guarantee a call.
Calls, on the other hand, are what we covet — and the great equalizer as to what is effective marketing. If you aren’t doing so, start tracking phone numbers to evaluate your marketing efforts. Most yellow pages offer them for free, and any pay-per-click campaign will offer them.
If you do a lot of newspaper advertising, it might be worth hiring a company to help you manage your campaigns and report the results. Divide the number of dollars spent per month in a given campaign by the number of unique phone calls, and you’ve got your cost per call. You can now compare yellow pages to newspapers to direct mail fliers to pay-per-click and determine your best dollar spent.
You can fine-tune your campaigns to get the best bang for the buck, but if you need more calls you can’t necessarily cancel a campaign just because it’s more expensive. Pay-per-click campaigns and yellow pages can top out, where additional budget dollars may not bring in significantly more calls. Thus, you may want to add that more costly newspaper ad or supplement your program with TV or radio spots. TV and radio can be tracked as an overall increase in calls generated by your other marketing efforts, but they are hard to analyze as a standalone focus.
Now let’s get back to our original question: How much marketing can you afford? If you can establish an overall cost per call in your advertising program and you know what your techs do, then you can determine if it’s worthwhile to spend that money in the first place. For example, if the average ticket for your residential service electrician is $965 and your total advertising cost for a new call to the office is $98, that’s money well spent. But if your average ticket is $245 and the spend is $98, maybe you should spend that money to bring in trainers for the electricians or establish a better pricing system. Remember that volume doesn’t add profitability. On the contrary, if you’re losing money on three calls out of six calls a day, plus a marketing budget, this will close your doors all the sooner.
Take care of business first. Price right, train your electricians, and then grow through a solid marketing campaign to get your message heard and continuously track and fine-tune your efforts for best results.
Murdy grew up in the electrical industry and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He has been in the residential electrical service industry for 30 years and has been a business owner for more than 25 years. He independently owns and operates the Mister Sparky electric franchise serving western Long Island, N.Y. He can be reached at [email protected].
