Battle Plan for Social Media Marketing

With more than 1 billion users on Facebook alone, it is important for cleaning and restoration firms to have a social media presence. Other social media platforms that could be useful to restoration firms are LinkedIn, for credibility and business networking; Google+, for more searchable content to boost search engine optimization (SEO); YouTube, for engaging videos and tutorials; Twitter, for responding to customers directly in a way that traditional forms of communication don’t allow; and Instagram, for sharing visuals and helping viewers feel like part of the restoration team. Social media can be useful for such things as brand exposure, marketing and lead generation, but it is important for firms to have a plan to grow their business through this medium.

According to Raven Faudel, project coordinator at PHC Restoration, “Using social media to generate leads and using it for general marketing are one in the same. Especially for the restoration industry, the need for our services could occur at any moment; every person reached with social media is a potential customer.” John Sturdivant, founder of Vant Marketing, adds, “Social media can be extremely effective for illustrating brand awareness, company culture and recruiting. These initiatives and the associated stats can be compared to print.”

How to Start Marketing and Generating Leads on Social Media

The best place to start, according to Sturdivant, is with a “well-rounded marketing plan that targets your key referral sources. From there, you should utilize some digital efforts to position your brand in front of them at the time of need (search engine, social media, etc.).” He notes that “only once you have a consistent and valuable cadence of content will you begin seeing measurable results from paid and organic social media.”

He offers five tips for restoration firms looking to create a social media marketing and lead generation strategy:

1. Define the culture of your brand and how you would like to voice that on social media.
2. Clearly list the “try to use” and “must avoid” messaging ahead of time (i.e., our team vs. staff member, competitive pricing vs. low cost).
3. Plan a calendar at least a month in advance to ensure a balance of content on your channel.
4. Try to limit promotional post frequency to less than 30 percent of total content.
5. Monitor results and repeat what works with your unique audience.

As for what constitutes a successful social media campaign, Faudel notes that they “are ongoing. We must consistently build our campaign, starting with a mission statement. Share what it is you want to accomplish, and continue building on that each and every day. The more people your message reaches, the more successful your campaign will be.”

Sturdivant adds that each campaign needs a unique set of key performance indicators that determine its value. “Branding/awareness should have a cost effective CPM (cost per thousand people) to hit a target audience. Lead generation campaigns should be able to connect the dots beyond the call all the way to revenue. Balancing top-of-mind awareness and hard calls to action has been a learned process over many years in marketing and the restoration profession,” he says. “These efforts have enabled us to maintain a consistent marketing budget (or even reduce over time) and yield a higher number of customers at a higher lifetime value.”

Social Media Dos and Don’ts

Faudel stresses the importance of using social media to share information with the community. “Restoration professionals are often not thought of until a loss occurs, but we can change that by sharing useful information through newsletters, blogs, helpful tips and events. For example, we are currently planning a restoration-themed escape room to be held at our facility in our training flood house. This will bring community members to our warehouse for a fun event where they can learn about what we do, socialize and have a good time,” she says. “If you can share a lasting impact on your community, they will likely remember you when needed for a service you provide.”

However, she recommends not waiting too long between posts, leaving messages with no reply or response, or posting the same thing back-to-back. “Keep your posts varied and consistent,” she says.

Meanwhile, Sturdivant cautions against overselling a product or service. “Although people should be aware of what you offer, it shouldn’t be consistently pushed for them to be so turned off by why they followed you in the first place,” he warns.

Social Media Offers Real Results

Utah Disaster Kleenup (UDK) hired Sturdivant’s firm, Vant Marketing, to handle its social media activities. Prior to Vant, the firm worked with a large SEO marketing and web firm that Keri Jones, director of sales and marketing at UDK, says “was not paying close attention to our keywords.” She notes, “What we found were our blogs and Facebook posts were very generic cookie-cutter posts. Also, we were being slaughtered by shifty competitors that were optimizing our names for their sites.”

However, the campaign Vant created for UDK has “given us that local feel to our Facebook messages and social media posts,” says Jones. “They have helped us get a handle on combatting shifty competitors by running a series of campaigns that highlight the UDK key differentiators in a head-on/apples-to-apples comparison. This is called competitive tackling and something we are excited about having.”

Moreover, the campaign has generated tangible results, with Jones pointing out that UDK’s organic search traffic has risen more than 82 percent in the last year, and reach and engagement have steadily climbed as well. She adds that calludk.com currently ranks for 256 keywords in dominant position, up from 141 in January 2017. Furthermore, UDK’s Idaho operation has seen search traffic jump 500 percent since last year, and iddk.com now ranks for 75 keywords in dominant position, up from less than 10 a year ago.

Meanwhile, Faudel says it is difficult to say exactly how long or how many posts it takes to generate leads, and it is difficult to say how many leads are generated through social media. “Social media is so deeply integrated into daily life that neither customers nor businesses know how far their influence reaches,” she says. “When asked how they found you, a customer may say ‘Google,’ but social media is really what drew the customer to you specifically.”

Faudel adds, “Social media is like a catalyst for all of your business efforts, an opportunity that should not be overlooked despite the difficulty to measure.” In fact, she notes that “a single post could be exactly what a home or business owner needs, at just the right moment they need us.”