Contractor Marketing Blog

Before you spend a dime on paid search advertising in 2013 make sure you read this article so you fully understand what you should be receiving from your paid search management company.

Earlier this week Comcast announced that it will be launching a new home energy management service to Xfinity customers.  The new service gives homeowners the ability to remotely control HVAC systems through a web-based software solution.  Comcast customers will be able to log in from any location and access and manage their home temperature through a smart thermostat.  I assume Comcast will be selling the equipment and software service as a monthly subscription – increasing customer retention and monthly recurring revenue.  This service compliments other Comcast offerings like home security, movie streaming and even computer tech support services.  Comcast offerings are moving far beyond the cable market and are now stretched into several service verticals including:  alarm and security, IT service, telecommunications and now HVAC. 

Over the last two years Google has been strategically making changes to the way it serves up search information.  In late 2010 Google completely overhauled their search infrastructure by implementing Google Caffeine – which makes it easier for them to index, crawl and return search results faster.  With the foundation laid out they have made several strategic algorithmic changes in 2011 that impact search.  With more and more consumers conducting local search than ever before these changes have provided small local businesses the opportunity to compete against larger sleeping giants and win.  In this article I’m going to lay out each change and give you a strategy and New Year’s resolutions that will help you take advantage of the new online search playing field.  

Each week I'll receive about 6-8 requests for a competitive assessment.  It's something I've been doing as part of my sales process for about a year now.  The local digital marketing competitive assessment is a great way to see how my clients rank in terms of authority and traffic in their respective market places.  The assessment is a deep dive into the core metrics that define how your website performs compared to your closest competitors. I've put together a 20-minute on-demand webinar that will take you on a step-by-step explanation on what you can do to make your website work harder for you.

Before you get in to the routine of posting your blog on a regular basis, there are some big questions you should answer.  To maximize the effectiveness of your blog you need to develop a blogging strategy.  Answering these questions can help you to make sure that you are providing the most appropriate information, and make all the difference in the results you get with your blog.

I’ve been selling in a transactional environment to the SMB market for quite some time and I knew from my experience that the market I sell to responds extremely well to short videos.  I felt it was important to develop a short sales demonstration video under 3 minutes and make it the focal point for the Service Blogger website project.  At first I wasn’t exactly sure if I wanted to take on the project myself or outsource it to a sales demo company.  I knew it was going to take a good amount of time.  I evaluated several sales demo companies and couldn't quite find a style I liked so I challenged my team and my cousin who recently got his degree in animation to take on this project.  The first step was to develop the sales script.  Here were the goals of the sales copy:

I am not a social media expert nor do I claim to be.  I do however have a strong interest in how social media plays an active role in the day-to-day operations of field service companies.  Field service marketers should have at a very minimum a social media presence on the big three- LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for the simple fact that consumers go online and do research first before engaging with a company.  They are influenced by their family and friends. At the same time I’m a firm believer that time and resources of each and every employee in a field service organization should be applied to revenue generating activity.  So how do you leverage social media so that it provides you with a tangible return on time and resource investment?  Here are 4 strategies that I’ve seen work for corporate field service firms:

Facebook: the behemoth of the Internet that looms over just about everything connected to the web.  It's changing the way people stay in touch, how the connect to begin with, how vacation photos are shared, how events are planned, and even how revolutions are fought.  It's much more than the website where college kids could share drunken photos and tell everyone about the tests they're studying for.  Now, Facebook is a powerful tool for organization and mobilization.  This includes customer bases.  Not everyone checks their email every day, and it's pretty easy to not bother opening an email that comes from a company instead of a friend.  Facebook, on the other hand, is often checked with a disturbingly high frequency, and EVERYONE is your friend on Facebook.

In an effort to attract the most viewers for a web page, it would seem logical that the more items that draw the eyes' attention one can place on a web page, the better.  Load it up with blinking text, background music, and have as much information on the main page as possible, right?

Keeping your website optimized for Google Search is absolutely vital to getting more hits and more customers to your site, so you’d better keep tabs on how Google ranks pages based on content.