Indoor air quality has been a buzzy topic for quite some time, but COVID-19 made it front-and-center, for homeowners and facility managers alike.
Regardless of added demand, most HVAC inspection, cleaning, and restoration businesses may enter a slower season as the holidays ramble on. Why not take advantage of downtime and catch up on a few marketing activities that have been on the back burner?
Here are 40 things to do during downtime that will have a big impact.
Your Customers
- Schedule catch-up calls or lunch with your biggest clients to see how you can better serve them in the coming year.
- Reach out to a former customer who’s fallen off your radar; try to win their business again.
- Check-in with a prospect you’ve been nurturing; see if you can get them closer to a sale.
- Gather client testimonials you can use in your marketing materials.
- Ask your best customers for referrals.
- Create case studies to show how your service helps customers.
- Enlist some satisfied clients to feature in a marketing video for your business.
- Collect before-and-after pictures to show off your work, and get permission to use them in your marketing materials.
- Don’t forget to send holiday gifts and/or cards to customers!
Your Website
Dig into your website analytics and learn:
- Where most of your website visitors are coming from.
- Which web pages they spend the most time on.
- Which pages generate the most leads.
- Which pages have the highest bounce rate? Use this information to fine-tune your online marketing, landing pages, and calls-to-action.
- Go through your website to make sure all the information (phone numbers, FAQs, etc.) is current and accurate.
- Check all links to make sure they are current (and work).
- Go through your listings on local search directories to make sure information is current and that your contact info is consistent across all listings.
Your Email Marketing
- Clean up your email list.
- Brainstorm new ideas for adding names to your email list.
- Segment your email list in different types of customers.
- Review your email analytics. What can you do differently to make your email marketing more effective?
Your Community
- Get together with non-competing local business owners to share marketing ideas.
- Team up with your local Chamber of Commerce, business association, or other local business organization to plan group promotions for the holiday season.
- Attend a networking event you haven’t been to before.
- Find a charitable organization for your business to support.
- Look for a nonprofit community group that your business can get involved with.
- Make a list of upcoming community events your business could sponsor or participate in.
- Research tradeshows to attend in the coming year, either as an exhibitor or an attendee.
Thought Leadership
- Research community organizations that might be interested in hearing you speak.
- Contact a blogger who is influential with your target market; see if you can write a guest post for them.
- Join or start a LinkedIn group relevant to your target customers and contribute to the discussion.
- Start a business blog on your website to share your expertise.
Administrative/Organization
- Review your marketing materials, both print and digital. Toss/delete outdated logos, images, bios, etc.
- Scan and digitize print materials whenever possible, and toss paper copies.
- Organize your marketing-related files in a way that makes sense to both you and your employees so everything is easy to find when you need it.
Big Picture
- Determine what marketing method has the biggest impact on your business (social media, email, paid search advertising, etc.), and learn everything you possibly can about it until you’re an expert.
- Choose a marketing method you want to use, but aren’t sure how to execute, and learn enough about the basics to give it a try.
- Review your marketing budget.
- Update your marketing plan.
- Create or update a marketing calendar.
- Research marketing automation software tools that could help streamline your marketing.
Get Help
- If you never seem to have enough time for marketing, determine which marketing duties you could outsource. Then look for a freelancer, part- or full-time employee, or local marketing firm to help. No budget to hire or outsource? Contact marketing professors at a local college or university and ask if they can take your business on as part of a class project.
- Doing even a few of these marketing-related tasks will put your business ahead of the competition when 2022 finally rolls around.
(Reprinted with permission from NADCA.com)
