3 Marketing Mistakes To Avoid With Your Heating Businesses

For many heating & plumbing businesses, marketing can become an afterthought. There’s lot’s of ways you can get more jobs (we’ve written a full guide here), but applying them for the best results requires a bit of strategy. 

Which is best for your business, and which is going to be the best use of your time? These are two very valid questions that will depend on your business.

We recently invited Wayne from Ugly Mug Marketing onto the podcast. From years of experience in the world of marketing, Wayne knows all the common pitfalls and mistakes business owners make. In this article, we boil down marketing to its essence and provide a framework you can follow for effective marketing. This includes:

The 3 M’s of marketing

Dropping a leaflet through a mailbox; sending a quick service reminder to a customer; leaving a business card behind — these are all great marketing, and they consist of three key components.

Market, message, and medium.

Your market is who you’re trying to reach. Do you prefer working for homeowners? Property agents? Or maybe even commercial buildings?

Your message is how you say what you want to say. How are you different from your competitors, and how do you solve your customers’ problems?

Your medium is the part most people are familiar with. It could be an email, online advertisement, poster – you get the idea.

Understanding these 3 M’s is the key to making the most of your time doing marketing. Experimentation is always important, but it doesn’t mean guessing: “Just trying a bunch of different things to see what’s going to work – I can tell you, first of all, that’s not strategic. That’s not going to work.”

Read more: Do you know your ideal customer?

The 3 mistakes to avoid:

Mistake #1: Not understanding who your ideal customer is

Every trades business caters to a niche. This is the type of job or type of customer that you enjoy working for the most. “I think it’s important first of all to understand who you best serve,” explains Wayne.

Lots of trades businesses tend to take a blanket approach to marketing. They may find customers and jobs, but not always the ones that they’d wish for. You can avoid this mistake entirely by building your ideal customer profile.

For your jobs, ask yourself questions like these:

• Out of the jobs you do, is it the residential or commercial ones you prefer?
• Do you prefer doing installations or services?
• Large luxury homes, or more standard housing?

Then, think about your customer:

• Will you work non-standard hours to cater to those who can’t be home during work days?
• Are you willing to work fast for demanding customers?
• How far are you willing to drive?

All of these things can then be put together to create what is essentially your perfect job for the perfect customer.

“The absolute best thing you can do is put an hour or two on your calendar each day to merely ponder how you can better serve your customers. That one exercise re-enters you; it re-focuses you on really why you exist.”

Mistake #2: Not targeting your customers’ problems

Even though a lot of the jobs you do may be the same, customers can have different problems. Relating back to our previous example, they might have scheduling issues, they might need rush services to fix a broken boiler in a cold spell, or they could be struggling with bills.

“Everyone can say great service friendly service. Everyone can say X years of experience… but the more you can speak to them about them, the more your message is going to resonate,” says Wayne.

Quick example:

Instead of saying “I service boilers and have 25 years of experience”, say something more like “Service your boiler and cut your gas bill by up to 40%. Ring 1234567890 to make a booking.”

Ultimately, it’s all about serving your customers better than your competitors do. One of the ways you can do this is by targeting their problems in your messaging, not talking about your business. Of course, it’s still important to get the basics right (which is much easier with good software) and simply doing good work.

Mistake #3: Starting with the medium, not the market 

The medium is the place where most people make the mistake of starting.

“They look around and they see their competitors or doing a lot on, let’s say, Facebook. They say we’ve got to be more consistent on Facebook…and it doesn’t work. They don’t get engagement and they’re not getting business from it,” says Wayne.

Rather than starting with the medium and then working back, it’s much better to start with your ideal customer.

Next, work out the right messaging to speak to these people. Finally, with these two things in mind, select the right medium based on where your market is and where your message will fit. In Wayne’s words, you “want to put your message in a place where it has the absolute best chance of being seen and understood by the audience”.

Why marketing isn’t just advertising

This little final tip is something that a lot of business owners get wrong.

Advertising is all the public facing stuff. It’s everything you put out there into the world, and makes up a part of marketing.

But marketing encompasses much more. “The way we service the customers, the way we show up, the way we follow up – that is all marketing,” explains Wayne. As an example, showing up on time and making a good impression is a form of messaging to your customer – just not one that you would normally think of.

How you can serve your customers better with Gas Engineer Software

This can seem overwhelming at first, but it also means you’ve got a lot of options around you to out-serve your competitors and win over customers. Job management software is one way in which we can help you.

The features in Gas Engineer Software are designed to not only make your life easier, but to give your customers a better experience too with paperless records, better scheduling, and lots more.

Learn more about Gas Engineer Software or start a free trial.