The Three M’s of Marketing for Your Pest Control Business

Are you struggling to market your pest control business? Just engaging with, say, five or six people on Twitter or Facebook in your area that mention bugs will not convert into sales. Or spending a hundred dollars on Facebook ads might only result in impressions and that, frankly, isn't a scalable marketing strategy.

The real question is how to advertise pest control in a way that gets you business. Before we tell you what the 3Ms are, it is important to first have your own marketing plan.

Have a pest control marketing plan

Without a basic marketing plan, you can easily waste a lot of money on many unnecessary things which might not work. Your marketing plan should generate leads in the long run and must have definite goals. Where do you start?

Have a list of achievable goals. Here are a couple of them to get you started:

Once you answer these, you will understand how many leads you require to achieve your goals.

For example, let’s say your average annual revenue target is $600,000. If your average transaction value is, let’s say, $500, you will need 1200 jobs throughout the year. If your average conversion rate from lead to a booked job is, say, 25%, that means you need to generate 4800 leads annually.

That’s a lot of leads, and you can only get there with an effective marketing strategy. Let’s focus on the 3Ms.

3 fundamental M's to succeed at pest control marketing

The fundamentals of marketing are your market, your message, and your media.

Your market

To understand the target market, you need to answer these three questions:‍

1. Ideally, what ‌people do you want to serve?

‍Who is your ideal customer? What are they looking for? What are their common pest control issues? Are you serving the wealthier customers or are your services more of a budget offering? Understanding the customer base will help you decide who you would like to serve, what ‌services you want to provide, and the pricing you will offer.

‍2. If you could get all the customers you want in a small neighborhood, which areas would you like to serve?

‍Targeting an entire neighborhood has advantages not just for your business but also for your customers. You can’t serve the entire population of a town or a city, but what you can do is target a small neighborhood. The reason many pest control companies try to target too large an area with too many services stems from scarcity thinking. What that means is you are constantly living in the fear of ‘not being enough’, here, specifically “I don’t want to let any customers go”. What if you could have all the customers in one specific area? Think about how much more efficient it would be to move from one house to another. Community pest control puts people at ease and it’s a complete win-win for both you and your customers.

‍3. What are the most profitable services that you could promote?

‍This requires an understanding of services that sell the most. One common mistake many small pest control companies make is trying to do it all by being a jack of all trades. If you are a small company trying to do every pest control service out there over a huge service area, it might not work out well. From a pure marketing point-of-view, when you say you do everything, people assume you don’t do anything well. Your customers will value more specialization. If you try to do it all, chances are you might be good at some things, mediocre at others, and maybe even terrible at a few. Find out the right services to sell for a profitable business.

Once you answer the above questions, you will truly know your ideal customers in your ideal area. This will ensure the maximum return-on-investment (RoI) when you run pest control ads.

Your message

Your message is the most important part of your pest control marketing. To find yours, answer these questions:

1. Why should someone choose to do business with you rather than with your competition?
2. What benefits do you offer that will resonate with your target customer?

Narrow it down to that single most important thing that makes you stand out to craft your message. The content you put out anywhere, be it your website, what you say when you meet potential customers, or your call to action (CTA), everything matters.

Key phrases like “same-day service”, “on-time delivery”, “upfront pricing”, “satisfaction guaranteed”, “trustworthy” work best.

Your message should be powerful and also reflect your brand, and this will help your business dominate the market. Guarantees work best to build that, for example, if you, as a termite control company, guarantee that the treatment shall ensure that termites won’t return for 6 years. Such unique propositions will give you an edge over your competitors, provided you follow up with your actions.

Use more variations of “you” than just “we”. Speak your customers’ language more than your business’ or yours. The more specific your message is, the better it is. For example, “we do this” or sentences like “we’re great at this” keep the constant focus on you instead of the customer. Instead, put your customer in the spotlight first.

“Are you frustrated by unending termite attacks? Let us solve it once and for all.”If you want to transition to you-language, use ‘so that’ often.  “We offer termite control 24 hours a day so that our service does not interrupt your day.”Now that you have curated your message, let’s find the best channel to advertise your pest control services.

The media

To answer the “how to advertise for pest control”, we finally arrive at the last piece of the puzzle, that is the media.

As a pest control business owner, it's difficult to choose the right media channels to attract new customers and grow your business. There’s the traditional form of advertising, or what we call the old media, that are newspaper pest control ads, radio commercials, television ads, etc.

The other problem with traditional advertising methods is that they have poor targeting ability. You have little control over the demography of the audience that views your ads. Prime-time slots on television are incredibly expensive, so many use local affiliate channels on cable tv to target small areas.

Some pest control companies spend up to 30% on television advertising to gain a national presence.

The challenge with traditional advertising is it takes time to show results and does not generate impulse purchases. People don’t jump up and call you after they’ve seen your commercial. They might do that after seeing a pizza commercial, but rarely for a pest control service.

Here’s where digital marketing comes in. “92% of American adults research online before making a purchase.” That means just about everybody looking to purchase pest control services is first looking online. You simply cannot ignore online advertising and marketing if you want your pest control business to thrive.

Get your toe in the water if you haven’t already with digital marketing

Your website should be a one-stop shop for your services and should rank in the top few in your vicinity. You might not believe it, but you are in the media business now. With so much competition, you need to outshine others. Treat your website as the first place to start your online marketing. Most businesses don’t design websites in a way to convert visitors into leads. Earlier, we talked about the message in the 3 M’s. Use those guidelines to carefully deliver your message, write crisp call-to-action (CTAs) and capture more leads. You should also try your hand at the Social Media Marketing for your Business.

A pest control business software can solve all these troubles by doing the major grunt work for you. To know more about what business software can do for you, read the complete article.

We recently launched our Sales Automation software that allows you to convert prospects that arrive on your website by offering instant quotations and allowing them to book their services and make payments simultaneously. This enhanced experience for homeowners will lead to three times higher conversion rates for your pest control business.

The bandwagon effect: Using social psychology to grow your customer base

Usually, the primary approach for new business owners (and even old, sometimes) is networking and referrals. To move beyond your initial few customers, use the bandwagon effect. Talk about the neighborhood and other people who are already using our services and this serves as social proof for your business. People would want to be included and jump aboard to not miss out.

To supplement this, offer discounts at the right time to your potential customers. Even if they don’t feel they need your services, you can offer them preventive solutions and get hired on a lease. As the old saying goes, “Keep up with the Joneses”, more people would want to be a part of that and that’s how the bandwagon effect works. Finally, once you get all those leads, how do you ensure you convert them?

Improve lead conversion with an online shop

Does this sound familiar? Your customers call you or submit a form to get a quote, then wait a day or two before you can get back to them. That’s a long enough time frame to lose your leads to competition.

Create your own Pest Control Online Shop with Attentive.ai[/caption]This is where an online shop comes in. It will allow your prospects to book your services straightaway simply by entering their property address. The software provides you with accurate measurements instantly, enabling you to offer a quote as soon as the customer requests one. You will start converting more leads every day of the week. Your website has become your best salesperson!

Now that you know everything about how to market your services, don’t wait another day. Come up with your own pest control marketing plan and get started. What are the different ways you market and advertise pest control services? Let us know in the comments below.