How to generate service leads through social media
By Alex Hallmark, Fluid Services
Media today is fractured into individual interests and habits based on a person’s habits and preferences on a smartphone.
Today an individual can drill down what he or she views on social media platforms to a specific show or genre, and can be easily siloed from seeing much of anything else as they scroll through. This design is intended to keep a person on the platform.
While we can be sympathetic to the new challenges this type of viewing behavior can create, we cannot ignore the reality. This behavior is not going away and will likely scale up further. While AI tools have a long way to go before they can replace all our jobs, tools like these are playing an active role in determining how a person creates and consumes media content, whether it’s text, audio or video.
Local businesses providing appliance services need to be in this conversation too. There are lots of ways to do this, but the most successful we’ve seen with our appliance repair clients is creating content that’s unique to their own brand, that drives authenticity and that tells a continued story, whether it’s a person or an AI deciding what to show next in a person’s social media feed.
Why Share?
Sharing is a big part of the internet, whether it’s sharing a picture with a friend by SMS or getting a wiring schematic to a specific model appliance from someone in a Facebook group. This doesn’t just help the users in that moment, it helps the machine that drives whatever platform a person used to decide what to show next.
Your website and your brand have the same reputation on each platform. Reviews play an important role but it’s your entire activity as a brand that will shape whether you show up in someone’s feed or conversation. What you and your team share online (if you share anything at all) will help that platform’s AI determine when, where and why it shows your brand in a person’s feed.
To get past the onslaught of content available to users, you need to be transparent and authentic by providing content that educates or entertains a user, without the focus being on closing a sale.
From the perspective of an appliance repair technician in the field, relevant content addresses these questions:
- What did you work on today?
- Where did you work today?
- Who did the work?
- Was everyone happy?
This info should be front and center and getting updated as often as possible on your website. If you don’t, platforms like Google, Yelp, Amazon and OpenAI will set their own narratives about your business, good or bad.
What to Share?
Write blogs on your website about how to fix appliance issues or how to maintain the appliances to prevent these types of issues from happening. Talk about how to use each appliance and show it with pictures or videos to go along with the text. Explain how to cook, clean and so forth, down to specific models.
Talk about what you sold and who and where you sold it (within the limits of a customer’s privacy, of course), but you can also generalize and still drive a conversation. Do it every day, and include any products you fix and repair. Tell your story to the internet so more people can discover the value your brand provides.
Ensure you have feedback from each market you work in and the team members within those markets. Being specific to a brand or product type doesn’t hurt either.
Just pulling out a smartphone is all you need to drive thousands of new eyeballs to what you and your team take for granted — doing the day-to-day job.
As an example, the video below from Fred’s Appliance Academy covers a simple topic, about whether to pre-rinse your dishes, and has gained thousands of views. People are always looking for authentic content that entertains and/or informs:
A lack of visibility on today’s media platforms is only going to do more damage over the long term to a company’s brand awareness in its local community. For your brand to generate consistent leads, it needs to be part of the conversation online, driving customers to come to you first with anything appliance related.
At Fluid Services, we help appliance companies across the country solve challenges to help drive profitability and improve overall company culture, either through coaching or through the specific services we provide. Our door is always open to have a chat and help anyone in this industry grow and prosper.
Alex Hallmark is co-founder of Fluid Services, a marketing company spinoff of Fred’s Appliance that helps raise the online presence of field service companies. Contact Alex at ahallmark@fluid.services.
