Focus future marketing on hiring employees

Photo: ©istock.com/Courtney Keating

Most pest management professionals (PMPs) will tell you they spend about five percent of their annual revenue on marketing. But it’s really all over the board — some PMPs will spend up to 10 percent; others won’t even spend one percent.

They will tell you where they spend it too, from radio, TV and internet to phone directories, billboards and even various school sports events, just to name a few. Let’s focus on your most important medium of marketing: your employees.
 

Hire hard, manage easy

In today’s world, we all live in a glass house when it comes to social media, and the firestorms of a bad review can spread like wildfire — no matter how much you have spent on advertising. It could be a whopping 20 percent of your revenue, but with one bad review that anyone can easily post or view on Facebook, Google, etc., potential customers will not even choose to call your company in the first place. It’s vital that you are aware of all reviews, good or bad, when it comes to the future of your marketing.

Thus, the future of your marketing goes all the way back to the fundamentals in your hiring practices. When hiring, did you:

• Check out your employees’ references?
• Order criminal background checks?
• Run their motor vehicle report to see what kind of driver they are?
• Perform a pre-employment drug screen, and regular follow-up drug tests?

Remember, these factors can be very important to the future of your marketing. It also will involve the training you have given all your employees, not only the technical side of controlling pests, but the customer service side of dealing with that occasional hard-to-get-along-with client. How you train them to handle everything — from the first call or contact with your office staff, to the service supervisors/managers conducting quality control checks or the technicians doing the fieldwork — will be of paramount importance.

Another big factor is the company vehicles — your rolling billboards. Are they clean? Are they being driven lawfully? A bad driver will cost you, so go the extra mile to ensure you have courteous drivers. Monitor this with GPS to verify driving habits.

You may not realize it, but you are marketing your business regardless of whether you spend a dime on marketing. It’s either good or bad marketing, your choice. The million-dollar question then becomes: What are you going to spend on your future marketing — or should we say, your employees?

Ray Johnson, past president of the National Pest Management Association (NPMA), president of Sevierville, Tenn.-based Johnson Pest Control and founder of ACES for Business, can be reached at ray@johnsonpestcontrol.com.