Marketing Like Fred’s Appliance Service

When an appliance breaks down, it’s an unexpected and frustrating experience for most consumers. Money has to be spent, schedules have to be re-arranged, and strangers have to be allowed in their home, whether it’s to repair or replace.

While dealing in the appliance industry on a daily basis, it’s easy to forget the perspective of the average consumer. Appliance repair customers NEED appliance repair service, they rarely ever WANT or DESIRE the service. Unlike Amazon, customers are not staying up late binge shopping on appliance repair. So it’s key to be in the right place, at the right time, to be the best option for your customers.

Traditional marketing methods like cold calling, radio and TV ads, billboard ads, newspaper ads, and direct mail can work but have a ton of disadvantages. These methods are primarily used to create brand awareness about a product or service that you offer but are very hard to measure and to have the best impact for appliance repair, you need to be advertising constantly since you can never predict when an appliance will break down. This makes each method very expensive for any sized repair shop with a low ROI. Not to mention that this type of advertising is starting to leave a negative brand impression (Time Warner/Spectrum/Comcast anyone??) so companies could be doing more harm than good without realizing it.

Basic Marketing Tips

Fred’s Appliance has grown its brand awareness without spending tens of housands of dollars a month in advertising. Let’s look at some of the basics for earning more business that every appliance repair company can start doing right now.

The easiest way to earn more business is by keeping your current customers coming back. Printed marketing material like our Leave Behind Cards or just a simple magnet with your business details is crucial to ensure customers remember you down the line when a friend or family member has a broken down appliance. It can be years before your customers need service again, don’t assume they will remember you.

Design a consistent brand/logo for your business and then brand everything. Your truck, your shirt, your hat, your invoices, and your tool bag. Not only do your current customers see this stuff, but all the customers in the neighborhood and on the road will see it too.

Explore signing up for warranty and extended warranty work with appliance manufacturers and insurance companies. These are leads you will never get unless you are participating in these various networks, but there are pros and cons to consider. These are fresh leads, but it usually doesn’t pay as well as COD(cash on delivery, the customer pays you directly) business and you will not get paid the same day which requires consistent followup and tracking to ensure you are getting paid for every job. You do get access to technical support and additional part distribution options and the exposure to new customers is an opportunity to earn future COD business assuming you are using printed marketing methods we just mentioned.

These are some of the basic marketing tactics every appliance repair business should be using, if not, stop reading this article and get it done!

Marketing Online

With the basics for marketing appliance repair out of the way, let’s talk about the internet. Phonebooks are giant paperweights in 2019 and Google is king of information and amongst all search engines, because to put it simply, it just works. It drives local results based on your search location which makes it easier to find the local businesses near you or to interact with customers near you. Setting aside the obvious privacy concerns of this technology, we cannot argue that customers are continuing to use the internet, and Google, in greater numbers every year.

Think about the new homeowner who has never had to deal with a broken down appliance before and doesn’t have a reference from a friend or family member to go off of. This homeowner will pull out their smart phone and google “appliance repair near me” “best appliance repair” “washer not working”, etc. and then shop around the first page of search results. For appliance repair businesses, this is where you need to be showing up. So how do you do it?

Ensure your business is listed on Google My Business, Google’s directory for businesses. This provides a dedicated listing on Google Maps for your storefront. This isn’t enough though to show up in every city you service, you will normally only show up in the city your address is listed in.

The easiest way to get found on the internet is to run ads and to pay for every click that your ads generate. You can do this with Google Ads but like the traditional marketing methods we were talking about earlier, this can get expensive as well. Unlike those traditional methods though, it is possible to track leads through Google Ads, but the success rate is still 20-40% of all ad clicks will turn into a customer engaging with your business by phone, email, or chat. Lead services like Thumbtack and HomeAdvisor can provide leads at a reasonable cost but these platforms are hit or miss depending on your market as most search queires will go through Google first.

Even though advertising can put you at the top of the page, ads on the internet are easy to ignore after the average user realizes where the best results are located and these are called organic results. These listings are placed below the advertisement by Google’s complex search algorithms which is striving to provide the best and most relevant answer to every search query. Based on our data, customers will click on organic listings nearly 3 times as much compared to a Google Ad at the very top of the page. So not only is it more expensive but it’s not where most of the click traffic is happening. It also means that every city you provide service in, there is a different result when a customer types “appliance repair” in the respective city. So you need to ensure your business is showing up organically in every city you service whether your customer types “appliance repair” or “oven service”.

Fred’s Appliance services 6 counties in Northeast Ohio, which includes Cleveland. In nearly every city they service, they are the top organic listing for various appliance repair related keywords. This didn’t happen overnight but we worked to earn Google’s trust that Fred’s Appliance is a dedicated resource for appliance repair in all the cities they service. How did we build this trust?

Fred’s earned these rankings by providing relevant content to their customers and for Google to consume. Since 2012, Fred’s has been generating content on their website by blogging on various topics that relate to their customers and their industry. This drive to be part of the conversation online has propelled their website in the organic rankings as Google uses the content on their website to answer various questions typed into the search engine.

Here are a couple of examples:
How to prevent your washer pipes from freezing
Difference between 4 prong dryer cord and 3 prong

These are the #1 answers nationwide for these specific questions which bring a ton of brand awareness when appliance repair is actually on the customer’s mind. Way more effective advertisement and we are actually providing content that our customers want. Fred’s gets to help solve problems without even having to run a service call, that’s a positive impression that a customer will remember and refer off of. It would take tens of thousands of dollars in advertising to match the same types of positive impressions that our marketing is providing.

If you have a Google AI at home, ask it one of those questions above, it will utilize the Fred’s Appliance blog posts as an answer which puts Fred’s a step ahead with voice search. Voice search is in “the wild west” type of phase and the first companies who start working towards these strategies will be first in line.

The overall domain authority ranking for fredsappliance.com is among the top 200,000 websites in the entire United States. That’s not just the appliance industry, we are talking across all industries and markets. Click here to see for yourself. You can also compare your own company website to Fred’s Appliance using the same tool.

Fluid Services took content generation even further at Fred’s by turning the service calls they run everyday into daily content for the web. Our team then tailored a unique local experience for customers to land on when searching for appliance repair in each individual city Fred’s does service in.

This has led to an increase in COD business, better exposure to find new employee talent, and an overall better online reputation as we work to turn Fred’s Appliance into an appliance resource for their community.

This entire service is available when signing up with Fluid Services to handle your marketing as we do all the heavy lifting of putting the methods we perfected at Fred’s Appliance into practice for new clients all across the country. We have been in the service business for decades and we strive to be the marketing extension for your appliance repair business. Working with us is easy and flexible as we do not lock you into any long term agreements when you work with us. We don’t like that stuff either.

Marketing created by a service company for service companies. So why wait?

Reach out to us if you are interested, we’re always happy to talk shop and share anything we can to help your business grow.