Our Deal

I have been trying to come up with a really good deal that we could offer at Cockrell Electric, other than the usual, free estimates. We have offered free 24 point inspections in the past that went well. They consist of us going in and checking 24 different areas in your house were there could be electrical issues and to make sure everything is up to date and working reliably.

One of the offers we have tried in the past is offering a percent off of their work after so much money is spent. The customers definitely respond when we offer a percent off and it usually isn't a big hit to us monetarily speaking. The thing with the percent off is that it doesn't necessarily bring in new customers or extra work. It just gives our normal customer base a percent off of their bill.

We also don't want to decrease our rates for any amount of time either, even if it is for a special. It is such a big deal for us to raise our rates, especially after not having raised them for the last 15 years. We have to send out notices months ahead, deal with the backlash (there's a little backlash), and stick to our guns no matter what our customers say to get a lower rate. We don't want to give an opening for us to have to go back to our lower rates. That now leads us back to the free estimates.

The free estimates are actually a great special, even if we do offer it all the time. The customer doesn't know that, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I get phone calls every day asking if we do free estimates. I believe we would get at least twenty percent more calls from people with it already in their minds that they want us to do their work if they call us already knowing they will get a free estimate from us as opposed needing to call to see if we even do estimates. It's an easy idea to market too.

Advertising that we offer free estimates can be advertised on any of the Social Media that we have worked with. It could be posted on Facebook and "Boosted" with a great Cockrell picture of one of our guys doing a service call. Or we could advertise on Yelp, where when you do an advertisement, it is placed right under all of your business information and business photo. Or we could Tweet it or make it stand out on the newsletter at the beginning of each new season. Regardless of how we get it out there, we should do what we can to let our customers know that we do estimates for free and advertising that would be an immediate boost to our amount of service calls that we receive.

Online Marketing and Business Growth

This was another great assignment. I know that we had to pay to take this class, but what we are learning is priceless. This is information that we can use for the rest of our lives and it is giving us the tools to be very successful online and otherwise. With these tools we are able to market our products or businesses directly to the people that want them. How easy is that? Every one of the online marketing tools that I read about for the assignment were great, but there were just a few that would directly benefit our business. A couple of them would benefit our business almost immediately.

I don't think it's a coincidence that after Facebook, some of the four most popular sites would be to our best advantage. They are LinkedIn, Yelp, Google+, and Groupon. Although I'm not sure of the last one being in line with us, only because of our particular demographic that we are marketing to. I don't have them listed in any particular order, but my least favorite online marketing tool is Groupon. If we were marketing to a younger, hipper, on a budget demographic, then this would be our cup of tea, but we aren't and it isn't.

Next is LinkedIn in the second to least favorite spot. It is great for so many reasons, number one being that we have access to professionals that are qualified for the types of positions we will be needing to fill in our company in the future. It is mainly a good place to find employees and for them to find us.

The last two choices are absolutely beneficial to our business, Google+ and Yelp. Google+ for the obvious reasons, having all your info on the screen when you come up in a search. I love when I find that with other businesses and I'm sure our customers would feel the same. Yelp is my absolute favorite and not only are we claiming our page and setting up an account, but we will eventually be advertising with them.

The main reason why I like Yelp is because our page is getting out to people that are actively looking for an electrician. They have great tracking tools, including mobile calls being tracked. The tracking tools are a big part of their program and they make it easy to keep up to date with everything that is going on with your page. Yelp gets new customers, as opposed to Facebook that is mostly about retaining customers and getting our name out there. The demographic for Yelp, through a census done by Neilson, is ages 40 to 50, educated with a bachelors degree, and earning 60 to 80 thousand a year. This is the exact demographic that we are looking to market to when expanding our service department, making it easy to integrate them into our current marketing strategy. It seems that the quality of clientele with Yelp would be better than most, just based on the fact that we know they do their research and extremely tech savy. I like all of my online marketing choices, but I really do think Yelp is the absolute best fit with our current strategy and our next step in online marketing.

Advertising For Free

It is absolutely incredible, the way you can market your business or your product through Social Media for free. We have done more target marketing and reached more people in the last month through Social Media than we have through mainstream marketing in the last 25 years. And we did it mostly for free. There were a couple of time that we experimented with Boosting, like when searching for a new purchasing Agent. The more people we could get the open position out to, the better our odds were of finding someone for the job.

For the first time, we are one of the top choices when Googling local electricians and it is all because of our new online presence. Before our Facebook and Twitter pages, we were not even one of the choices when Local Electrician was Googled, but now we are number three on the list of electricians!

By placing specific Call to Action posts and lots of interesting posts, we have been able to build our fans to 318 Likes in just over one month. Now, after having built such a big fan base like that, we are able to really direct target market our ads. For now though, we are content with our simple call to Action posts and our funny and interesting posts. People are beginning to Share our posts and we get more posts engagement than we ever would have thought for our first month live. Below are samples of Ads that we will be paying for: