4 Ways to Tell if your Marketing Strategy is Actually Working

by | Aug 21, 2018 | Marketing | 0 comments

4 Ways to Tell If Your Marketing Strategy Is Actually working

Before I share with you how to know if your marketing strategy is working, you must actually have a marketing strategy. To me, having a marketing strategy means promoting your business in defined direction to achieve growth. This includes a clearly stated revenue goal from a specific set of services and clientele. If you haven’t developed a strategy yet, check out our white paper, 3 Ways to Branch Out Your Marketing. Let’s face it – your strategy won’t be perfect right away and will certainly evolve over time, but establishing a desired result and way to achieve it is vital to begin.

Use the following 4 ways to ensure your marketing strategy is functioning the way you want it to.

Website Visits – The first place someone goes to find out information about your company is your website. It doesn’t matter if they were referred to you or found you through one of your marketing pieces. Your website is your chance for a great first impression. If you are confident about your website, begin to track the number of visitors to your site by using Google Analytics. This tool can break out where the visitors are coming to your site from and how long they stay on it. If you haven’t spent time updating and refreshing your website, check out our 5 Tips for a Better Website and make your website a priority.

Click Throughs – Your website must have a “Call to Action” on it to allow your customers to request a proposal for tree work or purchase firewood/mulch directly. When your website is set up correctly, the number of click throughs are easy to measure. You can also create custom landing pages specific to one service and track results from each specific page.
Closing Ratio – This is more of a management metric than a pure marketing metric, however, if you see that your company is getting more chances at jobs, but you do not see an increase in sold jobs, training of the salesperson may be a solution you need to explore.

Job Analysis – Each month it is very important to look back at the jobs that were finished and analyze them around the questions below. Give a score to each job to track how well these jobs are fitting within your goals for your organization. Each “YES” answer earns 1 point. Your goal is to have as many 3 point jobs as possible.

Was the work performed a targeted service?
Was the client within your targeted clientele profile?
Were the jobs done within the time budget set by the salesperson?

Now that you understand some of the data that will help you determine if your marketing is working, you must start tracking it. Use the current month to establish the benchmark for each of these areas and work towards improving on them every month into the future. After tracking these for a few months, you will begin to see clearly what you need to improve upon. Make sure you share this information with your team so they can take some ownership into improving what they do to move the organization forward.

Of course the ultimate goal is to perform more jobs within your targeted services, for your targeted clientele, and done on time and within budget. When this starts to happen and everyone on your team begins to realize that your company is growing intentionally, you will see the momentum pick up and your business will rise to the next level.

Written by: Eric Petersen

Mentorships: Can They Work for Me?

by | Aug 21, 2018 | Employee Management | 0 comments

Mentorships: Can They Work For Me?

Training new employees can be a difficult task, no matter what industry you’re in. In our office, much like many tree care companies, we’ve utilized a mentorship strategy to bring new employees up to speed as soon as possible. A mentorship program typically includes more individual attention than group training or orientation programs. Often times, situations arise that can’t be learned from a text book. The mentor is there to provide real life experience to fast track the learning process. Below is a conversation from when we had Ryan interview Malcolm and I on how we’ve used the mentorship process within our agency.

Ryan: Why did you choose to implement a mentorship strategy?

Eric: With any new hire, we feel it is critical to establish a solid working partnership that benefits everyone. We utilize a one on one approach to help ensure the employee’s career development within our culture. To us, development goes beyond the professional setting to include the creation of a healthy work/life balance.

Ryan: Malcolm, what have the major advantages been for you with your mentor?

Malcolm: The most obvious benefit is being able to find quick solutions as I gain knowledge important to my role. On top of that, it helps to have someone like Eric who is invested in my success that will ultimately push me in the right direction. When I come up with ideas or pain points in my career, Eric is there to give me support, or play a devil’s advocate role.

Eric: From an employer’s perspective, being able to spend time directly with the new hire has helped our organization in a number of ways. As Malcolm mentioned, it allows the new hire to become better at their position in a much shorter amount of time. Outside of boosting efficiency, we are also able to connect on a personal level which ultimately helps build a culture of employee retention and satisfaction.

Ryan: What challenges have you noticed using this process?

Eric: A critical piece to a successful mentorship program is time management. The mentor needs to hold themselves accountable by ensuring that they are available to the new hire, while also staying on top of their own work. Even though I have had a number of new hires under me over the years, this has remained the largest challenge for me.

Malcolm: For me, a big challenge was determining which tasks I needed to take to Eric and which tasks I should have figured out on my own. I felt the mentor should always be there to answer questions, however, sometimes I was nervous to even ask.

Ryan: How can your mentorship experience translate to the tree care world?

Malcolm: When I see my clients using these programs, I get excited because I know what it will do for their business. I had insurance experience prior to joining Eric’s team, and while the mentorship certainly helped with my insurance knowledge, it also gave me a more personal feel for ArboRisk’s values and overall operations. Because company values are so important in the tree care industry, I think this program is a great way to ensure new hires operate under those values.

Eric: There is no comparison to the individualized attention a mentor can give for the safe and productive development of a great team member. With all of the dangers in the tree care world, learning from your own mistakes may not offer a second chance. A mentor can take a new employee under their wing and help them avoid close calls by sharing their personal stories.

The most successful mentorship programs that I’ve seen in the tree care industry, involve upper management that is dedicated to developing their workforce despite the understanding that not all employees will be with their business forever. These employers are satisfied by helping individuals reach their own goals and developing their professionalism.

Lastly, I’ve witnessed firsthand that if no formal mentorship program is in place, unofficial mentors will become the internal voice of the company, ultimately creating the culture they want rather than the one you want to achieve.

Ryan: What steps should a tree care company take to build a mentorship program?

Eric: I feel there are 4 simple steps that can be followed to develop a mentorship program.

Talk to front line managers and crew leaders to see if they would be willing to serve as a mentor to your new employees.

Ask a recent new hire how their training was and what could be improved upon to help them become proficient in their job faster. Also ask directly if an individual mentor would have been helpful for them.

Start small. Pair the mentors up with the new employees and give them both flexibility in developing the program for your company. This means to allow for time, away from production or other tasks, to ask specific questions or get specific equipment training.

Review with both parties every 30 days to ensure that the additional attention is having a positive impact on the employee’s development.

Written by: Eric Petersen

7 Tips for Retaining Great Employees

by | Aug 17, 2018 | Employee Management | 0 comments

7 Tips For Retaining Great Employees

It’s hard to find a good employee and yet it feels like it is even harder to keep them around. Especially in the tree care industry, employee turnover can be the most demoralizing challenge that you as the business owner face. While every organization will have employees leave from time to time, top level tree services make a concerted effort to retain their team members. My list of 7 tips for retaining great employees come from working with and observing these top companies over the years.

Hire for culture fit – Okay this is more of a hiring tip than a retention tip, however, it’s the best way to improve your retention. It is a lot easier to keep your employees when you start with employees that fit the culture of your organization. Skills can be taught, but you will never be able to change the personality of your employees. If you hire to fill a specific skill set and do not pay attention to whether or not that employee will fit the culture you will either have that employee leave sooner than you want or they will push out good employees.

Communication – Everything within your company depends great communication. Knowing what matters to your employees and what motivates them is the key to keeping them happy while working within your organization. Provide a work environment that encourages communication between management and laborers without fear of repercussions and you will dramatically increase your employee retention.

Career development – Supporting and encouraging your team members to pursue additional training lets them know that you are committed to them and their careers first and your profits second. Great employees will produce more profit for the business, so allow each of your team members to grow individually. Also, developing a career path structure that an employee can follow to advance in your company will provide motivation and clarity for all team members.

Provide challenges – The best employees on your team want to be challenged. They want to use their skills and talents to accomplish goals that not everyone can. This helps them feel fulfilled in their work and wanting to stay with your organization. A clear defined career path, provides one way to challenge your employees, but you can also have a number of special projects lined up that an employee can sign up for. Perhaps starting a safety committee, researching the latest equipment, figuring out a way to utilize the latest client management software, or creating small videos for use on social media channels for marketing purposes are all examples of simple challenges that you can provide your employees that would be valuable to your company.
Flexibility – In general, most employees today are looking for a work place that can be flexible with them. Understanding that just earning a paycheck is less attractive now than it was in the past. Employees want to be able to take time with their families and perhaps work from home from time to time if they do sales or office work. When talking about field staff it is a little harder to be flexible, but not impossible. You must have great communication and a solid set of rules for flexible schedule so that everyone knows what to expect of them and their teammates. This eliminates one person from taking advantage of it and creates respect for everyone. Let your employees come up with ideas on how this would work that would be fair for all.

Diversify work opportunities – Providing a varied work day for your employees is nearly impossible within the tree care industry, but what isn’t is creating a rotation where employees get to work in different areas every so often to break up the monotony of their work. This starts by having the roles and duties of each position outlined and written down for everyone. Then create a structure where each employee spends one day out of every two or three weeks in a different area of your business. That could mean that a production arborist may spend one day working with the plant health care crew and one day in the shop with your mechanic each month. Resist the urge to keep pounding production out of your best employees to avoid burnout.

Compensation – I listed this as the last tip, because while important to retaining employees, if you master the points above, compensation takes care of itself. With a flexible work schedule and chance for career development, warranted performance based pay increases become a normal part of your company’s culture. If you have trouble figuring out how much to pay your employees, start by using the TCIA’s Wage Survey.

Written by: Eric Petersen

6 Steps to Building a Better Brand

by | Aug 17, 2018 | Marketing | 0 comments

6 Steps to Building a Better Brand

In today’s over-commoditized world, building your company’s brand is one of the most important business decisions that you need to make. By formulating a solid brand for your organization, it sets the tone for your entire operation. This is more than just your unique value proposition – it is the way you interact with your customers and team members, it is what people feel and remember about your company. At the 2018 TCIA Winter Management Conference, Bruce Turkel stated, “A good brand makes people feel good. A great brand makes people feel good about themselves.” This brand must be yours and it must be genuine. Here are 6 questions to ask yourself when building a great brand for your business. What are your company’s values? Spend time thinking about your own personal values. What do you believe in? Does your business operate on those basic life principals? Talk to others within your organization and ask them what they value and how the company can emulate those beliefs. For my firm, I used a large list of value words and circled my top 10. Words like trustworthiness and altruism stood out and helped me solidify what I wanted our company to believe in. This helped tremendously in moving our brand forward. What are your company’s strengths? If you haven’t done a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) on your business, do so now. This analysis helps in so many ways and is vital in building a better brand. Think about the strengths of your company – What is your team the best at? Where are the opportunities for growth within your organization? Who is your ideal customer? Your company’s values and strengths will highlight who will benefit the most from your services. Get as specific on this as you can. The more laser focused you can be on your target clients the better you can fulfill your promises to them. What can you solve for your customer? For this question, dig deeper and think about the reason that your customers are contacting you to perform a service. It isn’t just about removing the dead branches from the tree in their front yard or making the leaves look greener on the tree that hangs over their porch. It is about eliminating the work on their end. It is about giving them more shade on a hot afternoon when they are enjoying their patio with their friends and family. Think about the real reasons someone wants work done on their trees. How do customers feel about your company? Are your customers raving about your company? Do they tell their coworkers about what a wonderful job your team did? Have you mastered the customer experience by renovating every customer touchpoint so they have only positive things to say about your organization? Understanding how your team and services makes your customers feel is a significant part of your brand. Does your company’s look match what your message is? – Does your logo and color selection match what your values and strengths are? Is your logo sleek, modern and edgy, yet your equipment and uniforms look old and worn down? Does your website convey the same message as all of your written communications with your customers? The look of your company, from every aspect, is the most visual part of a brand and a part that cannot be taken lightly. While this can be expensive to change, it should be your last step in revitalizing your brand. If you are confident in the answers to parts 1 – 5, this step should be easy to implement. After you have figured out what your brand is, you must be consistent with it. Ensure that all of your team members know what it is and why it is important. Common phrases within your organization can help solidify the brand internally so that the external world will start to believe it. Building a brand doesn’t happen overnight, however, with structured concentration on it, you will begin to see how it can dramatically change every aspect of your business.

Written by: Eric Petersen

3 Tips for Redefining Your Customer Experience

by | Aug 17, 2018 | Marketing | 0 comments

3 Tips For Redefining Your Customer Experience

Everyone wants to provide exceptional customer service, yet unfortunately there are few companies that truly wow their customers. The service and personal touch that you provide to your customers will always be evolving, but here are 3 tips to begin redefining your customer experience.

1. Understand Your Customer – This should go without saying, but it is so critical to know who your customers are and what they care about. Who is your ideal customer and how can your services make them smile? Understand how they communicate and what really matters to them. Remember, it’s not the tree that pays the bill, it’s the owner of the tree that writes the check to you. If you are not connecting with your customers, you are making it easy for them to find another company to help them with their trees.

2. Touch-point Teamwork – Hold a brainstorming session with each department within your company to focus on every customer touch-point within your organization. From your website appearance and functionality, to incoming phone calls and emails, to field staff doing the work, to the invoices and thank you’s that go out after the job is completed, ask yourselves three simple questions for every touch-point:

What do our customers love about it?
What do our customers dislike about it?
What can we do to make that interaction better or more shareable?

3. Training and Integration – After you have defined the ideal customer and what they want from you, everyone in your company must know how important each touch-point is to have the best possible customer experience. This is best accomplished by the department leaders walking their teams through each touch-point and how the customer should be treated. It helps if similar words or phrases are used to solidify the organization and promote the client first culture.

By consciously focusing on your customer’s experience at every touch-point, you will begin to transform your company. Have fun with it, get creative and don’t be afraid to try something new to stand out. Wow your customers so they can’t help but tell others about the great experience they had with your company.

Written by: Eric Petersen