Marketing Your Field Service Brand in 2023

Here in the world of field service we all too often get caught up in discussions regarding the actual provision of our services and not on the business side of how we attract new customers and make sure our voice gets heard in an increasingly noisy space.

However, as with any business, it’s absolutely critical that your field service brand is constantly soliciting new clients and seeking fresh business opportunities. This author has seen way too many field service companies go under because they got too comfortable with the clients they had and all it took was for one of them to slip away and the whole business was thrown into chaos.

With the final quarter of 2022 now upon us [at time of writing] now would seem an opportune moment to look ahead and discuss how we are going to be marketing our field service brands in the coming year.

Market Penetration

The first step along any road to a fresh marketing strategy is to calculate and establish your market penetration rate. Knowing and understanding the market penetration of your brand can be a valuable tool and provide insight into how your customers and the wider market view your brand as well as the market health of your business and the extent to which you need to adjust your existing marketing strategy.

Before and after every marketing and sales campaign you run, you should take the number of customers you have and divide it by your target market size. Multiply this figure by 100 and you have your market penetration rate.

Once you have this percentage available to you, you can more accurately determine the success of your campaigns and set realistic goals for further growth. Remember that your market penetration rate is a comparative figure relative to the market you are operating in. You may start out with just your immediate area as your target market size, but as your business grows, you will likely want to expand this figure to a whole city, county, state, and eventually, the nation.

This way you can constantly be expanding your objectives and remain agile to changes both within your organization and in the surrounding market.

Inbound vs. Outbound

The next part of marketing field service businesses often struggle with is deciding how to strike the right balance between inbound and outbound marketing techniques. However, with the very nature of B2B sales interactions evolving more in line with their B2C counterparts, 2023 needs to be the year your field service organization really gets a handle on this factor.

Broadly speaking, inbound marketing is more suited to simple products or services with a low lifetime customer value, whereas outbound is often more relevant when it comes to more complex ones with a high customer lifetime value. In field service, we are generally selling a complex service with many options and variations – often needing to be tailored to each client – to customers where the intention is to maintain a long-term business relationship.

This heavily suggests that field service brands should lean more towards outbound marketing strategies as opposed to inbound, but this is not necessarily the case. With a wide spectrum of field service provision out there, the choice is not always obvious. For example, a field service brand which operates under a software as a service [SaaS] model, will often prefer a cost-effective and digitally focused inbound marketing models, where a large-scale field service enterprise operating under a franchise or similar model will likely tend towards outbound.

Because the lines between these kinds of field service operations are becoming increasingly blurred – a healthcare provider may for example want a single field service provider to provide a remote SaaS style for connected devices, but also require more traditional maintenance for other machines – we are increasingly seeing many providers opt for a hybrid model where inbound and outbound models are combined to target specific customer segments with the most appropriate strategy.

This is why understanding your market penetration is so important as it will allow you to deduce the needs of the companies more accurately around you and therefore strike the right balance between inbound and outbound marketing.

Final Thoughts

Marketing field service provision in 2023 is going to require a far more careful and data driven strategy than in previous years. We can no longer rely on sales calls alone and must seek a hybrid model if the way we market our services is going to match the increased intelligence in both field service provision itself and the medical companies we serve.

Join us on workshop day to take an active part in addressing smart service marketing, and how it can help you commercialize your service with Director of Global Service Sales and Marketing at Boston Scientific, Josh Papenbrook at Field Service Medical 2023, being held in February at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, CA.

Download the agenda today for more information and insights.