Leading Commercial Snow Contractors Do These Things in the Warm Seasons to Prepare for Winter
—
The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Table of Contents Click Here to Show
It’s never too early for commercial snow and ice companies to start preparing for the winter season. There are considerations for the amounts of supplies you need to order, the number of hires you need to make, and whether you’ll need subcontractors to help manage your snow accounts. With labor being challenging to find post-pandemic, finding quality production crew members and account managers can be a task that’s best not left to the last minute, so preparing for the next snow season in the spring and summer months is essential.
Ultimately, consistency in marketing is key to success as a commercial snow and ice management company—whether attracting new snow accounts or high-quality recruits. Leading commercial snow service companies take three actions during the warm season (and all year round) to prepare for winter: creating a marketing strategy, managing their online presence and reputation, and optimizing recruiting efforts.
Creating a Content Strategy for Marketing & Recruiting as a Commercial Snow & Ice Company
At the end of the snow season, it’s time to evaluate overall performance and create a strategy for the following winter. While this includes analyzing materials and equipment needed, it also involves assessing labor needs, creating a marketing strategy, and reviewing contracts and financials from the previous season.
Top commercial snow contractors don’t wait until August or later to start this process. The more time you have to prepare and implement your strategy, the better results you’ll see. We know how difficult it is to find time to strategize during the warm weather months. At HALSTEAD, we have helped countless commercial snow and ice management businesses create ongoing systems that ensure consistent winter business marketing and recruiting efforts.
Developing a Snow and Ice Management Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is an investment that continuously produces results. Once evergreen content is on your website, it’ll serve indefinitely as a part of your front-line sales team or your recruiting strategy, depending on the topic.
Your first step to creating an effective strategy is Identifying your target audience for each piece of content you create. For a commercial snow contractor, your target audience would be ideal commercial properties you’d like to service or prospective snow and ice management team members.
-
USING CONTENT MARKETING TO ATTRACT COMMERCIAL ACCOUNTS
What types of commercial property accounts do you want to attract? You might prefer large distribution centers over small retail locations, for example. Consider location, industry, company size, and property type to identify your target audience.
A large part of any content marketing strategy is the company blog. Creating a content plan with topics relevant to your target audience will help attract them to your website as they begin their customer journey. The B2B buying journey isn’t linear. It includes a series of five phases:
Phase 1: Problem Identification
This is when decision-makers identify a problem that needs solving. In this case, they must keep their parking lots, walkways, and surfaces clear of ice and snow.
Phase 2: Solution Exploration
This phase generally starts with a Google search. They might search keywords such as “commercial snow services near me” or similar. This phase is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play for your website.
Phase 3: Requirements Building
At this stage, the decision-maker identifies precisely what they need the services to accomplish. For commercial properties, this might mean ensuring that outside areas are clear of ice and snow to minimize liability claims and keep business running as usual.
Phase 4: Service Provider Selection & Validation
This stage is where a service provider is selected and reviewed to determine if they meet all of the requirements. This is generally the first contact for a consultation or to get information. Other members of the organization may review the service provider to validate and approve the decision.
Phase 5: Final Decision
After a thorough analysis, a final decision is made. If the commercial property team decides to move forward, they’ll sign a contract, and you’ll obtain the account.
The content on your blog serves to meet potential commercial snow clients where they’re at in the journey. You might have blog articles about how commercial snow removal services help minimize closures during the winter, the importance of not waiting until the winter to develop a snow removal plan to ensure peace of mind, how to choose a commercial snow and ice management company, or a list of benefits of commercial snow removal that includes minimizing liability concerns and keeping the business running smoothly all winter.
The ultimate goal is to keep potential clients engaged by providing educational information that brings value and provides a solution. Your content helps you keep your clients informed about snow services and concerns and helps establish you as an industry authority and build trust.
-
USING CONTENT MARKETING TO ATTRACT HIGH-QUALITY TEAM MEMBERS
Approaching recruiting with a marketing approach will boost your results and help you attract higher-quality team members. The post-pandemic world is an employee market, meaning you’ll need to stand out as an excellent employer to attract candidates.
Just as there is a customer journey, there is also a candidate journey that begins the moment they encounter your brand, whether via a job posting or a social media ad—even if the topic isn’t directly about employment. The steps along the journey include awareness, consideration, interest, application, selection, and hire—very similar in concept to the customer journey. Creating content that meets them at each stage of the journey is critical.
Promoting Company Culture With Strategic Content
Many factors influence potential candidates, and one of the largest factors is team culture. A recent study found that one of the top three things job seekers are looking for is respectful leadership—a core component of positive company culture.
Ultimately, treating everyone with respect and fairness, having opportunities for career advancement, and having a positive team environment are key components of good company culture. Demonstrating these factors via content marketing will help attract potential candidates as long as you authentically have a positive company culture.
There are various content types to use to reach your target candidates, including:
Employee Video Testimonials
Video testimonials are compelling because the viewer can see the employee’s face and hear their voice, helping create a connection. Have one of your operations managers share how they started on the snow and ice walkway shoveling crew, earned their CDL through the company, advanced to a snow plow operator, and now manage a team.
Stories like these make an impression on potential candidates seeking to further their careers. This is especially important because many believe the snow and ice management industry has no room for advancement.
Candid Photos & Videos of Employees Training, at Work, and Play
Featuring the faces of your employees within your photos and videos is effective, mostly due to psychological reasons. Faces naturally captivate people’s attention, and people subconsciously link them to feelings. Studies show that people interact more with photos featuring faces.
Opportunities for professional development are also an important factor for many job seekers. As your team goes through training programs such as slips and falls safety training, basic plow and salter repair and maintenance training, and site-specific hazard training, take photos or videos of these seemingly routine practices and use them for social media content. Showing how much you invest in the development of your employees can help attract driven people who want to advance in their careers.
A strong recruiting campaign involves using candid photos and videos of employees at work and play—demonstrating how your team balances work with fun. These visual elements create a compelling story of your team culture that will help attract candidates.
Employee Spotlights & Recognition Posts on Social Media
Everyone wants to feel appreciated, and featuring an employee spotlight or a post recognizing an employee on a recent promotion or accomplishment helps show your company culture. While you’ll want your employee’s permission to post their photo and story on social media first, most employees will feel proud to be featured and respected for their work.
As a bonus, your employee will likely share the post, which helps you gain more brand awareness amongst similar people who could become your next rockstar employees. These posts serve the dual purpose of building a positive company culture and showcasing it.
Managing Your Online Reputation and Branding as a Commercial Snow Services Business & Employer
Actively managing your business’s online reputation is no longer just an option or an afterthought; it should be a core component of your overall marketing plan. 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. With 98% of consumers reading and writing local business reviews, closely monitoring your online reputation is critical.
Whether the reviews on Google My Business are positive or negative isn’t as important as your response. Even negative reviews can help sway a prospect or job candidate toward your company; if you respond with a thoughtful, respectful, and growth-oriented approach, you can help develop trust in your brand.
Establishing Your Business Branding Online
Everything that prospects and job candidates see online involving your business is branding, whether intentional or not. Branding is much more than the colors you choose or the design of your website; though these are important factors, it also includes your company culture and the factors that set your business apart from the competition.
Highlight what makes your business different from the others—your value proposition. Do you have equipment with the latest technology to complete every job efficiently? Maybe your trucks have GPS trackers and material tracking systems to accurately measure the materials used. Perhaps you keep meticulous notes that help prevent liability claims against businesses. You may have a 24/7 snow tracking base where someone closely monitors the forecast and deploys your fleet at the first sign of snow.
Establishing your brand to show these qualities can be impactful, both for attracting commercial snow and ice management accounts and potential employees who are intrigued by the possibility of working for a company that uses state-of-the-art equipment.
Consistency is key in branding, online reputation management, marketing, and recruiting. These tasks cannot be left for when the snow season begins but must be maintained all year—even in the warm months when no one wants to think about snow.
Establishing Your Online Presence on Your Website, Job Boards, and Social Media
Your website is the hub that keeps all your content in a central location. You can share the content featured on your website everywhere, from social media to email newsletters and beyond. Establishing an optimized online presence that effectively demonstrates your branding helps attract potential snow accounts and employees.
SEO on your website will help with organic reach, and combining these efforts with ad spend amplifies the efforts. Similarly, Facebook ads allow for targeting to reach the right audience. All the features mentioned (your website, SEO, social media, branding, online reputation, ad spend, and content) create a marketing system that works like a well-oiled lead-generating machine. Each helps build your online presence for greater visibility among your target audience.
Amplifying and Automating Recruiting Efforts for Commercial Snow Contractors
While sales marketing and recruiting are similar in almost every way, you can also use an applicant tracking system (ATS) to amplify and automate your recruiting efforts. With HALSTEAD’s CrewRecruiter system, we optimize your job postings for SEO and professionally write to brand guidelines in a way that appeals to what job seekers want, making the many benefits the focus rather than the position itself. Automatically posting to 100s of job boards, including the top industry platforms, you can expand your reach and effectiveness.
Implementing such technology streamlines the process and, when combined with the total marketing system, creates the results you’re looking for. Not having to search desperately for job candidates when winter arrives will ease your stress during this busy time.