Are you a service brand looking for your last agency?
Strategy: How We Help Service Brands Strategize Growth
Depending on your niche, you likely have to be very strategic about how you identify potential customers. If you’re a pool service company, you don’t want to spend money on ads in college newspapers, just like you wouldn’t probably rely on Instagram ads to reach senior citizens about in-home care options. Plus, depending on your business model, you may offer a product or service that most people don’t need on a regular basis, like window replacement or waterproofing. In those cases, how can you tap into your system of happy customers and turn them into referral-drivers for your business? Brands that don’t have a brick-and-mortar location to help with brand awareness have an even higher hill to climb.
You might think that marketing sounds complicated. There’s some truth in that belief, but we’ve got some good news for you. We can help! Whether you’re launching a new service line, a new location or just want to get more potential customers into your sales funnel, we’ve got you covered.
Our overarching strategy as an agency starts with to tell the stories of the people behind your brand — whether that’s your customers, your team members or your founders — because brands don’t sell brands, people do. The first step is building the right strategy for winning. Maybe you have a strategy, maybe you don’t. In either case, we will challenge that strategy to find the best path to winning. We can be as deep of a strategic partner as you need – whether it’s handling end-to-end strategy, repositioning the brand or focusing on one aspect of the marketing mix – but we do our best when we are able to guide, or at least weigh in, on business strategy.
When we kick off working with a service brand, we ideally like to start with an assessment. It starts with an in-depth meeting where we dig into every nook and cranny of your brand to understand the past and brainstorm on how to build the future. After this meeting, our team gets to work on building a playbook – starting with the positioning of the brand (the “why you” / “why now”) to developing a content and PR plan to creating a budget to evaluating the sales process. You will receive a 50+ page playbook that your team can use, or we can execute.
Owned & Paid : How We Help Service Brands With
Content And Digital Marketing
How do we use people to tell a story about how your services fill a gap in the marketplace? How have your brand ambassadors (whether it’s an owner, technician, service provider or customer) seen success with your services? If you’re launching a new product or service, what was the thought process behind it? We’ll dig deep into your brand to pull out your differentiators to create stories and package them for your target audience.
With our 1851 and Estatenvy publications, we have created a platform that provides service brands with a digital newsroom that houses all of a brand’s news, whether it’s relevant for a potential franchisee or consumer audience. It’s not just a place to post content, though; rather it serves as a tool to educate your prospective clients, customers or franchisees about every aspect of the brand – through the perspective of the people behind the brand
- Content: 1851 and Estatenvy are custom publications that define the “Why you?” and “Why now?” To build content, we dig into what sets your brand apart from others in the space; how it is growing and winning with consumers; what’s newsworthy; what stops people from joining the brand and most importantly, validation from existing stakeholders.
- Amplification: 1851 and Estatenvy integrate Facebook, LinkedIn and Google APIs to provide brands with one place to view (or create) content and digital campaigns – in real time.
- Technology: 1851’s technology is like nothing that exists – brands get access to data, insights, cross-domain tracking (visitors to both 1851 or Estatenvy and your website) and more. We are always one step ahead of trends in digital marketing to ensure that we are ahead of the curve and delivering results.
- Data & Analytics: We don’t just set campaigns and let them run. We analyze every campaign to identify what worked (in terms of content and targeting) and what behaviors your targets are engaging in to provide strategic guidance for the next campaign.
As with any marketing strategy, our publications are just one piece of the puzzle, but serves as the foundation for storytelling for your brand. We amplify the content on 1851 and Estatenvy through digital marketing, public relations, website, social media and more to make sure all the pieces are working together for the biggest bang for your buck. We’ll take a close look at your goals and what channels work best to reach them. Once we’ve developed the right campaign, we’ll run it, optimize it and analyze it. We’ll dig into the data (of the campaigns and the impact to your business) to measure success, develop insights and make recommendations for our next campaign.
The beauty of working with Mainland is that we are always working closely with our brands to make sure that what we are doing for them is working – and adjusting accordingly. We can scale up or down on our content production and campaigning based on what is working and what isn’t.
Owned: How We Help Service Brands With
Website Development
We bring together years of experience studying the best user experience and most important content needed to create an impactful website that drives results. Regardless of the target audience or the intended behavior, we have worked with many brands to create compelling websites that are optimized for conversions. Some key areas we highlight on service brands’ websites:
- Why this brand, why this industry, why now.
- Depth and experience of leadership
- Growth and vision for the future
- Human interest content that drives users to engage
Owned: How We Help Service Brands With Creative, Social Media & Content Marketing
There is a huge gap between Social Media and Content Marketing. Agencies and brands alike understand how to create media and content, yet few can leverage the other two terms in this critical communications tools – Social and Marketing.
When Social Marketing is applied to content, the story takes life. How?
Through
conversation:
What inspires you to share something on social media? Is it a powerful image or video? Is it something that will educate or inspire your followers? We ask ourselves these same questions before we develop any content. We don’t create content for content’s sake – we are always looking for the best way to encourage our audiences to engage.
Through digital
advertising:
Our work doesn’t stop at developing image and copy. We take it one step further by creating a campaign for the content to reach our intended audience. With social media, content is evergreen, meaning anything can be shared by anyone at any time. Sure, some content is inherently more timely or newsworthy, but we can add more life to a story through targeted digital advertising.
Traditional
Marketing:
We always take a multi-channel approach with our content. Not only do we share it on social media and through digital advertising, but we give you a tool to deliver your story through your marketing channels, whether that’s email campaigns, company intranet, within your four walls and more.
Our approach is both complex and simple. It is complex because it has been created after years of studying brands, consumer behavior and marketing. It is simple because we focus on the fundamentals:
- Telling the right story
- Getting it front of the right audience
- Surfacing stories in the channels where our targets live
- Digging into the data to develop insights for the next campaign
- Leveraging technology solutions to work on our behalf
We do not take a “set it and forget it” mentality to social media and content marketing – our campaigns are always evolving. We are regularly analyzing what we are doing to make sure it is resonating with the target audience. The beauty of working with an agency like Mainland is that we have the benefit of working with dozens of brands, studying their campaigns and seeing what is working (and what isn’t). We never have blinders on – and we always keep the intended target (a person) in mind when crafting messages and campaigns.
We work with Property Damage Appraisers (PDA), a brand that provides fast, quality damage estimates on property, automobiles and specialty/heavy equipment. We create impactful images that highlight how unexpected challenges can create incredibly difficult situations and how PDA is well-positioned to get people back to life and back to work. We tap into seasonality, weather patterns, and company innovation to develop compelling social content and build digital campaigns that allow us to reach their highly focused target audiences: claimants and insurance companies.
Some franchise brands we have helped with social media:
Earned: How We Help Service Brands With Public Relations
A lot of agencies consider “doing PR” to be drafting a few press releases, blasting them out to a database and crossing their fingers for results. We take the opposite approach. As mentioned above, we dig into a brand and uncover every possible angle that could be considered newsworthy. We don’t just ask our clients what they’re doing, we proactively create stories with a focus on the humans behind the brand. We create strategic quarterly plans of the stories we want to tell to the media – but we don’t stop there. We tap into the news to position our clients as experts on timely subjects, develop trends, leverage data and position our clients as thought leaders in their respective spaces.
Public Relations Wins for Service Brands:
Mosquito Joe
ENTREPRENEUR MAGAZINE
A Buzzing Business: How These Entrepreneurs Turned a Longtime Annoyance Into Successful Careers in Pest Control
Property Management Inc.
SCRIPPS
Some workers are finding they can do their job from anywhere, including exotic locales
Christmas Decor
FOX BUSINESS
Holidays are not cancelled this year; Halloween and Christmas sales ramp up earlier than usual
Two Men and a Truck
FOX BUSINESS
Two Men and a Truck CEO on surge in demand for movers, push to fill job openings
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Work For Mainland
We love working with awesome brands and awesome people. Are you one?
Senior Account Supervisor
Chicago
Do you love working with people? Is client relations your thing? Do you have experience pitching the media? Do you love the idea of helping a company grow? Then you may be the right person for us.
Account Executive
Chicago
In the Account Executive position you will be the agent for achieving concrete public relations results for our roster of clients.
Account Manager
Chicago
We’re looking for a client services pro, with experience managing cross-channel marketing activities. Knowledge of PR, digital marketing and content; the ability to build strong relationships with...
Writer
Chicago
As an agency driven by the written word, we do countless writing projects for our clients every day, including but not limited to: press releases, bios, bylined articles, pitches, website copy, advertorial copy, blog posts, social media calendars and more.
SEO Manager
Chicago
This position will be responsible for the following: Managing the SEO content arm 1851franchise.com, estatenvy.com, and newly launched digital publications); managing Google Analytics; supporting project management; writing content and working with clients.…
Director of Social Media
Chicago
The Director of Social Media will be responsible for creating valuable and engaging content across our clients’ social media platforms. The Director of Social Media will work closely...