Expanding into new markets and choosing the right place to open a new branch can be overwhelming if you don’t know how to identify what to look for. In this post we talk about a few things we look for at Rove Pest Control before we open new locations and a bit on how we use social media to expand our business as well.
We just opened a few new locations in Madison, Boston, and Detroit, and one thing we look for before we select a new market is identifying if a market has underserved needs.
This could come in a variety of forms, such as, a lack of quality service from competitors, specific services that aren’t offered by others, number of competitors in an area, lack of marketing depth, and lack of certain service qualities at a specific price point.
When there are obvious gaps in competitor offerings, we move onto the next step of identifying a market, which is narrowing down the markets that are underserved that we can best serve with our core strengths.
Once a suitable market has been identified, the following step is to research the minutiae of local and state laws and regulations that need to be addressed for the establishment of the business and organization.
The next step is simply plugging in our turn-key operations pieces into the new market and follow up with the step of driving sales in that new market.
In addition to the traditional processes listed above for growing new markets, we also implement strategies through social media to attract new customers and grow new sales teams.
How to use social media as a powerful tool to expand your business
There is definitely a right and a wrong way to use social media to expand your business. Unfortunately, a lot of companies just use social media as a place to pitch their products.
This is not the best way to build your business online and often will turn off more people from your business rather than attracting them to you.
A crucial thing to focus on with your social media should be to lead with value that can help solve your target market’s problems. Using YouTube has been an effective strategy to attract new customers and sales reps for our business.
A combination of informative and motivational videos has worked to achieve that. For example, since we work in Pest Control, we have a variety of videos, with facts about pests, and we provide tips to prevent issues before they happen.
When you lead with value, education and training, it positions your company as an expert in your niche, and when you provide value and solutions to problems your target market has, it will start to attract customers and business to you.
After each video, we then offer some sort of free give-away to bring people into our list and offer them discounts and specials, which leads to new sales of our products.
On the business side of things, we offer videos geared towards technical training aspects and motivation to attract the right kind of sales reps we would like to work with.
The great part about using YouTube and creating content through social media, is that it works for us 24/7 and has a compounding impact as we put out more content.
The combination of identifying correct markets for expansion and using social media as leverage to reach new customers is a great combo to help you grow your business.
