Show, don’t tell: the key to services marketing

It’s not easy to create great marketing content for a clean energy services company that effectively differentiates you versus your competition. The crux of the issue is that all of your competitors can make the same core claims:

‍

“We have the best team.”

‍

“We put the client’s needs first.”

‍

“We have the most experience.”

‍

“We’ve supported XX GW of project deployments”

‍

“Our proprietary processes deliver results faster/better/cheaper.”

‍

Whether you sell engineering, EPC, O&M, consulting, quality assurance, legal, or assurance services, you face the same problem.

‍

As a quick aside, my favorite (and least effective) example in this genre is the “we have a combined 1,000 years of experience in the industry” claim. Does that mean you employ a gaggle of people you recently hired straight out of college? Or do you have two Yodas on staff?

‍

From your buyer’s perspective, each claim above reflects an area critical to the success of their project. But with most competitors making the same claims, how can a buyer separate the wheat from the chaff?

‍

This problem can’t be solved with better adjectives or more creative verbs. Spending a lot on advertising and promotion can help, but it doesn’t address the core problem. 

‍

That core problem, from the buyer’s perspective, is that the only way to truly find out if the claims are true is to start working together. And that is no solution at all.

‍

Demonstrate your expertise

Luckily, to paraphrase Yoda, a better way there is. Or perhaps I should say, companies that have a truly differentiated capability can easily solve this problem. Instead of telling everyone how good you are until you are blue in the face, simply share a portion of your data, insights, and analytics.

‍

The term “thought leadership” has been overused to the point of becoming a cliche. Yet, when you create detailed and nuanced content that directly speaks to problems your target decision-makers struggle with, it generally breaks through and influences perceptions. 

‍

Say, for example, that you’re looking for a company to perform annual maintenance across your portfolio of energy storage projects. Company A walks you through a presentation covering the size of their team, a map of locations they have supported in the past, and a visually appealing but hard-to-decipher diagram that describes their process flow (I’ll bet $100 it is a circle!).

‍

Company B, on the other hand, shares a detailed white paper describing the most common drivers of accelerated degradation. It clearly outlines what needs to happen during annual maintenance visits to avoid them. It also shares a link to a recent podcast where one of their field technicians discusses the proper way to maintain and test fire detection systems, including a particularly painful example of the inadvertent discharge of a fire suppression system and why it happened.

‍

Which company has built up more credibility in your book?

‍

Capture attention

Great content is only effective if you can get your target audience to read it. Thousands of ads and marketing messages inundate us every day. Compare that to the number of pieces of content you actually click on or read each day. It likely ranges from zero to a handful.

‍

What catches our attention as we efficiently filter out over 99% of the stuff that shows up in our inbox every morning (newsletters, webinar invitations, etc.) and our LinkedIn feeds? Some of it is actual news (the latest change to trade policy, for example). 

‍

The rest is primarily content that speaks to a problem we currently struggle with or a topic we feel we don’t understand well enough. In fact, if you’ve read this far, that is probably why!

‍

How do I get started?

Virtually every service provider has the raw ingredients for excellent thought leadership content. It may be in your daily logs, in your project management software, your ticketing system, or sitting in the heads of your most experienced team members. 

‍

To identify that marketing feedstock and transform it into thought leadership, start with these questions:

• What are the biggest problems that our customers struggle with?
• Are there any problems they have, but may not be aware of?
• Where does our company have unique visibility into what is happening in the field?
• What do we see regularly that would surprise most others in the industry if they knew it?

‍

Once you’ve found the raw ingredients, the rest of the process, while potentially time consuming, is not that complicated: especially if you have a detailed understanding of your target customer, their problems, and the relevant industry dynamics.

‍

If you’d like help thinking through your thought leadership and content strategy, drop us a note at info@renewcomm.com or fill out our contact form.

‍