Unlocking Growth: Jack Nagy Shares His Field Service Marketing Secrets

Dan F

Published on March 7, 2024

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On this episode of the Profit Roadmap podcast, Ryan and Bekah sit down with Jack Nagy, founder and president of MTA360 - a leading marketing and advertising agency specializing in helping field service companies.

Jack shares his valuable insights and proven strategies that will help you:

Leverage marketing to grow sales
Improve your SEO and website
Boost close rates on sales
And so much more!

Jack's Field Service Roots

Jack brings a unique insider perspective that comes from his decades of experience in the HVAC and plumbing industries.

He grew up in the family business, working at all three levels - contractor, distributor, and manufacturer.

His background gave him an inside look at the challenges faced by field service companies.

Jack has taken that experience and created MTA360, his marketing agency, over 20 years ago.

The Foundation for Success

Before you try and massively scale your company, Jack says that you have to have a solid foundation in place.

Even though every business is a little bit different your foundation should include:

An optimized website
Strong SEO and content strategy
A review generation process
Email/ticket integration
Chat functionality

Jack says, "It's like building a house - you need to pour that slab and frame it up before worrying about the roof."

Getting this digital foundation in place allows you to effectively promote your business online.

Generating Leads that Convert

Over the past 20 years, Jack has learned about business and marketing.

And he says that businesses really want one thing from marketing - leads that turn into sales.

Before you can improve that process you need to take a step back and look at the entire lead conversion process.

Here are a few things to consider when doing that in your business:

Monitoring phone calls with AI technology to identify missed opportunities
Training customer service staff on effective communication
Having a strong in-home sales process focused on customer benefits, not product features

Jack's team uses tactics like recording/scoring calls and having staff do role-playing to continuously improve lead handling and closing rates.

Budget Sizes

Field services businesses have marketing budgets of all sizes.

And if you have a small budget, it doesn’t mean that it will keep you from being competitive.

The key is developing the right strategy based on your budget and goals, rather than trying to do too much too soon.

So be sure your “foundation” is in a good place first before rushing into splashy advertising tactics like billboards or radio.

Also, Jack recommends taking on a tight geographic radius that aligns with your current website authority and budget numbers.

So instead of trying to take over all of Florida, start by dominating Tampa first.

Jack is big on reminding service businesses to understand where they are at now from a marketing perspective.

Extending too soon can be disastrous and Jack says, "You have to know point A before you can effectively get to point B."

The Power of Backlinks

One area Jack is extremely knowledgeable about is backlinking strategies for improving search rankings.

He explains that backlinks from other websites represent 30%+ of Google's ranking factors because they signal popularity and trustworthiness.

Investing in a strategic backlinking program has been huge for many of MTA360's clients to dominate their local markets through SEO.

But ultimately, it really is about creating quality content.

This is what Google is looking for and Jack says that it should be written by a human.

He still uses AI at his company and has a full-time person dedicated to testing and model building.

AI is important and will continue to play an important role in business, but right now, quality content is still best created by humans.

Lessons for Today's Economic Climate

With inflation, supply chain issues, and economic uncertainty impacting many service businesses right now, Jack says that it is important to evolve the sales processes.

A big reason behind this is to meet changing customer mindsets and budgets.

Instead of leading with product features, Jack recommends visualizing benefits through storytelling.

He recommends staff roleplay with co-workers to improve presentation and sales skills.

Ultimately, brand visibility and lead generation are even more important when market conditions get tight.