Why the pandemic transformed a legacy cleaning company’s marketing strategy

The marketing industry is often accused of being superficial, burnishing images with clever taglines or fancy new logos. But the pandemic inspired some marketers—including ABM Industries, a 112-year-old cleaning company—to transform their services from the inside out. The company chose to evolve cleaning from a “very budget-sensitive operational expense” that happened behind the scenes to a public-safety oriented “clean people could see,” said Cary Bainbridge, chief marketing officer. To accomplish that, ABM formed an advisory council of experts, redesigned its service, retrained and certified more than 3,000 staffers—and only then created new messaging. Register for Ad Age Next: Health & Wellness at AdAge.com/NextWellness. How did ABM initially respond to the pandemic? This became not only a story of adapting, but also trying to play offense while the rules continually change on you. Right away, we put together a cross-functional operational response team. We knew that our customers were going to be looking to us for guidance. One of our immediate steps was leveraging the web to create a COVID Response Center with how we were going to help respond quickly to immediate guidance from the CDC. We’re a 112-year-old company. Cleaning is what we do. Traditionally, cleaning has been a very budget-sensitive operational expense. Our purpose, to take care of people, spaces and places that matter to us, had been elevated in a way that never mattered more. Traditional cleaning methods weren't going to work anymore. It was about disinfection of the spaces and making sure people were certified and trained to be able to do it properly. How did this transform the company? We leveraged our experts because so many products were hitting the market, and our clients weren’t sure how to make sense of it all. It not only elevated what we did on the ground, but it also elevated the conversations that we were having on how to reduce risk and control infections. It wasn't just how we went to market with this product offering, but it was also how we empowered our sales and operations teams to guide the conversation with our existing clients. What was the new product offering? The enhanced clean offering was a prescriptive three-step approach that could deliver healthy spaces using a certified disinfection process backed by experts. What was unique about it is we developed an expert advisory council made up of industrial hygienists and epidemiologists helping guide the development of our program. How did you train staff quickly and safely? We leaned on our experts to create certified processes and training. We’ve trained and certified more than 3,000 enhanced clean facilitators and disinfection specialists to then train others on how to use hospital-grade disinfectant and specialized equipment for those hard-to-reach areas quickly. That was the basis before we got into some of the evidence-based testing that really validated that the disinfection was working. What was the messaging? Our entire marketing strategy was fueled by the message of this idea of “safety you can see.” Optics and perception are an important part of this. Our facility managers and property managers want to have visual assurance that high touchpoint areas are being disinfected. Think about cleaners used to cleaning at night. We're increasing staff during the day in a uniform. They want that visible. But then there's a key part of enhanced clean that's unseen—the certified processes and the training and the staffing and supplies and the testing showing that the disinfection is working. How did you bring the new offering to market? We did it in three waves. Obviously, for the first two waves we didn't know where the pandemic was going. We started with our top 100 clients and then our next 200 clients because we needed to make sure we had the supplies and staff to take care of our existing customers. It started there, with the sales enablement materials to guide our sales and operators through those conversations, really positioning ABM as the trusted expert. The third wave was about going broad and leveraging all owned, paid and earned media, all tactics and channels, to really take our message broad to all clients, all prospects, and really amplify that. It was about building brand awareness and credibility for who we are as a company and about introducing the value of enhanced clean and the service offering itself. Did you bring in outside partners? We used our internal marketing team for the bulk of waves one and two. We knew in terms of the speed and the scale that we had to engage our outside partners to help. It wasn't just about the competition that might have been out there, but it was really building that customer confidence. We chose channel partners and platforms that were proven to drive efficient consideration and conversion for this digital effort. Our channel mix was heavily focused on very targeted display advertising and publisher partners such as The Wall Street Journal and several of the industry trades. We did some co-branding with WSJ to give us that broad awareness and credibility with relevant industry penetration, so that we could strike a good balance giving a halo effect of exposures. What story were you telling? The story centered around this idea of safety you can see and what offerings like enhanced clean were going to be able to enable America to get back to work. That came in the form of an article, a bylined article or one of our enhanced clean videos. We used a mix of both. In some cases, we were right on the main page, really trying to get that halo effect of exposure to not just the investor community, but the C-suite and business decision makers. How did it work metric-wise? The exposures that we got from WSJ in such a short period of time was exciting for us because we hadn't done anything at that scale. In an eight-week period, we had 75 million impressions. Even our enhanced clean video that we launched with had more than 5 million views right out of the gate, when the highest views we had ever gotten before was 18,000. How did you adapt your lead flow management? In the first half of this year, year-over-year, we saw a 50 percent increase in leads. Now we're looking at how to tighten up our lead scoring mechanisms and the funnel in the segments we know we can deliver on. We're strongly aligned with our sales organization, and that includes our inside sales team. We’re breaking it down by each of our businesses and looking at that lead flow—where we are in the qualification process, what we need to recycle back into a nurture campaign if they're not ready. Then, it’s continuing at a local level with our regional sales leaders to make sure that we keep them moving through that funnel as quickly as possible. Subscribe to Ad Age now for award-winning news and insight.

Why the pandemic transformed a legacy cleaning company’s marketing strategy

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