How to Create a Facilities Management Marketing Plan

With more competition than ever for the facility management service, FM’s internal teams need to ensure their customers know and understand the value they bring.

Although many facilities managers may feel that marketing is outside of FM’s core competencies, the facilities management team must consider how they market facilities services in their contact and conduct with customers. In this regard, customer service is key. However, the terms marketing and customer service are not synonymous. While customer service provides opportunities to reinforce positive images of a facility management service, marketing involves first researching who the customers are, then selling to them and promoting the facility’s services. The main responsibility rests with the head of the facilities management department.

All facility managers should understand the following basic marketing concepts:

• Know the market. Each type of customer, what their needs are and how they perceive facility management. Know and anticipate your needs.
• Know the strengths and weaknesses of the facilities management service. What is done well and what is insufficient? To do this, facility managers need to identify the skills involved in marketing, which of those skills are performed, and to what extent they are performed.
• Develop a marketing plan that serves as a roadmap.
• Recognize the importance of quality customer service. Every staff member at the facility should realize how each interaction with a guest can serve marketing purposes and foster a positive image of the facility management service.

Know the market

If a facility management department is one of the administrative services supporting the business departments, it is unlikely that much thought has been given to the commercialization of the facility management department. Instead, the deal was guaranteed: corporate clients had to obtain installation services through the department. Today, many facilities management customers have the option of outsourcing facilities management. Facilities managers are now competing with contracting companies that have developed considerable marketing skills.

As struggles for market share escalate, workers at every company have been besieged by entreaties from their leaders to be sensitive to their customers. This issue is particularly pressing for facility managers, whose customers are increasingly aware that they can choose where and how to obtain facility services. In many companies, executives openly allow departments to purchase installation services, putting the company’s facilities management departments in direct competition with outsourced vendors.

In recent years, facilities management clients have become quite sophisticated. They are smarter, better informed and much more cost conscious. Many have considerable experience in marketing their own products and services and expect others to market their products and services in the same way. They may know as much as the facilities management team on topics such as indoor air quality or accessibility for people with disabilities.

Facility managers must also understand that their customers are not people with identical needs, motivations and goals. Most businesses have several different types of customers. From the facility manager’s perspective, each constitutes a niche market — a particular population with certain characteristics and distinct needs. For example, senior management has different needs than administrative support units or core business units.

Facility managers also need to know the skills of their staff. Every staff member makes an impression on a customer in every transaction, whether by email, phone, in person, or in a report. For marketing purposes, every worker must understand the customer. Mechanics, caretakers, and housekeepers who come into contact with customers can wield more influence over them than higher-ranking facility management employees who are rarely seen.

Develop a marketing plan

To develop a marketing plan, it is important to identify the marketing elements already in place. The greatest strength is the range and breadth of customer contact. There’s a fundamental customer service maxim that applies particularly well to facilities management marketing: “If you’re not serving the customer, you better serve someone who is.” A marketing plan can be organized around the following basic steps.

• Conduct market research — Know the characteristics and needs of your customers; know the service of your competitors.
• Promote services — Design a marketing plan that matches services with the right customers. A marketing brochure explaining the establishment’s services can be customized for different clients.
• Keep customers informed — Talking directly to customers is an opportunity to inform them of upcoming developments that may affect them, such as new regulations. This allows you to apply another basic marketing maxim: “Prepare the market for change”. Eliminating surprises helps facility managers and their customers become allies.
• Evaluate service delivery — Ask customers for feedback on service delivery. In doing so, potentially damaging misunderstandings about the facility’s services are disseminated. This particularly concerns sensitive issues such as indoor air quality.
• Create a website — A website may allow users to download standards, post construction schedules, obtain standards forms, and post surveys or questionnaires for research or benchmarking purposes.

To implement the steps mentioned above, a comprehensive marketing strategy is needed. This strategy incorporates several key elements that form the backbone of an effective marketing plan.

This article is adapted from BOMI International’s Fundamentals of Facilities Management course, which is part of the FMA designation program. For more information about this course or BOMI-HP™ certification, call 1-800-235-2664. Visit the BOMI International website, www.bomi.org.

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