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Marketing & Promotion: Why It Goes Beyond

Selling Your Services An abstract of The Geoholics Podcast –

Geoholic Anonymous
Prepared by Trent J. Keenan, PLS & Kristina Poulter

Marketing is something that’s easy to put on the
backburner. Particularly in smaller operations, day-to-
day work can leave little time for big-picture thinking.

But marketing is an important piece of the puzzle to
keep geomatics work flowing, particularly in the post-
2020 pandemic world.
The good news is that there are many ways to
approach marketing, and not all of them are focused
on explicitly selling your services.

On a recent episode of the Geoholics Anonymous
podcast, five business owners lent their expertise to
break down why marketing is important and how they
approach it. Here, we share their best advice.

Build visual brand recognition

From logoed hats for your employees to sponsoring the next local sporting event, one of the first pillars of marketing is getting
your company’s name out into the community.
This is the cornerstone of Trent Keenan’s
approach, owner of Diamondback Land
Surveying based in Nevada.

Trent recognized early on that surveying is
something most people need once or twice in
their lifetime. That means they don’t need to
know the details of his services, but they do
need to be able to think of Diamondback when
they encounter the rare need for surveying
work.

“My entire marketing strategy is branding
and logo recognition,” Trent says. “So when
somebody does a search and they have five
survey companies to choose from, they see one
that’s been a part of the community. They see
the logo, they understand it. They understand
what surveying is. It starts with a company
name.”
Branding is all about a long-term approach to marketing, not one that will result in overnight jobs and new business.
But it’s paid dividends over time for Trent, who invests a healthy budget into sponsoring local youth sports teams and getting
his logo and company name on jerseys, tv airtime, and radio broadcasts.

“Put yourself in these situations where you have a long-term and a visual logo all the time. That’s been our biggest strategy
since I started in June of 2008,” he says.

This outside-the-box thinking can go even further when you make a connection between the community event you’re
sponsoring and the surveying profession itself.
For instance, Diamondback will survey the distance of a home run so that they can tie the measuring aspect of surveying into
something fun that the general public will understand.

12 The Nevada Traverse Vol.49, No.1, 2022