Can you smell that? We’re baking up fresh new ideas to help dealers gear up for those sweaty months of hitting the pavement and canvassing for sales.

Our experience shows many large companies in the security industry have grown due to door knocking. It is June, which means hot days and eager-beaver college students are ready to earn some dough by knocking on doors and trying to get that contract. It takes a special breed — a person of leather skin — to get doors repeatedly slammed in their faces.

But what if there was a way to get the door slammed gently or, better yet, not at all for your door knockers? What if there was a way to break the ice with your potential customers by allowing them to know who will be coming to their door in days or weeks to come?

We would like to share with you a new social media experiment we’ll be conducting.

We are going to use social media as our platform — specifically Instagram and Facebook as our vehicles to drive our awareness and messages. We are planning to get some of our clients’ top door knockers on video telling their name and a little bit about themselves, and then then doing a quick description of home security and inviting the viewer to download a free checklist, available at the client’s website, that will help them be better prepared to talk about their home security when the door knocker comes calling.

So we have multiple door knockers on video describing themselves and announcing they’ll be in the neighborhood in the near future — now what?

Inside Facebook (which handles advertising on Instagram as well), we’re going to take those videos and segment each one of them according to zip code. Ahead of time we know which door knocker will be hitting up which zip codes or areas. Our intent is to frequently and consistently hit those areas online weeks prior to showing up at the door.

Think of how many times you or your family checks Facebook; now imagine if we were targeting your area, how many times you’d see our video or even our ad. If we were targeting your area you’d see our video or ad approximately15 to 30 times, depending on the frequency we choose.

Now, ring ring, or knock knock… guess what? The college kid you’ve been seeing on video for the past three weeks is now at your door. We’d venture to guess the potential customer answering their door will chuckle and say “Aw, you’re the kid we’ve been seeing on Facebook/Instagram for the past week.”

Now you have a captured audience who hopefully downloaded the checklist provided on your website and is ready to ask about what your security company can provide for them.

This method costs literally pennies compared with a PPC campaign, and it is more affordable than a direct mail campaign — plus, everyone loves video. We can’t say that enough; people go bananas over videos, so why not use that to your advantage?

Another quick idea we have already implemented for one of our customers was we created a city-wide Easter egg hunt that generated hundreds of shares, thousands of new likes to the security company’s Facebook page and brand awareness that has helped their canvasing efforts due to the local coverage from the newspapers and local media.

You can have holiday-related events that you can promote on Facebook for about $200 to be viewed by thousands within a zip code of your service area to help expand your brand and awareness.

Don’t just take from your local community, give back! And use Facebook as your vehicle to drive your security company’s messaging and to promote your events. It’s affordable laser targeted according to your demographic and it will definitely help your company to drive sales when it comes to door knocking.

Should you decide to use the idea of using videos and Facebook to soften your door knocking, let us know how it works for you. Until next month, believe in beautiful fat purple cows.