Make Your Mark: The case for marketing and advertising at community utilities

By Girish Balachandran, General Manager, Riverside Public Utilities

As community-owned utilities, we have the advantage of knowing our customers. They are our neighbors, councilmembers, parents of our schoolchildren’s friends, the mail carrier, the local grocer or even the hero at our doctor’s office. But as ratepayers in our community, these people also want to know how we spend our money. In fact, a common question community-owned utilities face is “Why spend money on advertising and marketing?”

Don’t let this deter you. Strategic marketing and advertising for your utility provides many powerful benefits to your entire public power community. Sponsored community banners, special events, bill stuffers, educational materials, presence at neighborhood meetings and digital interaction with videos and social media can pack a lot of punch without cracking your utility’s annual budget. Identifying up to 10 percent of your total utility budget for marketing and advertising will lead to priceless results. At Riverside Public Utilities in southern California, we maximize a fraction of that and see results with just $450,000 each year — less than one percent of RPU’s annual budget.

The formula is simple: marketing and advertising allows utilities to make their mark over and over. It’s easy to remember, too — metrics, attraction, relationships, conservation and support, or MARCS.

Let me show you how it’s done.

M: The metrics of marketing and advertising — findings from a yearly commercial and residential survey, the analytics of what is being said on social platforms, or even the face-to-face responses during an outreach event — give indicators to help a utility better understand customer needs as they evolve. Metrics are a measure of utility performance, but they can also give feedback on important issues like rates, renewable power and conservation preferences, and other insights that help local decision-makers. Metrics provide a roadmap of your customer’s wants and needs. That’s everything from how they want to be communicated with and what they will expect from you in the future. Understanding this roadmap is key to building trust and changing behavior. RPU conducts a yearly survey to gather important metrics that help us define the types of outreach we must incorporate into our plan for the year.

A: Smart marketing efforts can help with attraction and investments for your city. They communicate your affordable rates, reliable service or whatever benefits your utility can boast, especially compared to the competitors in surrounding service territories. At RPU, we leveraged marketing and advertising to attract a regional community hospital and then convinced them to expand. The hospital now invests more than $350 million in our community, creates jobs and tax revenue, and ultimately raises Riverside’s quality of life. For what we invested in attraction advertising, that’s a big win for the whole Riverside community.

R: The very nature of our business is rooted in relationships and trust, in good times and in bad. At community-owned utilities, we interact with customers when most utilities do: when their power is out. But at RPU we are compelled to interact with them proactively at community parades, chamber of commerce events, and gatherings like the Lunar Festival and holiday Festival of Lights. We also strengthen bonds with community members via the “Count on Us” campaign. A presence in the community creates opportunities for ongoing education, which is the foundation for positive relationships with stakeholders and local elected officials — and it’s the best deterrent for mistrust during a crisis like a power outage, equipment failure or accident.

C: Conservation mindsets, whether drought or renewable energy goals, hit all of us in the utility business. Efficiency is top of mind and a culture of conservation must drive every utility’s supply plan. Targeted marketing, advertising, public relations and community outreach are required to implement effective conservation programs so that customers know how to be water smart or thoughtful energy consumers. Strategic efforts include tailored messaging, awareness campaigns, and the development of educational materials.

S: There will always come a time when your utility needs support from the community. Whether it’s a rate increase, new practices or programs, or a high-cost capital improvement project, positive and strategic marketing prior to asking can make all the difference. At RPU, we use monthly newsletters, bill stuffers, advertisements and social media to communicate needs and count on this very support to drive our own capital improvement projects.