The Indispensable Guide to Home Services Marketing

For the home services industry, the digital marketing game has changed. Today, digital advertising and marketing are leveling the playing field for local home service companies to compete on a larger scale.

Online marketing strategies to attract, engage, and convert customers have grown to dominate the market, meeting customers where they already are. But when you consider the digital landscape, the competition can be fierce and be hard to keep up if you’re not a marketing expert or have a full time marketer on staff.

Home service businesses need sales to survive and need to maximize their return on marketing spend in order to thrive, grow, and own your market as a leader customers turn to over and over again. In this guide, we show you the way to the inside track on how customers look for home services and what they expect to find when search out solutions.

Here are the home services marketing steps to building a long-term, sustainable, and successful local business.

Local Search

“Hey Google, find me a plumber.”

Homeowners are using local search engines like Google and Bing to find home services to help solve their issues. When a consumer searches for a local business or service, they’ll see ads, sponsored links and organic search results. Companies need to make it easy for consumers to find them.

With the increasing use of voice search you can now use tools like Google Assistant to find home service companies near the user.

Make sure your website is SEO optimized for the service areas you cover and use your services as keywords to catch any would be customer searches.

For example, “Indianapolis plumbing” or “Denver area air conditioning repair companies”.

Search Engine Optimization

When you optimize the content on your home services website, you need to think like a potential customer. What are they searching for when they are looking for someone like you?

In home services marketing, it’s important to SEO certain pages on your website for what customers likely search for.

“Garage door repair + Des Moines” or “Ceiling fan install + Portland, OR area”

As you continue to optimize your website, you’ll add new content focusing on keywords that build out around your services pages. The idea being you have a page for each unique service you offer.

Did You Know?

95% of home services companies we requested a quote from didn’t respond to us within 5 minutes. Learn what else keeps many home services companies from being successful.

Pay Per Click

Optimizing your website and setting up your local business listings are great best practices to follow, but sometimes you need to spend more money to make more. Enter pay per click advertising.

These are the sponsored ad links you see at the top of Google and Bing when you search.

Because these ads are shown above the organic results, consumers are prone to scan and read these ads first before getting down to the other non-paid pages. This is prime real estate, that comes with a cost, but ensures your home services company name is at the top of the search results for your prospective customers.

Website Design & Content

There are four things every home services marketing website needs to have: a phone number call to action in the top navigation bar, be easy to navigate, be mobile friendly, and publish relevant and useful content.

Having the perfect website design can help accomplish all of this.

The phone number at the top of the website provides prospective customers the chance to click and make a call to your sales team immediately from your website.

Simple navigation ensures the information you are providing can be found quickly and not create frustration that makes them exit your site.

More than half of all web browsing is done on a mobile device. You better make sure your website looks great and functions properly for smartphones and tablets.

The more content you publish that helps consumers find the services and support they needs for their home services, the more they’ll remember your brand and think of you when the time comes for repair work.

Lead Capturing and Management

Consumers today live in a digital age where speed is everything. More homeowners are on the web, window shopping in their browser searching for solutions, and enlisting services through forms and live chat bots over picking up the phone. That means home services companies need to maximize their lead generation and operational response to make it simple for consumers to engage with your sales team online, and be there ready to respond in a timely fashion to their digital requests.

Home services companies need to realize that once a lead comes in, they need to jump on that lead and get service scheduled within the first five minutes.

In fact, 95 percent of home services companies don’t respond to online leads within five minutes. The first step to improving your company’s speed to lead is understanding your actual baseline call response time.

Did You Know?

Only 37% of home services companies we requested a quote from called us back. Learn what else keeps many home services companies from being successful.

Lead Nurturing

Not every person that comes to your website will be ready for a new system or repair work. The key to home services marketing is to make sure prospective customers keep your business top of mind when the time comes to reach out.

You can use a blog newsletter sign up to collect leads that you can nurture over time. Once you build up a database of prospects, build out some simple email marketing campaigns and direct mail campaigns to make sure your brand remains memorable.

The more you keep top of mind, the more likely you’ll be the first a customer calls when they need help.

Direct Mail & Email Marketing

Both email marketing and direct mail play off one another as additional nurturing touches in the customer lifecycle. With the right amount of information on your leads, you can segment your database and send off very personalized messages to your audience.

With email marketing, simply use the data fields from your form or additional information collected in your CRM to make smaller groups of contact that share similar traits. For example, you could create a list of customers that previously had AC repair work in the last two years but haven’t had a new unit installed. Send this list a specific offer for a discount on a new unit or asking them about another tune up.

You can use the same idea for direct mail and provide offers directly to the customer’s mailbox. Often times, it can be physically holding something out in the yard when they get the mail that makes them think now is the time to get that heat pump looked at.

Customer Review Programs

Once you have a solid flow of leads coming in and your average ticket values are where you want them, you should focus on getting your recently pleased customers to share their experience with a customer review.

There are multiple places where customers could leave a review, including your Google Business Profile, Facebook, Angie’s List or HomeAdvisor. You can ask customers if they were pleased with the service you provided to find your profiles and leave a 5-star review.

Remember to make it as simple as possible for customers to leave a review. If you ask them in an email, make sure you link to the page where they can leave a review and don’t just ask them to find it themselves.

Social Media Marketing

People love interacting with their favorite businesses on social media, and the home services industry is no different. You can post pictures of your team at the office or working on site to show customers your company’s personality. Before and after photos are a great way to visually show the power of your services.

You can also post content you publish on your website to help educate customers about your services and regular tips. Host a contest to generate new leads and get your followers to engage with your posts. The most engagement your social media posts get, the more likely other followers will see your posts in their feeds.

Trust Your Home Services Marketing With An Expert

Valve+Meter helps businesses in the home services industry create more leads and close more deals by optimizing their lead management strategy and maximizing their speed to lead success rates. Get in touch with us today to start a free assessment of your home services marketing efforts.