Understanding digital marketing best practices can be uncharted territory for home services businesses. You have to design, optimize, manage, curate, and so much more. Trying to do everything at once can lead to some aspects of your digital presence not getting the care they deserve.
While there are common denominators across all home services companies where mistakes are common, it doesn’t mean that you must fall prey to these same traps yourself. Identifying potential problem areas and developing strategies to navigate through these issues requires careful planning, strong execution, and a willingness to address any hiccups along the way. Let’s take a look at some of the most common home services digital marketing mistakes that we see in the sector.
It’s no secret that social media has experienced a boom in recent years in the digital marketing world. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more have proven beneficial to home services companies to reach a wider audience and increase ROI across the board. However, the approach to using social media for business should be more nuanced than merely pumping out sporadic organic content and hoping that it reaches the right audience. There are ways for you to help increase the impact of your social media presence.
Investing some money into sponsored content can help your overall social media reach. You determine the target demographics that you want to target through the sponsored posts, have full control over the posts to focus on, and can tailor your approach to your current needs, regardless of how they might be shifting or evolving. Through these targeted demographics, you can ensure that those who would benefit most from your home services will see your content.
Social media also presents a delicate balancing act between pushing your services, the value that your business offers, and oversaturating their feeds with your sales pitch. Social media users have an array of needs and reasons for using these apps; they do not want to have a constant barrage of ads. Striking the right balance between selling your services and experience with engaging and informative content can prove challenging — but absolutely essential — for your overall success.
You may have the right organic and paid social media strategy to help drive your business forward. Still, if you aren’t interacting with your audience, you miss out on opportunities to forge relationships. For the home services industry at large, forging lasting relationships with customers creates the repeat business that keeps your company growing. People might be leaving comments on Facebook, mentioning you on Twitter, or tagging you on Instagram; however, if you aren’t taking the time to interact, respond, and potentially address any concerns they voice, they will remember the inactivity and potentially take their business elsewhere. Social media is a powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal; taking the time to ensure you are leveraging it properly across all avenues is essential for your business.
Digital marketing is a continually evolving field where new trends your business can take advantage of come into play. However, some strategies have proven reliable over the years that some home services providers take for granted. They either do not adequately implement the tactic or do not invest in it altogether and miss out on potential opportunities to grow relationships with customers. With tools such as email marketing, PPC campaigns, and a solid, well-researched SEO campaign, you can invest more time and capital into your business and get the right eyes in front of your service to drive growth.
While social media is the belle of the ball at the moment, relying solely on social media means you’re missing out on other, potentially fruitful growth avenues. With an engaging email marketing campaign, you can directly communicate with people on your email list and help drive revenue. With services like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and others, you can send out email blasts announcing deals, reminding people about your services, and spurring them to think of your business when they need a problem resolved.
Whether it’s an HVAC provider, landscaper, or a plumbing business, every home services business wants to rank better on Google results. Research shows that users rarely venture past the first page of Google when looking for services, so the most effective way to improve your rankings remains investing in a strong SEO campaign. If you aren’t researching relevant keywords and producing content that utilizes those keywords, then Google’s search algorithm will not rank you as well as you could for your services. Taking the time to ensure that any images you use are properly optimized for SEO can help improve your ranking as well.
A PPC campaign can help drive organic traffic to your website through a targeted campaign. Taking the time to invest in a PPC campaign allows you to devise a strategy that targets specific keywords and demographics that can lead to a high conversion rate. Google only charges you when users click on your ad so that you can see a potentially favorable ROI.
Finding the right balance between digital marketing standbys and the evolving medium of social media can make or break your digital marketing strategy. Neglecting even one of these avenues can lead to your home services business not capitalizing on every opportunity to drive growth forward.
How people interact with your website remains just as important as the content you put out. If your website doesn’t function appropriately across all possible platforms, you miss out on potential customers. More and more people are increasingly visiting websites from their phones, and if your website does not scale with the change in medium, people will move onto the next service. A mobile-first mentality will ensure that your website functions the same whether users visit on a computer versus their device. This will also help maintain a consistent user experience and show your potential customers that you care about the meticulous details that make their experience a positive one.
When you’re designing your website, there’s sometimes the temptation to go overboard to make it stand out from your competition. Whether that comes in GIFS, overly-stimulating images, or extravagant color schemes, how you present your website and services in the digital space is critical to properly engaging with users. Ensuring that your website is a pleasant and intuitive experience for your visitors will help keep them on your website and drive them to make an appointment. They want to feel like the home services they book is an experienced authority on the subject and not one that relies on smoke and mirrors to get business.
Running a home services business requires time, energy, and a clear strategy. Handling the company’s digital marketing side can present a challenge where you don’t have enough time in the day to take the operations and marketing sides equally. That’s where hiring a dedicated professional website marketer can help give your business the edge it needs moving forward. Dividing and conquering with your trusted website marketing partner can help drive your ROI and develop relationships with new and existing customers in a way you couldn’t achieve beforehand.
Developing effective digital marketing strategies can prove challenging for home services business owners. Navigating through this evolving field’s nuances requires keen attention to detail, a sound plan, and a little bit of help. In our most recent white paper, 10 Mistakes You’re Making In Marketing Your Home Services Business Online, we cover some of the most common marketing mistakes and how you can avoid them in the future. Identifying the areas where you can improve can help your home services business succeed in the long term. Download our whitepaper and contact us today to learn how we can help you refine your digital marketing approach. Call us now to get started!
About the Author:
Dan Matthews is your friendly neighborhood content writer at 1SEO. His secret dream is to go onto Guy’s Grocery Games, win, and parlay that into a recurring role as a judge. You can find him around town sampling the finest taco spots Philadelphia has to offer.
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