Oluwadunmola Adefioye | Updated: June 3, 2023 | Home services marketing, Home services websites
As a home improvement services business, regardless of your service vertical, whether it’s heat pump care, lawn care, or air conditioning services, you need good branding to stand out. Every business owner wants their brand to stay top-of-mind for customers, but this doesn’t happen by wishful thinking.
Your home service brand needs to be well positioned online, such that homeowners would think of your business first when in need of the services you offer before they think of other brands.
Eager to learn how branding can help scale your home service company for improved growth? Follow through on this conversation.
Home services business branding combines various marketing solutions to create a favorable identity and character for your business, ensuring your brand sticks with consumers while driving overall company growth. The primary benefit of branding for local home services companies is the consumer loyalty and recall value it brings to the table.
Here are some terms you need to know when it comes to branding:
Consumers automatically associate your name with their required services when your company’s brand identity is effectively positioned. And the best part is how this isn’t limited to one service alone but spreads across all your service verticals; no matter the problem encountered, your company is first on their mind.
When your home improvement business is a household name in the industry, customers would be willing to stick with you for all of their services. In addition, you’ll get free referrals, and prospective clients due to the testimonials and reviews that these brand loyalists give.
Branding for local home services companies isn’t a one-day job that yields results overnight. It’s a fruit that comes from long-term online marketing strategies that continuously boost your brand’s recognition and reputation. This steady process involves consistency, which might seem like little drops of water until it becomes a raging flood; where the company sells itself.
Here are some of the best strategies to implement when looking to put your brand out there:
Your business narrative, otherwise known as your brand story, is how you establish your brand identity and develop the business’s core values. This is where you create an emotional connection with your target audience (existing and potential customers), communicate why you do what you do, and how you can help them solve their problems.
A good brand story should be:
Your business narrative should be well-planned, resonate with the target audience, and be relevant at all stages of a buyer’s journey. Your brand story should spur your readers or listeners to engage the company, whether the service consumer is at the awareness stage or the purchase stage.
For example, an HVAC company brand story can center around how poor heating affects the feeling of homeliness at different times of the year. The feeling of safety, coziness, and warmth is a major need for homeowners. Hence, having your company brand story highlight how you help achieve their desires and needs creates an emotional connection with your brand. Your business narrative isn’t about making sales but how to help people solve their problems and live a more comfortable life.
Even though stories are more remembered than figures, it’s easier for people to relate when you inculcate numbers in your text. This way, you can share insights from your marketing team and about the home service business without losing the audience’s interest. For example, stating that 9 out of 10 homeowners prefer using lawn mowers to weed whackers, can help inform how customers engage with your lawn care brand.
To gain insights on your home service vertical, you can either reference large statistics sources like Statista or Forbes. But my preferred method is when you let your business control the narrative. How to do this is simple. Comb through your customer lists and gather specific data from qualified customers. For example, if you want to establish how often home owners in Manhattan care for lawn, you can send out a survey to past customers or potential clients in the suburbs of Manhattan. Then, you can gather the results and publish online. This would register your brand as a topic expert and authority. And that can help you gain more referrals and improve your domain authority.
This is the visual part of your branding journey. Ensuring your website is pleasing to the eye, easy to understand, and operating smoothly is a surefire way to reduce abandon rates and entice the modern consumer to your home improvement brand.
Speaking of user-friendly websites. You can check out our complete guide on home contractor websites and get all the information you need to build a fashionable home for your brand online.
Endeavor to choose a logo, tagline, font, and color that suits your home service business. Admittedly, building and maintaining a website might be a bit over the top for a non-specialist; however, this is where a specialized home contractor website developer ( like Klutch Growth 😉) comes in.
Map the website layout with prioritized user actions, and ensure the page buttons and dropdown menu are located at positions where your service consumers can easily find them. And to measure the effectiveness of your website setup, you need to install analytics tools like Facebook pixels and Google Analytics into your website backend.
Optimizing your website for computer use alone will see you miss out on about 60% of online traffic generated from mobile devices. Most homeowners looking for home services are in a panic mode and won’t remember to use their PC to book services; they’d most likely use their mobile phones which are handier.
Your website content should consist of more than words; it has to include videos, pictures, and everything the audience interacts with on your blog. To get the best out of branding for home services businesses, try to:
Utilize your blog posts to provide visitors with information related to home services. In your research, address prospective customers’ questions regarding your local home service company and emphasize your advantages over competitors. If you can position your blog as a go-to source for home improvement topics, it’ll attract site visitors and rank via organic search. And at the same time, drive lead conversions.
Combining helpful and SEO-laden content with other technical SEO bits will help bring about a boost in search results, as your home improvement business would rank high on search engines. This is a good home service marketing strategy since a highly-ranking website puts your business in front of more potential clients.
Doing SEO is not easy business. It requires proper content marketing strategy and lots of patience, especially if you’re a new business in the home care industry. The trick is to bear in mind that SEO is a long-term game. So, you need to write content to rank for keywords, but also use persuasive tactics like brand storytelling to help convert the traffic you gain over time into paying customers.
Branding for local home services companies is most effective when there is a widespread online presence. As the goal here is to put your business at the forefront of the market, you need to increase your reach as far as possible.
Promoting your brand online involves growing your brand followership; the first way this happens is by educating your website visitors. While this often involves publishing helpful content via your blog, it also banks on good user experience and the quality of your content. As your content readership and engagement grow, you can also leverage your articles to promote new and exciting offers to your audience.
Social media platforms are another great way to improve your online visibility, as you can build a solid following through them. Your social media posts will not only encourage quality engagements with your followers, but they’ll also help you reach a broader audience. And if you ever run out of what to post on your page, repurposing content from your blog is a great idea.
Social media ads are a great tool for retargeting leads that interacted with your online brand but didn’t convert. Part of branding for local home services companies is staying top of mind for potential clients. You can improve your brand’s recall strength by keeping your social media pages active and engaging. Then, employ retargeted social media ads on the side to grab repeated attention. You have to tactful in implementing this. You have to diversify the content formats that prospective clients would encounter online, use a mix of text content, images, carousels, and videos.
In addition to your brand’s organic engagements, paid advertising is a great way to expand your business reach. This is a home services marketing tip with proven results. For example, Influencer marketing and social media ads are paid ad options that leverage social platforms whether directly or indirectly.
Then, there are other options like Google local service ads (LSAs) and display ads which are search advertising channels. The main goal here is to be seen, hence it’s advisable to use multiple channels and multiple formats when promoting your brand online.
Put your business up on recognized digital business listings for local home services brands, such as Google My Business, Yelp, HomeAdvisor, Houzz, etc. Prospective customers visit these trusted sites in search of home service providers like yourself. Optimizing your business directory also involves making your services company contact readily available and adding a conspicuous location to put you ahead of the competition, especially those in your service area without an online reach.
To cap our discussion, branding for a home service business is only good if the service delivered is top-notch. To ensure a pristine reputation and see that your branding strategies don’t go to waste;
Happy customers will be eager to drop positive reviews that’ll get your home services business out in front of more people. If your brand doesn’t live up to its promise and instead delivers subpar services, you’ll end up spending most of your time on damage control rather than promoting your business.
Testimonials from clients go a long way in convincing prospective customers of the goodness of your service industry brand. Ask your clients who’ve received 5-star services to pass comments showing their satisfaction with the job, and add these customer reviews to your website, social media, and business directories. This further strengthens your brand’s position as a top company in the home improvement business and gives credibility to your claims.
One of the key characteristics of any notable home service brand is good customer relations. Since all reviews can’t be good, and online reviews can mean the difference between converting and losing a lead, you should mitigate the risks by contacting the complainants and seeing how you can help them sort through any issues.
The best way to increase your home improvement brand visibility is by having a brand story that resonates with your audience and spurs them to engage with your brand. You can then infuse your brand story into your online marketing efforts, including blog content for SERP rankings and social media posts targeted at engaging with your audience.
Even though hiring an agency to provide digital marketing services and help build your brand would be more productive as they likely have more digital marketing experience, it isn’t mandatory. You can build your brand by yourself if you have the expertise and the time.
Yes, social media marketing is a form of branding since it involves widening your company’s reach and recognition. The more people get acquainted with your brand, the better your chances of lead conversion.
Service branding is simply branding restricted to the service industry alone. While regular branding combines products and services, service branding is the applicable term when it comes to branding for local home services companies.
The local home services playing field is vast and filled with customers requiring the services of home contractors. What you need to do is strategically position your brand and form a connection that’ll keep you top-of-mind with your audience.
Don’t forget, branding for local home services companies starts with having a relatable brand narrative. And then, you need to create awareness for your business by putting out content consistently, maximizing social media channels, leveraging paid ads, strategically using customer reviews, and most importantly, doing work that you’re proud of.
We get how busy life as a business owner can be, which is why we’re here to reduce your burden. Klutch Growth will help you handle the nitty-gritty of promoting your home service brand, from website design down to search advertising; if this sounds like what you need, book a free call session with us by using the form below.
I enjoy writing engaging and practical articles that help local businesses grow. That’s why I take my time to understand the industry - customers and businesses - before writing a word.
Aside from content marketing, I enjoy watching football and love my beloved Arsenal FC.
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