Oluwadunmola Adefioye | Updated: June 4, 2023 | Home services marketing
Your marketing campaign can be the difference between success and failure as a home services provider. A successful campaign means reaching new customers, establishing your brand, and driving revenue. However, with so many marketing channels and formats available, knowing where and how to focus your efforts to get maximal returns can be challenging.
In this guide, I’ll help you see some neat ways to 10x your home services marketing campaign ROI. I hope you find them actionable and can improve your bottom line. But first, let’s go over some of the things you might not be doing right.
Home services advertising campaigns could fall short of expectations for a number of reasons. Some common culprits include ineffective audience targeting, poor choice of marketing channel, and an unclear or unappealing marketing message.
You can improve your campaigns and achieve the desired results by spotting weak links and tweaking your marketing tactics.
Let’s highlight common factors that lower home contractor advertising ROI:
Failing to be specific in mapping out an ideal customer profile (ICP) negatively impacts marketing ROI. When marketing campaigns reach a very broad audience that includes people who aren’t interested in the services, it also means a chunk of the marketing budget is being wasted on people who will never convert into paying customers. Instead, it’s always better to advertise to potential customers who match your ICP to get better conversion rates.
Here’s an example of wrong targeting: if you want to run a cleaning business marketing campaign, failing to narrow down your target audience demographics (to go above age 25) and your location, means that your marketing efforts would be seen in areas you don’t cover and by younger people who don’t make housekeeping decisions. In the end, much of your budget won’t yield positive ROI.
Many home service businesses choose the wrong marketing channels or the wrong format when trying to reach potential customers. The timeline algorithm differs from one marketing platform to the other. And that’s why different marketing formats would perform differently on varying channels. For example, text tweets perform well on Twitter, whereas short videos do great on Instagram reels and TikTok.
So, as a painter, I would pick marketing on visual platforms and leverage the appeal of high-quality images and videos. Whereas for a moving company, text format is great in describing routes and answering questions, hence Twitter would be a viable marketing option.
Interestingly, not understanding the best format to use per channel does more damage than the platform choice for business marketing performance. The best approach is to test multiple channels and multiple formats per channel. And this is another crucial step that many home services businesses leave out in their marketing.
The home services industry has a lot of verticals and players all vying for the attention of the same customer group. So, it’s a disadvantage for small and medium-scale businesses competing against established brands. However, new home service businesses can improve their marketing performance by addressing their marketing message or USP to a very specific ICP.
Without a unique selling proposition (USP) or brand messaging that resonates with a specific buyer persona, you risk losing potential leads and revenue to more established brands. A specific painting business brand narrative like “Office murals for tech startups” would separate your brand for improved ROI outcomes, while also reducing direct competitors.
Now that we have established some mistakes that could make your home services marketing campaigns fall below expectations, let’s see some of the tactics we deploy (or advise) to deliver top-level home services marketing campaign ROI for our clients.
By identifying specific audience segments and mapping out their customer journeys, you can develop a captivating brand story that speaks directly to a specific group among your general target audience. You can then tailor your marketing message to resonate with their special needs and preferences. This establishes an emotional connection with these specific potential customers and helps them see the benefits of choosing your services over the competition.
For example, as a landscaping company, you can decide to specialize in eco-friendly design. The brand story could then emphasize commitment to environmental sustainability while creating beautiful outdoor spaces. By using this message consistently across your marketing channels and gathering insights into customer behavior, you can refine your targeting and messaging to reach eco-conscious homeowners who would gladly pick your services over others in the same field.
Targeting specific locations alongside a defined customer profile is crucial to get the most out of your home services marketing campaign. By incorporating relevant regional terms into targeted keywords, you can increase the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies and maximize your ad budget. Other times, you also have to exclude irrelevant areas using negative keyword lists.
As a plumbing company in Los Angeles, you could use regional search terms like “Los Angeles plumber” or “plumbing services in LA” in your keyword strategy. That way, you can explicitly target people seeking plumbing services in the Los Angeles area. This makes a higher conversion rate possible and saves money spent on targeting audiences beyond your service area.
Other local SEO practices includes getting your business listed on niche-relevant digital business listings. In the home services industry, websites like Houzz, HomeAdvisor, and Yelp are very trusted for customers to get an idea of what to expert from service providers. So, you can better your online rating by monitoring what customers are saying about your business online.
Also importantly, you need to pay attention to your Google My Business profile (GMB). By optimizing your GMB profile, you can bring together all your online ratings into one place. Then customers can easily locate your business when prospective clients search within your service area. Also related to your GMB listing is the Google Maps Pack location calibration. This would help customer to find your business physically, and this also helps deliver customers from searches in your region. You can see why location targeting is quite important to successful home services marketing campaigns.
Your landing page is often the first touch point of potential customers who find your home service advertisement campaign. Hence, a well-designed landing page is key to converting interested traffic into action-taking site users.
To create an effective landing page, consider the following tips:
According to a recent survey by BrightLocal, 91% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. You can leverage social proofs by including customer reviews and testimonials when running Google ads, in social media posts, and for your website content. By sharing the experiences of happy and satisfied customers, you can build credibility and trust with potential clients. Also, you can increase the conversion rate for your website by strategically showcasing what others are saying about your home services business.
As a home services business, you can retarget both existing and potential clients who have previously engaged with your online brand to increase your customer lifetime value (CLV) and overall revenue. This can happen by running advertisement campaigns across various marketing channels to earn more mindshare among your target ICPs. You can try this with social media marketing and also with Google Ads for contractors.
You can also use email marketing campaigns to effectively follow up with your website visitors by providing them with educational information, personalized messages, and special offers to keep your brand top-of-mind and drive customer growth.
It’s essential to have a data-driven strategy to actually 10x your home services marketing campaign ROI. If you don’t know the metrics that you’ve crushed, you can’t know when your marketing returns are doubled or “ten-timesed.”
Essentially, you have to familiarize yourself with tools like Google Analytics and Ad Campaign manager to track your marketing efforts and measure their effectiveness. Also, you can identify profitable campaigns and make informed changes by analyzing metrics like bounce rates and click-through rates.
Additionally, you can employ a data-driven approach when curating your ad campaigns by using the Keyword Planner tool to identify the keywords with the most potential. While a well-defined negative keyword list will also save cost by not showing your ads to people who do not fit into your ideal target audience.
Another important tool to use to monitor your website performance is Google Search Console (GSC). This one is pretty important to be able to tell which pages on your website are being crawled, indexed, and getting listed for the appropriate keywords. GSC is quite important for home services brands because sometimes, your website content could be ranking for other service verticals which could result in low conversion rates on your web visitors.
Another powerful tool for attaining higher click-through rates and conversions for your home services business marketing efforts is to include personalized CTAs. According to a study by Hubspot, personalized CTAs convert 202% better than generic CTAs.
To effectively incorporate CTAs in your marketing campaigns, it’s essential to understand your audience and tailor the “button designation” to resonate with their exact needs. For instance, if you’re offering a service that requires an appointment, a CTA such as “schedule a free consultation” would be more effective than a general “contact us” CTA. Furthermore, incorporating urgency or limited-time offers in your CTAs can create a sense of urgency and encourage prospective customers to take action.
To get the best home contractor advertising ROI, keep a close eye on critical metrics like the total number of conversions, customer acquisition cost, click-through rate, cost per lead, number of shares, and marketing spend, to mention but a few. Tracking these metrics will tell you what marketing channels and media formats are working well and help you make data-driven decisions to improve your overall marketing plan.
You can measure your home services marketing returns by using various analytics including Google Analytics, Facebook pixels, and Ad campaign manager. Each marketing channel comes with its analytics tool which provides insight into marketing campaign impressions, audience demographics, user journey, and conversions.
Yes, location targeting can improve the ROI of your home services marketing campaigns. By focusing your online advertising efforts on specific regions, you can reach ICPs who are within your serviceable locale.
Every home services business should have a comprehensive marketing strategy to stay ahead of the competition and ensure that every dollar spent on marketing is put to good use.
As we’ve examined in this piece, maximizing your ad spend and marketing budget starts with targeting the right market, then developing a strong business narrative that addresses customer problems. You also have to back your marketing effort with continuous tracking and campaign data analysis to identify what works and what doesn’t.
This simple approach has proven to be a powerful tool for driving growth, building a loyal customer base, and “10x-ing” the home services marketing campaign ROI for some of our client businesses.
Want to dive deeper into online advertising for home service contractors? Check out our comprehensive guide on advertisement for home service businesses.
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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