Digital marketing for home improvement companies isn’t always at the top of business priorities. If you are in the home improvement business, then you are in a lucrative niche. However, due to the stiff competition in the industry, you may find it difficult to get more clients. But it doesn’t have to be that difficult. You can maximize your business potentials via digital marketing.
After all, clients are always springing up and need someone to repair their faulty home appliances or system. Utilizing some best practices for digital marketing may be what you need for your business. You can reach your target audience, generate leads, and increase revenue. In this article, you will learn about five best practices in digital marketing for home improvement companies.
Five Best Practices in Digital Marketing for Home Improvement Companies. Five Stages in the Online Customer Journey.
Becoming visible in a customer’s online research gives you a chance of being selected by them. In fact, recent research shows that 93% of consumers will search for a business online. It is important that you understand how customers are making their buying decisions today and that you put processes in place to win at every stage of the online buying journey.
Create Awareness
Creating awareness is the first step in digital marketing for home improvement companies. That is how your customers know your company exists. Here, you create awareness about the services you offer. Since it is for home improvement, you could break your services into commonly searched terms such as remodeling, kitchen upgrades, bathroom upgrades, and so on. To achieve this goal, you will need to implement some awareness strategies such as social advertising, email marketing, and video marketing.
Starting with social advertising, you could make use of social media to implement this goal. Social media targets a wider audience and gives your brand more exposure to the public. To harness the power of social media, the first thing to do is to locate where your target audience is. Are they on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, or Reddit? By understanding the platforms they use, you can develop content that will capture their attention. Whether you want a blog post or videos, infographics, or pictures, they will engage with the content and give your brand more exposure. This is a great opportunity to show off your work with before and after pictures.
Concerning email marketing, you may start by asking your clients to sign up for newsletters, weekly promotions, helpful tips relating to home improvement, and others. This helps you to reach new audiences while retaining existing ones. More audience implies more exposure to the public.
Finally, videos are a great way of capturing the public’s attention. After all, a video is more likely to be watched than other forms of content. Besides, research reveals that about 95% of viewers retain more messages in a video than in texts. As a result, you can create different unique video content to reach more people. For instance, as a home improvement company, you can publish an explainer video (DIY) about your product or services. Or you could upload a testimonial video about the review of your products or services to capture your audience’s attention. When your audience becomes interested, they tend to find out more about your brand. This increases the awareness of your brand and allows you to harness the potential of digital marketing. Consider asking your customers to do a video testimonial in the space where you’ve just completed a project.
Let Your Customers Find You
After creating awareness, your customers should be able to find you both offline and online. In other words, when people need a home improvement company to help them with a project, the name of your company should be found on various local business listing sites. Keeping your listing information up-to-date and accurate helps your business be listed more prominently and is a strategy to help support your online reputation.
There are different ways to enable your customers to find you. One of them is the use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With SEO, search engines like Google can rank your page in the search engine page result and establish you as a presence among your competitors. It can enhance your visibility on the page with SEO elements such as keywords, backlinks, meta titles, meta descriptions, and many more.
Also, you can utilize uploading your location on a map to give directions and allow your clients to visit you in person. You can also utilize GPS to give directions with ease. Make sure that you have listing information that is mobile friendly so that mobile users and search engines will prioritize your business information.
Finally, targeted ads through mediums such as PPC(Pay-per-Click) allow you to send ads to specific audiences which they can use to find you online and is also a common tactic to support awareness.
Online Reputation Matters
There is more to this than just having happy clients. Properly managing online reputation is one of the most critical activities in digital marketing for home improvement companies. Reputation management is the trust engine in digital marketing for home improvement companies. It is all about letting customers know that you are an active business that is generally liked by its customers. This is often a pivot point in online searches. If several home improvement companies come up in search.
Online reviews are an important and obvious factor in reputation management. Positive reviews are important, of course. Also important are recency and engagement. Recent reviews signal both prospective customers and search engines that the business is active and that customers are generally happy with the home improvement services provided. Engagement refers to review responses. You should be responding to every review very soon after it’s written…both positive and negative reviews.
There are tools available to help automate the tasks of requesting reviews from customers, guiding them to the review sites most important to your business, monitor reviews and responding to them. These tools also often include sentiment analysis which helps give you an unbiased view of what’s being said about your business and whether the sentiment around certain words and phrases is positive or negative.
Make Scheduling and Payment Easy
In the online buying journey, conversion is getting customers to do business with you as their preferred home improvement company. Now that you have gotten your customers to this stage, wouldn’t it be a waste if they don’t do what matters most with ease? For home improvement companies, you can start by developing a website or a that will allow them to schedule an appointment with you or book your services. Research has shown that almost half of consumers are looking to book a scheduled time with a business after hours. To do this effectively, ensure that your customers have a smooth experience when interacting with your website. It should load quickly and have clear calls-to-action to maximize conversion.
Create Raving Fans
Building advocates from your past customers is the final stage in good digital marketing for home improvement companies. You certainly appreciate the value of positive word-of-mouth. In today’s modern buyer journey, word-of-mouth has moved online. This is where having tools and processes that make it easy for customers to leave reviews is important. Utilize a review request system that sends requests by SMS (text) message as well as email. Engagement with text messages is around 95% versus email which is only about 10%.
Take your customer advocacy a step further than just collecting reviews. Turn those positive reviews into social advertising to reach a wider audience. Also you can utilize tools like Reputation Manager to place your best review right on your website automatically.
Conclusion
Digital marketing for home improvement companies requires that you manage every stage of the online buying journey. That can be a tall order for home improvement businesses that are already juggling multiple projects with multiple customers and juggling everything else it takes. That where tools and services come in. Just like using the right tool for the job in construction, using the right tool for the right digital marketing task helps make the job easier. Outsourcing some or all of the effort to a trusted partner can help home improvement companies scale their grow more effectively.
