To grow your home service business, you’ve got to constantly acquire new customers. That means taking proactive steps to advertise and market your business to generate home services leads.
In the old days, it used to be about maximizing your Yellow Pages ad. Today, it’s about optimizing your Google search ads and your social media ads.
Facebook has a massive audience. 81% of US adults say they are on Facebook and 70% report they use it daily. No other website or social media site compares. Because of its audience, you can likely find the people you’re looking for.
Unlike many other advertising options, digital media lets you target audiences narrowly to find exactly the right type of people that you’re trying to attract. You can target locally, sort by home value or type, and marketing to existing customers or leads.
And, you can change your ad or shut it off completely at any time.
Facebook ads should be an important part of your overall marketing strategy for your home services business.
Here are seven tips that can make a difference in the performance of your ads. Following them can improve the number of home services leads that are generated but also optimize your spending and give you a better ROI.
One of the most important things you’ll do is to target your ads. Fortunately, Facebook gives you plenty of options to do so. You can target by demographics, geography, or lookalike audiences.
You should do an analysis of your best customers (the most profitable ones) and see what things they have in common. Let’s say that your best customers are 45+ years old, married, homeowners, with an income exceeding $75,000. Facebook lets you target those exact demographics in your service area. This cuts down waste by only showing your ads to people that fit that profile.
So, someone has seen your Facebook ad and responded to your offer about a $49 spring tuneup service for their HVAC system. Congrats! However, when they click on the ad, they get sent to your company’s home page and can’t find the offer listed. What do they do? They likely click away from your website and maybe start looking at your competitors.
You can avoid this by creating custom landing pages for your Facebook ads. When someone wants to take advantage of your offer or learn more about you, you want them to click through to a page making it as easy as possible to convert. In this case, they should go to a page with the spring tune-up offer front and center or by itself.
In marketing circles, we call this reducing friction. Anything you put in a customer’s way that causes friction will decrease leads or conversions. The simpler it is for customers to follow through, the better your ads will perform and the more home services leads you will get.
Before you start any campaign, it’s important that you set a goal for the amount you are willing to spend on customer acquisition. This gives you a better way to evaluate performance. It’s not always the cheapest ad that gives you the results you need.
As your ads get optimized, they will be more effective and you may be able to maintain spending levels while delivering more qualified home service leads.
It’s important to test several variations of each social media ad you use. You might test different images, copy points, and headlines, for example.
Facebook allows you to run multiple ad sets in rotation to see which performs best. If your goal is to generate qualified leads for your home services business, try multiple ads and see which rises to the top. This helps you improve your contractor leads and your ROI.
Often, contractors get a little nervous if they don’t see their ads provide immediate results. Although it does happen sometimes, we suggest you let ads run for at least a week before making significant changes. Facebook is also optimizing your ads behind the scenes. After all, the more leads they send you, the more the social media company makes, too.
When you’re launching a new ad campaign, Facebook will give you options for how you set it up. You can choose from several variables, such as:
When you select the goal, it will also help Facebook to determine the potential reach, delivery, and cost per result.
Advertising works most effectively when you have a broad enough reach to capture interested prospects and enough frequency to make an impact. Often, it takes a few exposures before someone decides to take the next step and engage.
When people tend to see your ad too many times, though, “ad blindness” can set in. You may be serving ads to people that aren’t interested in your services or wasting money showing the same ad to the same people. You can fight both of these scenarios by carefully tailoring your audiences, measuring campaign results, and creating multiple ad variations.
It may be the same ad but use a different image. You may want to vary the headline or include different offers for your home services business. This can give you the frequency you need to invite engagement, but it can also reduce ad blindness.
Another way to optimize your ad spending is to optimize your audience.
For example, once someone responds to your offer and becomes a qualified lead for your home services company, there’s no need to show them your ads anymore. You can do this by creating a Facebook Custom Audience and then excluding them from your campaign.
This tells Facebook to show your ads to everyone that fits your audience profile except for the people you’re already doing business with.
If you have current customers, you may want to exclude them from your ads or provide them with a different offer. Someone that signed up for the free inspection, but then failed to buy a service plan is no longer worth targeting with another inspection. However, they may be a good prospect for an annual service plan.
Rizen is a digital marketing agency made up of inbound marketing and sales professionals that are forward-thinking problem solvers. We help deploy proven revenue-generating strategies to create more leads and increase sales for home services companies, such as HVAC, mold remediation, garage doors, impact products, and more.
Our Rev Grow system is easy to implement, scalable, automated, and proven successful in companies just like yours. Ready to step ahead of your competition and boost your revenue? Get in touch with Rizen today and let us help you grow your business.