What is Digital Marketing? A Bulleted Explainer for Home Services

How does your home services company find new customers? Word-of-mouth? Mailer ads? 

Digital marketing is the better way to reach today’s customers. Why? This strategy has proven methods that generate sales leads, get more customers on the buyer’s journey, and get your company widely known at a much lower cost than other traditional marketing methods.

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Why Should This Matter to Home Services Companies?

If you’ve had trouble getting new customers and have struggled to think of the best ways to advertise your business it's time to do something different!

We urge you to think about some cost-effective digital marketing methods to engage potential customers, generate sales leads, and develop a good company reputation.

What is Digital Marketing? 

• Digital marketing is all marketing that occurs on the Internet, whether through social media, email, websites, or search engines.
• Use digital marketing to widen your reach and engage your target audience where they’re already spending a large amount of time: on the internet! (Hubspot)
   
  • 85% of Americans are online every single day, and 31% are online almost constantly (PewResearch).
  • Digital marketing is also more cost-effective than other forms of marketing, as it has a larger reach and its ROI is often measurable! (Hubspot)

What Do Digital Marketers Do to Actually Help My Company Grow?

Digital marketing encompasses all forms of content and advertising that people encounter online while scrolling through news feeds, checking their email, or even just surfing the web. Just some tasks a digital marketer will do for your company include:

1) Building Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are profiles for your company’s ideal customers that are based on data and serve as a guide to predict how those ideal customers will behave at different points in the buying journey.

2) Creating and Publishing Content

• 72% of marketers say that their content marketing has increased their audience’s engagement and sales leads! (OptinMonster)

Remember - views get people on the first step in the buyer’s journey! More views = more sales leads!

3) Conducting Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization involves using specific keywords and search habits of your ideal customer to ensure that your company is showing up in the right online searches and as top results!

• 48% of consumers start their inquiries on search engines (Marketo) 

4) Engaging in Social Media Marketing

Digital marketers can handle your accounts on social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

• 73% of consumers have been impacted by a company’s social media presence when making a purchase decision (Animoto).

5) Conducting Paid Advertising

Paid advertising refers to digital ads you see as you browse the Internet - from search engine result placements to banners on web pages. This category is usually split into two sub-sections - native advertising and sponsored content.

• Native advertising ads blend in because they match the formatting of other non-paid content. It doesn’t look like an annoying ad to the reader!
  • 41% of brands use native advertising as a part of their broad marketing plans (WordStream).
• Sponsored content is when a company pays another platform, person, or entity to promote your product/service. A popular example is when companies pay influencers to test out and promote their products.

6) Engage in Ad Retargeting

Ad retargeting is the practice of tagging the people who have been on your site before and then placing more of your content in their path as a reminder.

• 96% of people who visit a website leave without doing what the marketer would have wanted them to! (Hubspot)

Does Digital Marketing Actually Work? 

Yes! That's the straightforward answer. Let's look at some reasons WHY:

• Many customers start their search for a home service company by typing “plumbers in [city]” into a search engine (Valve+Meter)!
  
• 62% of buyers say they make purchase selections based on digital content. 
• Digital marketing methods generate 50% more interactions with potential customers than traditional marketing methods. 

Contrast the results of digital marketing to older methods.

Traditional marketing methods (like direct-mail, common to home service companies) only have a 1.7% conversion rate, versus a 14.6% conversion rate for digital methods (DigitalThirdCoast).

How Do I Find a GOOD Marketing Agency to Help Me Grow?

Some marketing agencies will advertise that they work with home service companies, but they really just copy/paste the marketing methods they use with any other company. So, ASK THESE QUESTIONS when interviewing potential partners: 

1. Will you use buyer personas to make sure that ads for my company are geared towards my target audience?
2. What is your process of creating content/ads and publishing them?
3. What types of digital marketing have you used for other home services companies and why? Remember! They should be able to give you examples of what they have done with other home services companies.

Bringing it All Together & Moving Forward

So, have we convinced you to give digital marketing a try? 

Using digital marketing, you can engage potential customers, generate more sales leads, and develop a good company reputation. 

Digital marketing for your company might look like this: 

• Blog posts with titles like “5 Ways to Weatherproof Your Home” 
• Showing up as one of the top 3 search results when people in your area search for your type of service
• Educational videos about your service and why it’s necessary
• Before/after pics of your work on social media accounts

If you're unsure if your home services company is ready to partner with a marketing agency, download our free questionnaire. Our inventory will help you and your team examine your current operations to see if an external partner is a right fit at this point in time.