Why You Need a Home Services Marketing Specialist
You’re hiring an HVAC technician. You interview someone who calls himself a “general fix-it guy” in the home services space but doesn’t have the knowledge, experience, or efficiency you’d expect of a technician in your space — he doesn’t have a certification, either. Technicians are certified in a given area of expertise, and with that comes the assurance of the kind of work they can do. That’s why you hire them.
Just as it is with technicians, so it is with marketing. The digital world is evolving at a rapid pace. There’s no way that a marketing professional or agency can be an expert in everything. Now add in the competitive and highly seasonal nature of your home services industry.
A qualified agency partner with expertise in your home services industry is crucial to successfully navigate this landscape and yield the best experience and outcomes for your business.
What can and should your experience look like working with a home services marketing agency? To get a complete picture, we spoke with Bell Media’s Home Services Lead Digital Consultant, Cole Willis, and Lead Customer Success Manager, Jeff Campbell. Willis and Campbell work with countless businesses in the HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, and pest control spaces.
What can and should your experience look like with a home services marketing agency?
1. They'll help you navigate issues within your industry.
When you have a dedicated home services marketing partner, they’ll be knowledgeable about the industry overall and the unique issues and relationships within it. A comprehensive understanding of your sector better equips them to help you successfully navigate the digital landscape.
Campbell shared various ways he and his fellow customer success managers strategically advise home service clients on a path to success within the industry.
- Drawing on relationships with Distributors – “Bell Media understands HVAC at the distribution level, and that allows us to be more efficient and effective for contractors. We had a contractor who was excited to roll out a campaign to release HVAC units. Thanks to our relationship with the distributor, we knew the contractor would be facing a shortage of units. We were able to use that distributor knowledge to design a marketing campaign for the contractor that focused on social media, brand awareness, and repair business rather than something they wouldn’t be able to execute on.”
- Shaping Campaigns around Seasons – “Bell Media understands the seasonality of home services. Within the HVAC space, we push service and replacement when it’s right and encourage setting up regular maintenance checks to tide businesses through the winter season. With pest control, we know that certain bugs are more prevalent during certain weather conditions — we’ll run a mosquito campaign when it’s hot and rainy, for example.”
2. They'll draw on past data and proven methods of success.
First-party data from past experiences is gold to us, and we use it regularly to help deliver success to our clients through campaigns and new offerings.
Speaking of new offerings, “Bell Media recognized how important reputation and reviews are to its home service clients,” says Campbell. “When we found that there wasn’t a good reputation management platform out there for our clients, we built our own reputation management platform.”
We also educate businesses like yours with top tips to improve your online reputation.
3. They'll deeply understand and effectively target your ideal market.
“A lot of our home service clients’ target market isn’t near their office location. Their service area has a different footprint,” says Campbell. “A lot of agencies will build around the physical location, and that’s a missed step.”
“We think about the customer journey, the type of customer they’re trying to acquire, and create campaigns that are meant to attract that type of buyer. We drew on our knowledge of the 10-year life cycle of HVAC for one of our HVAC clients. And we used location-based mobile and targeted older homes to reach customers most likely to convert.”
4. They'll focus on revenue-generating outcomes for your business.
As an experienced home services marketing agency, Bell Media knows the importance of generating revenue for businesses like yours and the right strategies to deliver successful business outcomes.
Willis recalled working with one of his major construction clients. “We know that roofing is the highest value service. So when we looked at the budget allocation for their campaigns, we knew where we could make the biggest impact in terms of profit margin.”
5. They'll position your business to compete sustainably.
Your industry is competitive. And it can be challenging to keep up your revenue stream month over month, year over year. Our experience and past data taught us several ways to give clients the best chance at sustainable growth.
A strong website foundation is one of the primary ways. “If the foundation isn’t solid, businesses will miss out on a tremendous amount of leads,” says Willis. “Beyond just focusing on digital marketing efforts, we make recommendations to get your website on solid footing. Our experience has taught us that this gives clients a better chance at success in the long-run.”
6. They’ll understand your business outcomes & tailor efforts to help you achieve them.
- Advising on the market opportunity – Many business owners we talk to don’t know how much revenue they can achieve if they conducted reliable digital marketing on a sustained basis. We develop tools like our revenue opportunity calculator to demonstrate how much revenue you could achieve.
- Coach on Lead Intake – Many home services business owners are single operators or a small team. They’re the ones fielding the calls. They struggle to get back to all their leads. Even the larger companies can have some breakdown in lead intake processes. As they work with us, we coach them on best practices for lead intake and management and help keep it front of mind.
- Recommend what’s best for your goals – A lot of business websites aren’t broken down into service pages. And they want to focus solely on paid search. We get it; everyone wants leads and wants them now. We have real and honest conversations with our clients — that means telling them there’s a real opportunity for better rankings and visibility in their markets and making recommendations about how we’d go about doing that (hint: it’s more than just running paid search).
- Beyond impressions and clicks – “At the end of the day, anybody can sell clicks and impressions,” says Campbell. “What we’re looking for as we go through calls and search queries is the highest converting channels. We allocate budget and efforts accordingly. We’re looking for where we can make the biggest impact and provide the greatest return on your marketing investment.” “Amen,” seconds Willis.
7. They'll help you navigate smoothly through day-to-day issues.
Willis, Campbell, and our Home Services Marketing Team work day-in and day-out with businesses like yours and are real business partners doing whatever it takes to help you achieve your goals.
Below are a handful of examples of what you can expect when working with a home services marketing agency like Bell Media.
- Work with your schedule. Home services businesses start their days early and end them late. We’re flexible and tailor our communications and meetings around your schedule.
- Make proactive recommendations. We’re focused on your business and leveraging digital efforts to help it succeed. That means monitoring and evaluating every aspect of your online performance and making proactive recommendations when we find there’s room for improvement. For example, if we’re driving traffic to a site, but the conversion rate isn’t as high as we’d like, we’ll take a closer look and make proactive recommendations for improving user experience and Calls to Action (CTAs).
- Give you back the time to focus on your business. A lot of business owners have become successful because they know their trade well, says Willis. “But what they didn’t learn when getting their hands dirty is how to market their business, what their ad copy should say, etc.” When you’re our client, “we take care of all of that for you.”
- Learn your preferences and what’s important to you. Some clients want to be hands-on, and some don’t. But all our home services clients want someone they can trust, and we aim to get to that level. We aim to get to the point where we know your preferences, what’s important to you, and proactively make changes aligned with your goals. “That level of confidence…the level that shows we know clients’ businesses on a deep level…that is really valuable,” says Willis.
Digital and Business Partners in Your Business Success
Your marketing agency should be more than a digital marketing vendor for you. A deep level of expertise and success within the home services industry, coupled with a dedicated customer success team whose goals are aligned with your success, is what you can and should demand in a digital marketing provider.
Would you like to speak with a marketing partner who specializes in your industry and is invested in your business success? Let’s chat!