Marketing Tactics for Home Service Businesses

Cold Marketing Tactics

Cold Marketing is for people you have never heard of you or your services. This is the group of people you need to reach to go after a larger audience of people. If you service an area with a lower population (small to mid size cities) and there are fewer opportunities to use Warm Marketing Tactics such as people searching for your services online, your best bet is to use cold marketing tactics. If you are in a larger city, you can use both cold or warm marketing tactics to maximize your results

Social Media Posts – Always be doing these tactics regularly.

• (FREE) Post on your business Facebook newsfeed.

  • Showcase your work and provide a brief description of what is happening. Always make sure to include your phone number AND a link to your website. You need to make a way for people to contact you.

  • Make sure to share your business posts onto your personal page and have your close friends and family also share these posts to get maximum reach

• (FREE) Create posts on Yard Sale and local classified Facebook groups

  • This avenue will reach more people than just sharing posts on your Facebook page. You need to be strategic with these posts as some groups do not allow self-promotion. You should ask your clients that have used your service to write recommendations on these groups for maximum results.

• Create ads on Facebook and Nextdoor

  • Facebook and Nextdoor ads can be hit and miss for each business and city you are in.

  • Make sure to test out different pictures and videos along with different ad copy.

  • Always have something unique to offer people. Whether it is a special price/offer or financing options to make it an attractive ad for people to contact you for a quote. Without an offer, you might not get the same results as people don’t have a reason to stop and message you.

  • Test out sending people to “Send Message” to get a quote vs sending them to your website. If you do send them to your website, make sure it is a landing page with short copy and a form/phone number ready to get their info.

Yard Signs – Always do this after every job or when you don’t have jobs lined up

• Have a sign while you are doing work at a currently working on a job, and then also leave a sign in that yard if possible. You can get signs for as low as $2 online.

• Try and put them in high-traffic places where people will see it while they are stopped so they can fully read the sign and write your number down. They can’t write or memorize your number if they are driving by.

Door Hangers / Flyers – Always do this after every job or when you don’t have jobs lined up

• After a job is finished, walk up and down the street and put up at least 10+ flyers. Why mail it to the 5 houses around the one you cleaned when you can just put it on the door that same day?

Post Cards – This is something you might do if you have a larger budget as the ROI is not immediate

• With EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) you can choose post routes of where you want to have your cards delivered to or you could use a service like SendJim and send postcards directly to a house on a map. It is much cheaper to use EDDM than a service that allows you to choose which house to send to.

• You will want to send out at least 5,000 or more postcards and plan on hitting those houses 3 to 6+ times each.

  • Make sure to have a promo on your postcard with an expiration date to create urgency and action

  • Postcards is a volume play so you need to hit many houses to get results and you need to hit them multiple times so people take action. Do NOT send out postcards once and call it done. Have a plan in place to send it out at a minimum of 3 times and preferably 6 or more.

  • Testing should be done to figure out how close the postcards should be sent out. 3-4 weeks apart should be enough to be a good reminder to that user that your company exists and the second time around they will probably start thinking more about considering you. Remember this is a cold marketing tactic and that it takes time to warm them up.

• We’ve heard that a 0.5% conversion rate is about average for people that will contact you. So if you send out 5000 postcards, expect only 25 people to contact you— after you have done it consistently 2-3x.

TV Commercials — This would be something for larger companies with bigger budgets. You do need to be consistent with running the commercials and not expect results from simply trying it over a short period of time

• We have had several clients tell us that TV commercials work very well for them. From what we can tell, the people that use them are running the ads consistently. This should help potential customers remember your brand and recall your company name and use you when they finally are ready to purchase. It should help increase your organic and direct traffic to your website as well.

Referrals — Ask your current clients to refer you to their friends

• Create a rewards system to incentivize people to refer you to their friends

• Give out business cards to clients with a referral promo on the back

Warm Marketing Tactics

These tactics are going to typically yield better conversion rates than cold marketing tactics. But you have to have people actively looking for your service to get results from these channels. If you are in an area with few people searching for your services online, you may not get many leads from these channels. You should always set up a Google My Business and a website, but paid ads and SEO may not be the best bet for every company. You should consult with an agency like Creatively Innovative to see if it’s right for you.

(FREE) Google My Business – Create this immediately when you start a business

• Make sure it is completely filled out and verified.

• Get reviews on a weekly basis. Try and get 20+ reviews as fast as you can, and then don’t stop there!

Website – Highly recommend a quality design-build for this from the beginning.

• Free sites and poorly made sites even by agencies will cost you in missed revenue $20k-100k a year. Get it done right the first time with a website by 180sites.com

  • Make sure the right keywords are on each page. It needs to be in the headlines and paragraphs.

  • Besides the home page, you need 1 page per service with 700-1000 words of content per page. Aim for your keyword to appear 1x for every 100 words of content on the page.

  • Make sure to have your phone number and contact buttons sticky at the top of the page on desktop and mobile

  • Make sure there are clear calls to actions throughout the page

Pay-per-click advertising on Google and Bing (Google Ads and Bing Ads)

This is the fastest way to get leads and should yield a positive ROI from the start. If it’s not producing the results you want, either switch to a better agency that is better historical data for your industry that might work for you or stop using it completely.

• An agency is going to be better at managing the ads. If you hire the right agency, it will be cheaper to pay a manager than running ads on your own.

• Run through numbers and see if it’s affordable ahead of time. Know what your cost to acquire can be and then work backward with your conversion rate of a lead to a sale to figure out what your cost per lead can be. Pay-per-click marketing might not work for you if you have a low conversion rate or a low ticket price for your services.

• A good Google Ads agency will provide Phone Call and Form tracking and will send that data back into Google Ads to be able to optimize your campaigns. Without both of these forms of tracking, there is little the agency can do to optimize your campaigns. If an agency does not provide proper dynamic call tracking numbers then you will be blind to know what your true cost per lead is. Since they cannot optimize the campaign, this means that your cost per lead will not be able to come down over time with optimizations.

• The use of a landing page for Google Ads is another way to increase your leads. Creatively Innovative always recommends you send traffic to a landing page so that it can be optimized if there is an issue with conversion rates. A landing page should load quickly, have all the main points of the site clearly and concisely laid out, and not be text-heavy. The page should be aesthetically pleasing and the contact info should be easy to get to. Phone numbers and a form should be within the first scroll of the page.

You can learn more about Google Ads over on our page here: Google Ads for Local Service Businesses.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

This marketing approach is a long-term investment that will take 3-6 months before you start seeing any results and possibly up to a year before it has a positive ROI.

Since this is a long-term investment, you should only start doing SEO after you are established as a business. The beginning months are an expense and you may not get a return on those first 6 months of SEO. Some clients that come to us from other agencies never saw a return in 12-24 months. So keep in mind not every agency is the same.

Your monthly revenue should be at least 20x the cost of the SEO before you sign up. For instance, if you are going to sign up for an SEO plan that is $800/mo, your monthly revenue should consistently be over $16k a month.

Not all agencies perform the same SEO tactics so you really need to make sure you get solid information from the company before you choose one.

• A good SEO agency will provide dynamic phone call tracking (Callrail, PhoneWagon, etc) and have all the data for forms and calls being tracking in Google Analytics. If they do not offer to track the leads— RUN! They are trying to hide results from you. You need to use a group of 4+ dynamic phone numbers on your site to set this up properly. You should also use a static number on your GMB to track calls from your GMB (Make sure to put your main phone number as the secondary on the GMB so Google will know you are using call tracking).

• Keyword tracking is great to see the progress of rankings, but you should also realize that 86% of searches are brand new. So this keyword tracking will not be as accurate as watching your year-over-year organic traffic metrics inside of Google Analytics.

• The right agency will fix your content on your site including titles, content on-page, alt tags on images, and your descriptions that will show on Google search results

• They will also provide backlinks not just for your home page but for every service page and city page they create as well

• They will interlink pages from the home page to service pages and service pages to your city pages to make sure no page is left unlinked.

• The agency you hire should have a history of growing site traffic and leads for others and have proof to show it. They should have call tracking and form tracking set up and be able to clearly discuss results for other clients in your space.

• DO NOT pick an agency based on a brand reputation for being a “company you have heard people reference.” We hear so many people choose an agency because of a recommendation of a friend but there was ZERO data behind the decision. Later they found out that the agency did not provide any backlinks and it took them 6+ months to get any new content added to their site.

• It is better to start fresh with a high-converting website before you do SEO tactics. It will take 2x the efforts of SEO if your site converts very poorly. Each industry is different, but on average we see conversion rates of 8-18% for organic traffic for the home service industry. The higher the ticket price of your service, the lower the conversion rate. Companies that offer a service that costs less usually have a higher conversion rate. (A conversion rate is simply a call or form divided by the total number of sessions on your site)

You can learn more about our SEO over on our page here: SEO for Local Service Businesses.

Hot Marketing Tactics

Customers who you have bought from you in the past are going to be the hottest form of marketing since they have used your service before.

• (FREE to LOW COST) Email marketing – Drip out quarterly emails to these people for additional services if you have something they might buy again from you