10 Effective Home Services Marketing Strategies

Home services include appliance repair, roofing, landscaping, HVAC, plumbing, and electrical repair. The growth of digital marketing has changed how home service businesses market their services. So in this article, we’re going to cover various strategies to better position your home services business online.

What is home services marketing?

Home services marketing is the process of marketing your company’s home services to your ideal customer base. This could include using marketing initiatives such as SEO, PPC, blogging, email marketing, social media marketing, and more.

Home services are competitive. You need to ensure that you’re using the right marketing strategies to position yourself in front of your target audience with your unique selling point and value proposition. The aim is to be the business they choose over your competitors. That’s where choosing the right marketing strategies makes all the difference.

Why is marketing for home services important?

Marketing for home services is essential because people are looking for these services online. If you can position yourself correctly, then they’ll come to you to get the job done.

Your website and general online marketing are a key part of the decision-making process before potential customers call your number or complete a contact form. With poor marketing, you miss out on many opportunities to get more leads. 

When people are looking for home services, such as plumbing, or appliance repair, it’s usually because they require something urgent (e.g., their refrigerator is leaking).

In this case, they aren’t necessarily going to do hours of research to find the right home service provider. They’re going to make a quick decision. This decision usually comes down to selecting a company that has done an excellent job with digital marketing.

Having a solid marketing strategy allows you to establish your company as an authority in your respective market and showcase why your specific services are the best choice. The better your marketing, the more leads you’ll get, and the more ‘household’ your brand will become.

10 marketing tips and strategies for home services

1. Blog

Starting a blog is one of the most effective types of digital marketing for home services brands. Take appliance repair for example. What do you do when your Samsung microwave isn’t heating? You Google something like “microwave not heating”. Guess what – in the U.S. that exact phrase is searched 4,800 times + per month. The top results for this keyphrase? They’re mostly blog posts.

By writing blog posts around questions and phrases that your potential customers are searching for, you can provide them with valuable information to solve their problems, become an authority in your industry, and increase leads to your business (as many problems they have with their appliances, plumbing, etc., they will need professional help to solve).

Blogging provides some of the best ROIs in marketing because once your blog post is published and ranks high in search engines, it can consistently drive traffic and leads to your business while only costing a one-time investment to initially create and publish.

2. Local SEO

Nearly half (46%) of all Google searches are from users seeking local information. Some examples in the home services industry include “plumber Atlanta” and “refrigerator repair near me”. Optimizing your website for local searches is known as “local SEO” and is one of the most important aspects of a good marketing strategy, as home services are local and in-person-based.

There are multiple things you can do to improve local seo, such as setting up a Google My Business, gathering regular reviews, citations, optimizing your pages for on-page SEO (e.g including key local keyword as the focus keyword for your homepage), and building backlinks to pages you want to rank for local key phrases. 

3. PPC

One way to get your home services found on search engines is to run pay-per-click (PPC) ads. PPC advertising helps you appear at the top of Google search results so that customers can quickly find you after searching for specific keywords. Setting up PPC ads involves choosing specific keywords to bid on and setting a budget, as well as the specific region you want to target. Your budget is then only spent when users click on your ads, hence the name pay per click.

PPC ads can provide a great ROI. Let’s say it requires $500 of your budget to acquire 4 leads, and you convert 1 of these leads. If your lifetime customer value is several thousand dollars, then you can continue to reinvest in ads that generate these leads due to a positive ROI.

4. Social media marketing

Social media is one of the easiest ways to interact with your customers and potential customers. While the home service industry may not seem like the type that would be good for social media, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram can help you show your customers your company’s personality, before and after photos, testimonials from current customers, and more.

Social media marketing is an easy way to directly connect with your customers, build your brand awareness and generate new leads. Not to mention you can use the native advertising capabilities of these platforms to help promote your home services.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is important for any business for one key reason – you own the email list. When it comes to generating traffic from Google via SEO or building followers on Facebook or other social media platforms, you don’t ‘own’ the audience. With email, you have direct access to peoples’ inboxes.

One effective tactic is to create a list of customers who previously had repair work done but haven’t had anything new done lately, and send this list of people a discounted offer. A certain amount of people may convert into customers again, and just like that you’ve generated revenue with a huge ROI as the only investment was the time spent gathering the email list together and sending the emails.

6. Website design

Your website is the poster of your brand. Having a beautiful and professional website provides many benefits. A great website automatically makes your brand and services seem more credible and professional. Think about this from your own perspective. All other factors equal, are you more likely to trust a company that has a website that looks like it was built in 2001, or a clean, modern, and fast website. Clearly, the modern website is the winner.

But a good website isn’t just about looking pretty – it’s important for it to be built with purpose and function in mind. A good-looking website does no good if it’s hard to navigate. That’s why having a professional web designer that understands both design and conversion rate optimization is important

7. SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your website for search engines so that you appear high in search results for specific keywords related to your home services. There are multiple aspects to a successful SEO strategy, including off-page (acquiring backlinks to your website), on-page SEO (optimizing factors on a page to help search engines understand your website, and technical SEO (making technical adjustments – such as increasing website speed).

SEO can help increase your organic traffic, which is the best kind of traffic. Rather than having to reach out to people, people find you, and best of all they find you through searching for relevant keywords to your business. This makes SEO traffic pre-qualified and of high value.

8. Video marketing

There is no question video marketing is getting more popular and important. Video delivers messages effectively in a short time period. Video is also highly engaging, shareable, and can help increase engagement across multiple platforms and content types, from emails to social media and even blog posts.

Video can be used to educate and help answer people’s questions, similar to blog articles. Video can also be used to showcase your brand personality, showcase testimonials from customers, and show off your brand’s culture and identity, including your team members, beliefs, and more. You can even use videos on Youtube ads or on Facebook and Instagram to further your reach and help generate more leads.

9. Get referrals

Referrals are a great way for a home service business to get more customers. In fact, it’s the ideal way to get customers. Consider the following scenario. You Googled for “air conditioner repair” and hired a technician to come and repair it. They do a great job. Then, two months later, your friend’s air conditioner also breaks. They text you and ask who fixed yours, and voilà, a referral has occurred!

Referrals are great, but how do you proactively seek them? First and foremost it’s about delivering a good service + time. If you deliver on what you promise and stay around long enough to build a brand people know, referrals will naturally happen. But, you can also incorporate asking for referrals through incentives such as giving customers a discount for future work you do in return for referrals. 

10. Google Local Services Ads

Google Local Services Ads are another great way to general leads for local customers. Local Services Ads are different than PPC as you’re paying for quality texts and phone calls from prospective clients – making these types of ads better if you have a limited budget. These ads show the above PPC ads and provide users with the information they would need to contact your business.

To run Local Services Ads, you have to go through a specific verification process to become Google Guaranteed, where Google verifies your licensing and insurance information to ensure you’re a credible home service business and provide users with a greater sense of trust.

The bottom line

Home services marketing is not so different from marketing other types of services, apart from the fact that a ‘local first’ strategy is ideal since home services are local and in-person.

There are many different marketing strategies you can use to help grow your home services business, but not all are required to succeed. If your business is new, start with one or two, and master them. If you’re more established and have resources, try all of the above, and see what works best.

Whatever you decide to do, remember to stay consistent and focus on measuring your results so you know what’s providing the best return on investment.

You don’t have to do this all yourself. There are many great places where you can outsource digital marketing.