For quite some time now, marketers have claimed digital marketing to be the future of marketing. And you know what… they were right. When it comes to digital contractor marketing, some failed, while others knocked it out of the park.
Nearly 50% of the overall businesses shut down within their initial 5 years. That’s because these businesses don’t believe in shifting their focus towards their marketing efforts. In the end, that’s what leads to failure. And if you want to grow your contractor business, you are in the right place. In this blog post, we will take a look at 20 contractor marketing ideas that you can implement in 2020.
The Ultimate Guide to Contractor Marketing
Listed below are the top 20 ideas we will be taking a look at to grow your business:
Create an outstanding website
Publish High-Quality Valuable Content
Optimize Everything For SEO
Improve Your Local SEO
Optimize Your Google My Business Listing
Determine Your Brand’s Identity
Research Keywords
Write Optimized Blog Posts
Build Out A Social Media Strategy For Your Contractor Business
Plan Email Marketing Strategy
PPC Advertising
Video Marketing
Competitive Analysis
Focus On Infographics
Optimize Your Website For The Mobile Devices
Generate Raving Reviews
Personalize Marketing Messages
Update Old Content On Your Website
Expand Guest Blogging Opportunities
Measure Results
1. Create An Outstanding Contractor Website
Your website is often the first place your customers go to learn more about your business. It's no secret that first impressions matter a lot. And if you aren't able to grab the attention of your audience at the very first sight, you'll be losing them for good. So, how can you make a great first impression?
From design to the website loading speed, to its accessibility, you need to take care of it all. Nearly 48% of people claimed that website design plays a major role in deciding your brand's credibility. If your business doesn't appear credible or trustworthy, you will a bad impression on your potential customers and could hurt your website conversion rate.
Mentioned below are the elements your contractor website needs to have in order to help you stay one step ahead of your competitors:
Simple & Sweet Design
Value-Building Statements
Contact Information
Social Media Buttons
Intuitive Navigation
Blog Section
Services Section
High-Quality Images
The Locations You Service
Contact Forms
Reviews or Testimonials
In addition to this, your website should be:
Fast (Focus On Your Website’s Loading Speed)
Secure
Mobile-Friendly
SEO-Optimized
Keeping these points into consideration will help you build an outstanding website for your contractor business, helping you generate high-quality leads and turn them to paying customers.
2. Publish High-Quality Valuable Content
Content marketing has become one of the hottest digital marketing trends for the last few years. Instead of directly pitching your services in front of your potential audience, content marketing is focused more on adding value to their lives. When your potential audience or your existing customers look for a solution to their problems, they’ll head over to Google to find some answers. Once they head over to your blog post and find it to be really value-adding, they’d be considering you as a business that’s trustworthy and knowledgeable about contracting.
If your content doesn’t add any value, it’ll be doing more harm than good and will definitely leave a bad impression on your potential customers. Publishing high-quality valuable content isn’t just limited to publishing blog posts. Instead, you should focus more on other content types such as social media posts, eBooks, guides, videos, etc.
Tip: Along with keeping your content educational, focus on interacting with your audience like they’re your friends. Interacting with them at an emotional level will help you build a healthy relationship with them.
3. Optimize Everything For SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your contractor website such that it’s search engine rankings will improve over time for certain keywords.
Nearly 90% of consumers don’t move past the first page of the search engine results. If your contractor website doesn’t rank at the top for certain relevant keywords, you’ll be missing out on a huge amount of your potential audience. Listed below are the factors that you need to focus on in order to improve your search engine rankings:
Mobile-Friendliness
Secured Websites
Content Quality
Content-Length
Website Speed
Backlinks
Optimized Images
Social Signals
Domain Age
Domain Authority
Page Authority
Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Schema Mark-up
4. Improve Your Local SEO
Local SEO is one of the most effective tactics of attracting your potential audience in your neighborhood. What's the first thing that your potential audience in your neighborhood will search for when they are looking forward to getting in touch with a contractor business? It'd be something like this:
“Contractor Business Near Me” “Top Contractor Businesses Near Me” “Best Contractor Business In [City Name]” “Contractor Services Near Me”
The possibilities are endless. Listed below are the tips that you should implement to optimize your Local SEO:
Claim Your Business Listings
Add Location Pages To Your Contractor Website (if you have branches at multiple locations)
Improve NAP Consistency
Optimize Google My Business Listings
Attain Reviews
Publish Local Content
Acquire Backlinks
Conduct Local Link Building
Promote On Social Media Platforms
5. Optimize Google My Business Listing
If you haven’t already claimed your Google My Business page, you are missing out on a huge amount of your local prospects. Here’s what a Google My Business Listing might look like this:
Fill or update the following information to completely optimize your contractor business’ Google My Business listing:
Business Name
Address
Phone Number
Reviews
Hours Of Operation
Company’s Description
Photos
Google Posts
Frequently Asked Questions
Offers Or Discounts (if any)
Online Booking Feature
A well-optimized Google My Business listing will help your target audience to:
Know about your business whereabouts
Find contact details
See your business hours
See your posts
Book your services immediately
See photos
Check out reviews
6. Determine Your Brand’s Identity
If you don’t have a consistent brand identity, you could be facing a hard time attracting potential customers towards your business. Not only will focusing on your brand identity help you look professional, but it will even help you attract a huge amount of quality leads. Nearly 77% of the overall people are loyal to the brands.
Imagine the number of people you’ll be building healthy relationships with. The customer retention rate will increase as well. According to Jeff Bezos, “It’s not about what people say to your face. Instead, it’s what people talk about when you aren’t in the room.”
By determining your brand identity, you will be building an emotional relationship with your audience. This means that they won't be reaching out to other contractor businesses, as they completely rely on you for their pest control needs. It’s a combination of your brand’s logo, mission statement, goals, service, vision, name, design of all the assets as well as aesthetic.
Not sure your small business needs branding? We would argue that you have more competition than the "big" brands. That means your business needs branding even more. However, all too often small businesses don't take branding seriously. That's good news for you. With a good brand strategy, you can easily stand out as a market leader.
7. Research Relevant Keywords
Keyword research is one of the most vital aspects of a well-planned digital marketing strategy. As we are talking about a pest control business here, you’ll be focusing mostly on Local SEO. However, you shouldn’t eliminate the other keywords out of the equation. It’s an extension of the buyer persona research.
There are tons of tools out there that can help you with your keyword research.
Listed below are the top 10 keyword research tools that can help you find the most relevant keywords for your pest control business:
Google Trends
Google Search Console
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
SECockpit
Google Keyword Planner
Moz Keyword Explorer
Keywords Everywhere
Keyword Snatcher
Right from your website content to the high-quality blog posts and the social media captions, you will be implementing your keywords everywhere to improve your search engine rankings.
Once you have a list of the relevant keywords, you can begin with your on-page SEO research as well as optimization. That's where you will be putting in the keywords. For instance, meta description, H1 tags, page titles, etc.
8. Write Optimized Blog Posts
Never underestimate the power of words. Long before people started promoting their businesses on digital channels, the words have been helping businesses attract a huge amount of customers towards their website. A well-framed engaging, as well as a value-adding copy, can help you take your business to the next level.
Content, as well as blogging, have been considered to be incredibly vital when we talk about the search engine rankings. Each blog post that you'll publish will be a new page for Google to index. However, you need to make sure that your blog posts are engaging, value-adding, and of high-quality.
Alongside this, the structure of the blog posts should be simple and easily accessible. Make sure that you are implementing the SEO keywords in your blog posts naturally.
Here’s the list of tips that will help you create killer SEO-friendly blog posts for your business:
Know Your Audience
Frame Compelling Headlines
Break Up The Page Using Sub-Headings & Shorter Paragraphs
Use Bullet Points
Add Images
Optimize For SEO
Add Proper Meta-Title
Optimize For Focused Keywords
Add Meta Description
Add Alt-Text to the Images
Use Keyword Variation
Embed Internal Links
Add A Compelling CTA
9. Build Out A Social Media Strategy For Your Pest Control Business
In 2005, just 5% of American adults used at least one social media platform. However, today 72% of the public uses some type of social media.
And that’s exactly why it has turned out to be extremely important for businesses to start focusing on building out a social media strategy for their businesses.
Building social media channels for your pest control businesses and promoting content on a regular basis will help you interact with your audience at an emotional level. If they have any queries or doubts, you can even help them solve it as well instantly. Alongside this, you will be posting high-quality social media posts, helping your audience solve the pest control problems. Plus, you will be able to run paid campaigns on your social media channels, which will help you reach out to your target audience more effectively. Here’s a list of benefits that your business will be subject to with social media marketing and advertising:
Increased Brand Awareness
More Inbound Traffic
Improved Search Engine Rankings
Higher Conversion Rates
Better Customer Satisfaction
Improved Brand Loyalty
Cost-Effective
Gain Marketplace Insights
Establish Yourself As The Industry Leader
10. Plan An Email Marketing Strategy
Email Marketing is not dead. Instead, if you do it right, it will help you attract a wide range of your target audience. All you need to do is focus on building your mailing list. Once you start with your content marketing journey, you can convey your message about a new blog post or an outstanding offer by sending out bulk emails. Hence, your mailing list should consist of people who will be the most interested in your pest control services.
However, you need to make sure that your emails are engaging and not too salesy. Otherwise, you will be risking all of them hitting the spam folder. Hence, you need to plan out an email marketing strategy ahead of time in order to witness outstanding open rates and conversion rates.
Here’s how you can build a killer email marketing strategy for your pest control business:
Identify Your Target Audience
Build Your List
Create Segments
Identify Goals
Track Analytics
Equip Yourself With The Right Tools
Some outstanding email marketing tools that you can use for your pest control business are:
Constant Contact
SendIn Blue
MailChimp
Get Response
ConvertKit
Drip
AWeber
Keap
11. PPC Advertising
It's no secret that you'll have to work on your website's SEO for months before you'll start witnessing results. It's a slow process. Meanwhile, it shouldn't be the reason why you ultimately quit. Consider PPC as a temporary boost. With PPC advertising, you can use Bing Ads or Google AdWords in order to rank higher up the search engine results.
Your ads will be displayed at the top of the search engine results. However, before you dive in you need to make sure that your pest control website's landing page is outstanding. That’s because there’s no point of running ads if your website is not up to the mark or your landing page is poorly designed. Your prospects will be ultimately redirected to your website’s landing page. Hence, if you don’t work on your website’s landing page, you will be wasting your hard-earned money.
In order to help you witness outstanding results with your PPC campaigns, we have laid out a few tips:
Choose The Right Bid Strategy
Display Ads At The Right Time
Rotate Your Ads
Target Locations Carefully
Utilize Effective Device Targeting
Apply Bid Adjustments
Optimize Bids
Utilize Single Keyword Ad Groups
Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Use Ad Extensions
A/B Test Your Ads & Landing Page
Finalize Valuable Keywords
Pause The Under-Performing Ads
Keep Testing
12. Video Marketing
Video Marketing has been considered to be one of the most effective tactics that have helped innumerable businesses elevate their business sales. For instance, there’s never been a time when I didn’t watch a YouTube video within an hour of waking up. How about you, have you ever looked up a YouTube video for a project?
Plus, videos are simply bound to rank high in the search engine rankings because YouTube is owned by Google. Here’s why video marketing is important for pest control businesses:
Enhance SEO efforts
Add Value
Deliver Research-Based Content
Increase Customer Involvement
Increase Brand Identity
What kinds of videos work best for a pest control marketing business? Let’s take a look:
Informative Educational Videos (like how to check for bed bugs)
Technician Introduction Videos
Job-Related Videos
Company Introduction Videos
Reviews & Testimonials Videos
Videos Helping Your Audience Learn More About Pest Control Problems & Providing Easy Solutions
13. Competitors’ Analysis
How are your competitors holding up? How much traffic are they able to attract towards their business? How effective is their social media marketing strategy? Does their pest control website rank at the top of the search engine results? What about Local SEO?
That's what competitors' analysis is all about. Chances are, your competitors are doing something a little different than you that you could learn from. Once you know what their up to you can develop a strategy to take advantage of their gaps or strengthen some areas of your marketing. Aside from services and good prices, how are they able to attract such a huge amount of their target audience? Is because they'd have focused on building their digital presence for a long time or are they deploying a better digital strategy?
And that's where you should begin your journey. A competitors' analysis will help you have a better understanding of what works and what doesn't. Alongside this, you will be able to boost your digital marketing strategy with the help of the data you will be gathering.
Why should you carry out a competitors’ analysis? Let’s take a look:
Better targeting customers
Competitor pricing
Competitor product tracking
Customer acquisition
Market potential forecasting
Tertiary market possibilities
Understanding the market
14. Focus On Infographics
Infographics can help you provide valuable information to your audience in an engaging manner. Not only are infographics extremely popular, but they are considered to the most engaging content form.
You can gather a bunch of data, and convey it in such a manner that won’t bore your audience. That’s because we, humans are wired such that we get attracted by visuals. Nearly 90% of the data that’s transmitted to cerebrum is visual.
Here’s why you should use infographics for your best control business:
Eye-Catching
Persuasive
Helps You Position Yourself as an Expert
Generate More Traffic
Easily Read, Remembered & Understood
SEO-Friendly
Portable & Embeddable
Connect With Your Target Audience
Easy To Track & Analyse
15. Optimize Your Pest Control Website For The Mobile Devices
If you want to rank higher on the search engine results, you need to make sure that your website’s mobile-friendly. Your site should look clean and must be easily navigable. Plus, it will have a major impact on your website’s SEO.
Here’s why a mobile-friendly website is really important in today’s world:
Faster download speed
Improve mobile conversion rate
Improved user experience
More flexible & cost-effective than application development
Positive ranking signal
Streamlined experience across devices
16. Generate Raving Reviews
Nearly 90% of the overall consumers will get in touch with a local business if they find online reviews to be positive. 88% trust them as much as personal recommendations. In addition to this, the number of reviews, as well as average rating, will play a major role in determining your search engine rankings.
Hence, you should ask your customers to leave their valuable feedback. You can frame a message such that:
"Thanks for taking advantage of our high-quality services. Hope we were able to deliver outstanding service and customer experience. And if you have the time, you may leave your valuable feedback."
You can't force them to write reviews but we've found that there is a way to automate your review process in a way that maximizes your positive public online reviews while suppressing any potential constructive reviews from going public.
If you just head over to the search engines and take a look at the other pest control businesses’ reviews section, you will find some full of positive reviews and others to be empty. That’s because not many of them ask for them consistently. However, it’s one of the biggest mistakes that they are making.
Finally, don't forget to respond to reviews, the good, bad, and ugly. But...do so carefully.
17. Personalize Messages
Instead of reading boring messages that are simply forwarded to everyone, your customers will love to read the ones that are personalized.
You can take the first step by digging into the analytics and understanding the demographics, in-market segments, as well as, affinity categories. Not many pest control businesses execute a well-planned personalized marketing strategy. It's not just adding the first name at the beginning of every message. Instead, you should get in the mind of your prospects and learn what they love, wish, and want.
Learn about their pain points. Focus on them. Plus, you need to make sure that the content you are sending to them is concise as well as easily understandable. You need to make sure that the interaction adds value to their lives. That's how you will be able to win them over.
You should focus on behavioral segmentation as well as the separation of audience members into different groups, based on:
First purchases
Repeat Purchases
Lost Customers
Page Views
And so much more.
18. Stay Relevant By Updating Old Content On Your Pest Control Website
Chances are that the old content on your website might not be relevant anymore. Google updates its algorithm on a regular basis. You need to make sure that your content and SEO adheres to the guidelines. Instead of simply pumping out new content, you should focus on your old content as well.
Not only will it keep your content fresh, but you will be improving your search engine rankings. In some cases, I’ve seen after revising an old blog post, some brands were able to achieve a higher ranking. One of the plus points is that it’s cost-effective. It has been considered to be one of the most effective as well as successful marketing strategies for pest control websites out there.
For instance, you might have a blog post published in your blog section, namely:
“Latest Pest Control Technology Innovations”
But what if you published the article a few years back and it’s not relevant anymore? And that’s exactly why you should get started with updating the content such that it’s reliable and adds valuable information to your target audience.
There are also more practical reasons to update your website like keeping contact details and employee profiles up to date. Probably the worst example of outdated content was a pest control company that had an old picture of their business signage.
However, when you went to the website that was on the old picture, a very unsavory website popped up instead...ouch!
19. Expand Guest Blogging Opportunities
That's another one of the ways to reach out to your target audience effectively. Instead of reaching out to guest blogging websites related to your niche personally, you can allow people to post guest blogs on your website. It's one of the most effective content marketing strategies that will help you attract a huge amount of target audiences. Not only will it help you leverage your expertise, but it will even play a major role in turning a huge amount of leads into paying customers.
However, you need to prepare a guideline that the guest bloggers need to follow in order to get their content published on your website. After all, you wouldn't want anyone to post low-quality boring blogs on your website, right?
20. Measure Results...and We Mean EVERYTHING
How well are you doing? Where do you currently stand with your digital marketing efforts? What’s your conversion rate? What’s your Email Open Rate? Did your PPC ads perform well?
If you don’t know where you exactly stand, chances are that you are wasting your money. How will you be able to improve your marketing strategy if you don’t know how it’s performing?
If you aren't able to attract a huge amount of your potential customers your way, you should know the reason behind it. After all, that's how you will be improvising. And that's what measuring results and tracking analytics will help you with.
Here’s a list of the key metrics that you should track:
Website Traffic
Traffic Sources
Bounce Rate
Top Pages
Conversion Rate
Conversion By Traffic Source
Customer’s Lifetime Value
Calls Per Source
Google My Business Insights
Chats
Local SEO Status
Among many others
Conclusion
If you want your pest control business to really do wonders, you should get started with implementing these ideas to your digital marketing strategy straight away. Plan it all out. Focus on your online presence. Build a well-planned digital marketing strategy. Evaluate the analytics and take a look at the insights in order to have a better understanding of what to do next.
Or you can simply hire professionals to help you get the job done effectively. Get in touch with us TODAY to plan out your FUTURE!
If you're looking to grow your pest control business, take the first step today, and learn how we can help with our all-in-one pest control marketing platform.
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