Why Home Service Contractors Need Digital Marketing

Home service contractors have stuck with traditional advertising methods for a long time, often relying on word of mouth and direct mailers to get their brand name out there. However, the world’s transition to the digital age meant that more and more people have started relying on the Internet to find home service (painters, plumbers, electricians, etc…) contractors. This means that companies that provide home service contracting but have no online presence are at a significant disadvantage. 

From news and entertainment to communication and collaboration, the Internet has become the top option for people. When they need a particular service, they’ll first search for it on the Internet. If a household needs repairs, they’ll be searching online for a local, reliable home service contractor. Is that contractor your company? Not if you don’t have an online presence. This is why you should consider digital marketing.

What is digital marketing?

Simply put, digital marketing is any form of marketing done through electronic devices such as smartphones, computers, and tablets. Among the forms that digital marketing can take are online videos, search engine marketing, display ads, social media posts, and paid social ads. Although also digital, television programming is considered a form of traditional marketing.

Apart from the medium, the main reasons why digital marketing is different or even superior to traditional marketing is its low cost and measurability. Digital marketing is significantly less expensive, and it’s naturally easy to measure, allowing you to keep a close look at how your marketing campaign is working. 

It’s more cost-effective

As mentioned above, digital marketing is really cheap compared to traditional marketing. While big corporations are capable of dishing out money and resources on creating television ads, putting up billboards, and other forms of traditional marketing, small businesses such as home service contractors can’t. For smaller businesses, digital marketing is the way to go. It achieves almost the same impact without burning a hole through your pocket. With just a few bucks and basic computer knowledge, you can access simple forms of digital marketing such as direct email marketing.

It’s easy to measure

When you invest in marketing, you want to see how it performs. Is the marketing campaign yielding results that will help your business grow? Or is it not working, and you’re just throwing away money unless you change things up? Keeping track of your campaign’s performance is way easier with digital marketing.

The effectiveness of traditional marketing is hard to track. You have no way of determining where your leads come from without asking everyone who visits your company. With digital marketing, the effectiveness of your marketing can be measured accurately. Each form has its own tracking system, such as Google Analytics for search engine optimization. 

Not to state the obvious, but knowing whether your campaigns are working or not is a big deal. If you can track your campaigns, you’ll know which practices work well and which ones fall flat on their face. You’ll be able to ditch techniques that didn’t work and stick to the ones that yielded great results, preventing you from wasting money on ineffective marketing strategies. 

It highlights your work

The work of home service contractors is best marketed visually, and that’s easy to do with digital marketing. For instance, displaying before and after photos of your client’s homes is one of the best ways to show the quality of your service. Through digital marketing, it’s easy to create project galleries, videos, and other visual advertisements to showcase your work. 

It allows you to target customers

Another reason why digital marketing is superior to traditional is it allows businesses to fine-tune who they’re marketing to. You can have the best ads and a wide reach but if the right customers aren’t setting it, it’s basically useless. With traditional marketing, you put out an ad and just hope it comes into contact with the right people, but with digital marketing, you can specifically target the right people. Imagine if you can have your ads shown only to homeowners who are more likely to use your services over those who just rent? You can do that with digital marketing.

It lets you make changes on the fly

In traditional marketing, once you commit, there’s no turning back. Do you want to change something about that billboard you put up? Too bad, you’ll have to take it down and make a new one. With digital marketing, making changes is quick and easy, even if you’ve put up the advertisement. This means you won’t have to spend extra just correcting any errors or making immediate improvements. Moreover, the freedom to make changes on the go also speeds up business workflow as it shortens processes on the marketing side. 

It gives you an edge

The home service contracting industry is competitive, and digital marketing can provide you with the edge you need. Almost everyone, young and old, uses a smartphone or a tablet today, making digital marketing among the easiest ways to reach a wider audience. Digital marketing trends show that 54% of social media users in 2021 used online platforms to search for products and services. In addition, the average social media user spends three hours in their preferred platform a day, justifying the increased priority placed on social media marketing.

The low cost plus the wider reach affords you a lot of power in marketing that might just give you the advantage you need to win the competition. Unless you have no need to improve your online presence or just don’t care about marketing, digital marketing is really a no-brainer not only for home service contractors but also for all businesses.