Contractor marketing is creating awareness of your brand’s or company’s construction services to your potential customers. The best marketing strategy that’d guarantee any contracting business’s success in the past was word-of-mouth referrals. As much as they’re still applicable today, they may not be as effective as before. You can’t rely on them entirely if you want your business to grow.
With modern technological advancements, most contracting businesses are now incorporating online marketing techniques to help them gain a competitive edge and win more clients.
To do your contractor marketing successfully, you’d want to do proper research to enable you to incorporate the right digital marketing strategies into your business. If you have a website, it’s essential to ensure that it ranks among the top search engines. Watch the steps to rank in Google below. Once you’re done, you can now read through this comprehensive guide to contractor marketing:
1. Incorporate SEO Strategies
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the method you can use to help your website rank among the top in the different search engines. SEO doesn’t only stimulate the long-term growth of your brand, but it’s an effective tool for creating awareness of your contract marketing business.
Some of the essential steps that you’d want to avoid missing when incorporating contractor SEO techniques include:
- Using Appropriate Keywords
It’s essential that you conduct a proper keyword search to get the keywords related to your contractor’s business. Using the right keywords will help clients locate your business quickly and help you rank among the top in the search engines. Moreover, integrating them properly will improve the quality of your content. You can use an application like SEMrush to help you generate appropriate keywords.
- Link Building
This involves using internal and external links to improve your site’s crawl ability (the ease of a robot scanning and indexing your pages) and domain authority.
- Maximizing Your Website’s Metadata
Ideally, you should use meta titles and meta descriptions with appropriate keywords to help clients easily locate you. Moreover, they help Google in indexing your site.
2. Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly
On many occasions, people use mobile phones more than they use their laptops or desktops. Thus, most traffic on websites is generated from the use of mobile phones. You’d want to ensure that any mobile phone user can easily access your website. Otherwise, if it’s only accessible to laptops, you’re sure to attract fewer customers, thus less revenue.
Other ways of ensuring that you have a mobile-friendly website include:
- Using short paragraphs
- Using appropriate images
- Ensuring that your content is readable
Additionally, it’s essential that your website is of high speed and secure. No potential customer would want to wait for long before a web page loads. Some of the ways to improve your website’s speed are:
- Enabling caching
- Removing all pop-ups
- Reducing the size of your images
- Removing video backgrounds
Also, no one would want their information to get compromised while browsing. Thus, you can install a secure socket layer (SSL) on your website to maximize its security.
3. Make Sure Your Website’s Design Is Appealing
A website’s design is one of the most important contractor marketing strategies to help you win as many customers as possible. It acts like a storefront to your customers.
Even if a customer has been referred to your business through word of mouth, they’d first want to visit your website and check out your services. If they find an appealing site, then there’s a high likelihood they’ll consider you. If your website’s design isn’t good-looking, they might want to check out better options.
Examples of ways to make your website look professional and engaging include:
- Using a simple and clear layout
- A design and color that looks spectacular on all devices
- Having accessible fonts
So, by knowing this, you need to realize that it’s crucial to make a digital impression since your website is like a digital window to the world. Apart from its design, it’s fundamental to have a 24/7 functional chatbot where potential customers can ask questions and get immediate responses.
4. Try And Create Engaging Content
Another contractor marketing technique is creating captivating content. You need to know that you’re competing with other businesses offering the same services. Therefore, it’s essential that you do one extraordinary thing that’ll make you outstanding and attract more customers to your business.
One way of doing that is understanding customer preferences and creating content that’ll tap into their needs. If you can give more insight on the contactor business in general, its future trends, and what customers should expect through blog posts, apart from advertising your business, more customers will be drawn to you. You’ll gain a competitive advantage because you’re enlightening them and helping them make proper and informed decisions.
In essence, it’s crucial that you make content that’s unique and related to the contracting business. Adding how-to videos occasionally can also help you become more outstanding. Also, try to be consistent in producing quality content. People would like to be in the know about the things happening in the industry. Use that leverage and update them regularly.
5. Ensure That You Share Pictures While On Site
One effective way to market your contractor business is by posting before and after photos of the construction projects you’ve done. You can post a picture of a construction site before construction started, when building a home’s foundation, as well as different house stages up until you completed it. Also, you can show the clients how well you landscaped the area.
Customers mostly like dealing with companies that are active on social media since they can see evidence of their professionalism. It’d help if you reminded your workers to put on personal protective equipment when working and take a photo of them so the client can see your seriousness when working.
It’s also essential that as you post the photos, you confirm to your audience that your business has contractors’ insurance to protect your builders, electricians, and plumbers in case a risk occurs while they’re on site. An excellent way to do that is by sharing a photo of a builder receiving first aid after an injury while working on a project.
6. Build Your Social Media Presence
Another effective contractor marketing method is advertising your services through social media platforms. You’d want to ensure that you have a peculiar and outstanding online presence. You can use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to reach your audience.
Apart from advertising your services, you can demonstrate your skills and answer some of the questions your prospective customers may have. This will help you determine customer preferences and align your services to meet their needs and specifications.
It’d be best to keep your customers in the loop about every move your business takes, for instance, if you’ve upgraded the machines you’re using. By doing so, you’ll make them feel valued. Thus, they’ll be loyal to your business.
Social media platforms have ads. Thus, they also play a crucial role in helping you build traffic to your website. The more you share posts, the more likes and followers you’ll get, and the higher the chances of expanding your reach. Nevertheless, try to engage with your followers as often as you can.
7. Consider Going For Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC is an online advertising strategy where you place ads on a platform like Facebook or Google. As the name suggests, your role as the advertiser is to pay the search engine or platform any time a client clicks on an ad.
This method may seem expensive, but it’s among the most effective ways of converting sales and generating leads for your construction company, thus enhancing your brand recognition. PPC helps rank your website’s page among the top search engine results page. It’s cost-effective since you only pay when someone visits your website. Moreover, you can choose your target audience depending on your location and language, making your efforts more precise.
8. Create Instructional Videos
The idea when doing contractor marketing is to showcase your abilities in the best way possible to help you win as many clients as you can. Therefore, you’d want to use a good camera to take quality work videos to help promote your brand.
If you have no idea how to do that, it’d be best to consider getting a qualified professional from a renowned digital marketing agency. This individual will help you write a well-explained script and produce a highly engaging and informational video that can impact your target audience.
You can post the video on your website, social media platforms, or YouTube. How-to videos that are related to building, construction, and renovations can also play a significant role in attracting clients. They’ll see that you’re well versed and knowledgeable in the field.
9. Encourage Your Customers To Give You Feedback
If you ask most of your customers to give you feedback on the job that you’ve done, chances are they’ll refuse to do so. Thus, since some customers forget to give any feedback, you can remind them to do that after getting your services. However, one thing you need to avoid is offering an incentive to get a review because it’s illegal, according to Google.
Some of the ways of collecting reviews include:
- Asking the customer how you can serve them better through an email and provide a link where they can find a form and write their feedback.
- Physically offering the satisfaction survey form to your customers once you’ve finished working for them.
- Calling or texting the customer to ask for their sentiments.
Once they’ve given you their honest opinion, you need to respond to their comments, whether they’re good or bad. However, it’s crucial that you maintain courtesy, even if you’ve received a negative comment.
Try and use customer complaints to improve your services so that the next time, you can meet all the clients’ needs. It’d also be wise to focus on positive comments more to help you stay motivated and keep hope alive.
10. Publish The Reviews From Your Customers
Once you’ve offered your services to a client and asked them for feedback, sharing their reviews and testimonials on your social media feed or blog would be best. Many potential buyers look at this before considering a product or service.
You can screenshot a direct message like ‘thank you for the job well done’ from a client and post it for your target audience to see. This will determine whether new visitors will want to work with you or they’ll get discouraged.
The other option is gathering ratings and reviews from your clients and publishing them on your website. This can help affirm the credibility of your services to the market. The higher the number of positive reviews, the greater the chance of getting customers.
11. Ensure That You’ve Provided Your Contact and Social Media Handles
As much as you’re supposed to share your posts and the services you offer, it’d be in vain if you didn’t tell your clients how they will reach you. Thus, it’d be wise to add your contact information to your website to make it easier for visitors to get in touch with you, book appointments, and ask questions.
In this regard, your website’s homepage should be welcoming and appealing to create a positive impression on your potential clients. Also, it’s vital that you use visible fonts and place the contact information (WhatsApp number, social media handles, and email address) in a place that’s easy to locate.
Conclusion
For successful contractor marketing, you need to try using SEO strategies, create engaging content, ensure that you build your social media presence, ask clients for feedback, and share your contact information.
Moreover, it’d help if you share pictures before and after you’ve completed a project and tried the pay-per-click advertising method. That way, you’ll gain a competitive advantage over your competitors and have one of the most outstanding and successful contractor businesses. Consider the ideas mentioned here as you plan and prepare.
