Guide To Marketing a Home Service Business Digitally
Marketing any contract service business or home service business is not an easy task for any business. It can be tough to know where to get started or how to begin.
That is why we decided to make a general guide that any contract service business can use as a roadmap. So what are the steps you need to take at a high level?
Step 1: Lay out your core contract service company information
Step 2: Get your contract service business branding nailed down
Step 3: Learn search engine optimization (SEO) best practices
Step 4: Set up your contract service business website and digital marketing tools
Step 5: Claim your business list page on listing sites and review sites
Step 6: Start a regular posting and content creation cadence
Step 1: Lay Out Your Core Contract Service Company Information
While this might feel redundant, you should start by jotting down key information about your business that will help you determine what you want to cover on your website and what you could include in your other marketing.
Ask yourself the following:
What services do you offer?
What cities do you service?
What is your company's story?
What are your company’s core values?
What careers are you hiring for?
What pictures do you have of your company and your work?
1. What Services Do You Offer?
Do you offer residential services, commercial services, or a mixture of both?
If you offer commercial services, do you work with specific types of companies or industries?
Do you offer repair services, installation services, maintenance services, design services, etc.?
2. What Cities Do You Service?
You should list the cities you actively service and then also create a list of areas you want to expand to.
3. What Is Your Company’s Story?
When was your company started?
Who started it and why did they start it?
Have you expanded over the years?
Do you plan on expanding?
What sets your company apart from the rest?
4. What Are Your Company’s Core Values?
Does your company believe in hard work?
Does your company have high standards for quality?
Does your company believe in honest and transparent communication?
Does your company pride themselves in educating their customers?
What things are important to you, your business, and your employees in relation to the work you do?
5. What Careers Are You Hiring For?
Think about the careers you are hiring for right now and will need to hire for in the future. If some of the entry level roles have paths for promotion if someone works their way up the ranks in your business, you should map that out.
For instance, someone starting out as a laborer might wonder if there is potential to work up to crew lead and perhaps project manager someday with your company.
6. What Pictures Do You Have of Your Company and Your Work?
You should collect all of the photos you have of your company, like:
Pictures of your employees
Pictures of your company vehicles
Before and after photos of your jobs
Pictures of your company’s community engagement
To keep things organized, you should have folders for each of these categories so that you and your team can easily locate photos when using them for your website and your social media.
For more information about how to decide what pages to include on your contract service business website, read our article “How to Determine the Structure of Your Contract Service Business Website.”
Step 2: Get Your Contract Service Business Branding Nailed Down
At a base level, there are a few things you will need to have nailed down for your contract service business marketing, like:
A company logo
Company brand colors
Company fonts
A company persona
A brand style guide
1. A Company Logo
Having a logo from the moment you start your business is a great way to start building your brand recognition. To create a logo, you can either create it yourself in a free tool like Canva or you can outsource the creation of your logo.
If you do make your logo with a free tool like Canva, you should be wary of including any of their pre-designed clip art, as there can be elements that are already copyrighted that prevent you from trademarking your logo.
Your company logo will generally include your company name, a unique font, an icon, and your company colors. However, you have probably noticed that some logos don’t include all of these things.
Some company logos do not have icons and are just the acronym for the business. On the flip side, sometimes companies have an icon that encapsulates their company well with no text.
As a brand that is starting out, it can be helpful to start with each of the elements and then pivot to a logo with just an icon for example.
If you outsource the creation of your logo, you may also want to look into having someone create a cohesive brand kit for you (a logo, brand colors and complementary colors, company fonts, and any other base marketing pieces you want made).
2. Company Brand Colors
Choosing your company brand colors can be tough. Just like your logo, you want to pick colors that represent your brand well and make customers think of you when they see it. Although, there are color schemes that commonly arise for different industries:
Landscaping - different shades of green with hints of oranges, yellows, and blues.
Plumbing - gray and blue, sometimes with black, orange, and red accent colors.
HVAC - blue, red, orange, and yellow, with the occasional purple or black.
Tile and stone - earth tones, gray color palettes, or modern colors combinations.
Roofing - generally red, orange, blue, yellow, or brown.
A great way to get a sense for the norm of your industry is to search “[Industry] company logos” on Google and see what shows up. Now you don’t necessarily want to copy other companies, especially because then all of your marketing will start to look the same.
However, if you are in an industry like plumbing, noticing that blue is a common color is a good thing to note. You could plan to select a brand color palette that works well with the shade of blue you choose.
To mess around with color palettes, you can use this free color palette tool from Adobe that enables you to create a color palette based on complementary colors on a color wheel.
3. Company Fonts
Determining your company’s fonts can be even harder than choosing your company colors. However, just like colors, there are a few guidelines you can follow to make picking font combinations easier.
Serif fonts: Traditional, classic, and authoritative.
Sans Serif fonts: Modern, clean, and polished.
Slab serif fonts: Dependable, solid, and strong.
Script fonts: Elegant, stylish, and creative.
Decorative fonts: Original, unique, and fun.
Handwritten fonts: Informal, playful, and fun.
For more information about the different types of fonts and examples of what they look like, read Visme’s “Ultimate Guide to Choosing Your Brand Fonts.”
To test out font pairings, you can use a free tool like Fontjoy or Designs.AI font tool to test out different font combinations.
4. A Company Persona
Your company persona is what sets the tone for your company’s voice. Generally this company persona won’t be too far off from how you operate as a business owner because it will line up with your core values.
Are you to the point, no BS, honest, and trustworthy? Determining your company persona (personality) help will guide your content efforts.
Once you have this company persona defined, your content manager will be able to start to emulate that persona in all of the content they create.
5. A Brand Guide/ Style Guide
Your brand guide will be a document that outlines your company’s core values, your mission statement, your target audience, and rules on how colors, fonts, logos, and other visual elements will be used.
Depending on how detailed you want to get, you could include information about general structure and strategy for blog creation, website page creation, and case study creation.
Creating a brand guide will allow your content team and company to get on the same page about how they should create marketing collateral for your business.
Step 3: Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practices
The person creating your contract service business website content should have a basic understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) best practices so that you start your website off on a good foot.
Your content manager should know or learn the following:
Write a meta title and a meta description (and know the purpose and how to optimize)
Understand how to structure headings for search engine optimization and know why you structure them in H1, H2, H3
These are key items in creating pages that are optimized for search results and provide potential customers with information about the services you offer.
We have compiled a list of the top five things you should know about formatting your contract service business website pages in our blog “5 Steps To Properly Format Contract Service Business Website Pages.”
If a content writer doesn't know how to create optimized meta information, URLs, and headings, you run the risk of your company’s pages appearing like this in the search results:
Including complete search engine results page (SERP) information for each of your website pages will serve as mini advertisements for your business, compelling prospects to go to your page to learn more.
Step 4: Set up Your Contract Service Business Website and Digital Marketing Tools
If you don’t already have a website created, you can take the following steps to get things up and running:
1. Make a Gmail Email Account
Creating a Gmail (Google Mail) email account is as easy as clicking “Login” at the top right of Google and then clicking “Create Account” and then selecting “For Work or Business.”
This email will be the account you use to connect your Google tools later. You should probably create a company email address formatted like youremail@yourcompanyname.com so that your email address appears more legitimate.
Company emails that end in @gmail.com instead of @yourcompanyname.com can sometimes be flagged in customer’s inboxes as spam if you send a lot of marketing emails.
2. Create a Core 5-10 Pages To Get Started
Creating content for your website can be difficult, but it is crucial that you create enough content to get your site launched. Sites with 5-10 pages starting out tend to do better than sites that begin with under 5 pages.
You should prioritize creating your pages in the following order:
Careers Page
For your Services pages, you may have three services under your Services Overview page, like repair, installation, and maintenance that each need their own page.
Since you will already have created a gmail account, you can create Google Docs in your Google Drive to create each of these pages.
3. Brainstorm a Domain Name
Your domain name is your website’s URL (or the name after “www.”). If you already have a company name established, you will generally want to get a domain that matches it pretty closely.
However, in some cases, someone may already have the domain name that you want. If you run into that, you may be able to buy it from the person using it if they are not actively using it or are willing to switch to a different domain name.
To find a domain name, you can go to a site like GoDaddy and use their domain name search.
If you are unable to get the domain name you want, you should think of similar, alternative names. If you go into searching for a domain name with multiple options, you can increase your odds of getting a domain that works for you.
You will want to try to get a domain name that ends with “.com”. If you are only able to find a “.co”, you should continue trying other domain name options to see if you can find a “.com” that is available.
Once you have selected the domain name you want, you can purchase it and select if you would like to buy it for a year or longer. Generally, you will have the option to select a year subscription that auto-renews each following year.
Once you select the domain name and purchase it, you may also want to consider getting domain ID protection. This ensures that your personal information is not vulnerable to spammers.
To do this, you can generally purchase domain privacy with your domain registrar (the entity you get your domain name from).
4. Determine What Website Builder You Want To Use
Once you have created drafts of your website pages and selected your domain name, you can choose the website builder you will design and build your website with - in some cases you may have already determined this.
Some website builders that are easier to use than others and are fairly inexpensive, include:
To pick the best website builder for you, it will ultimately come down to the one that offers you the features you need (scheduling, templates, website analytics, etc.).
For more information on the five website building platforms listed above, read our article “5 Website Building Platforms To Use To Create a Contract Service Business Website.”
5. Set Up Your Contract Service Business Website
Once you have chosen your website builder, you are onto one of the harder steps of the process: setting up your contract service business website.
This involves creating the URL structure and navigation layout for your site, creating the layout of each page, and ensuring your site is ready to receive inbound leads (meaning your contact us page is set up, has a form, and is connected to a gmail account or google drive).
If you do not have a design or layout in mind, you can usually rely on a pre-designed template from your website building platform. If there are no templates that match what you are looking for, you can also find sites for inspiration and then build it from scratch.
6. Connect Google Tools
Once you have created a gmail account, written your website pages, and created your website, the next step is setting up your Google Suite tools:
Google Analytics
These tools allow you to create a business listing page that appears on Google when customers search for your services near them, check the health of your website and views, and analyze your website traffic.
With these tools set up, you can continuously check how well your site is running and ensure that you make changes and updates that keep you top of mind for Google.
Step 5: Claim Your Business List Page on Listing Sites and Review Sites
7 listing sites you should claim your business on:
Better Business Bureau
Yelp
Angie's List
Yellow Pages
Superpages
HomeAdvisor
Thumbtack
Better Business Bureau
The Better Business Bureau is one of the most reputable sites you can have your contract service business on. It allows customers to know you took the time to become associated with the Better Business Bureau.
Yelp
Yelp’s website is a collection of business listing pages and customer reviews. You may have used Yelp in the past when looking up reviews for a particular restaurant or trying to find restaurant recommendations in your area - they also have a dedicated section to home services.
Angi (formerly Angie's List)
You may be familiar with Angie’s list from when they first began in 1995, known then as a published booklet or a call in service. Angie’s List has now rebranded to the website “Angi,” but they still serve the same purpose - to promote recommended home service providers to customers.
Yellow Pages
Just like Angie’s List, you probably know of the Yellow Pages from many years back when websites didn't exist. The Yellow Pages is now an online directory where customers can search for the services they need, like contract services for their home.
Superpages
If you know of Yellow Pages, Superpages is just a different version of that same idea. It is owned by the same company as Yellow Pages, so the site has a very similar look and feel. As a business owner, it is a good idea to be on Yellow Pages and Superpages in case your ideal customers have a preference for one over the other.
HomeAdvisor
HomeAdvisor is different from the other review sites because they focus solely on home services. You may be familiar with them for their home service articles that they have created to get to the top of search results for questions about service costs.
Thumbtack
Thumbtack is a very similar concept to HomeAdvisor. This site also focuses on creating a directory of home services and provides information to consumers about the costs, the average length of projects, and more.
For more information on how to claim your business on these seven listing sites, check out our article “The Top 7 Review Sites to Claim Your Contract Service Business On.”
Step 6: Start a Regular Posting and Content Creation Cadence
Once you have created your website and made it live, you need to consider what type of posting cadence you want to maintain. The key to picking the correct cadence for you is to choose an achievable one.
The reason for this is because you want to be consistent with your content publishing. The more consistent you are, the more your audience (potential customers) know they can expect to see content from you regularly.
We have seen a variety of posting cadences, like:
2 website pages and 1 blog per week
1 website page and 2 blogs per week
1 website page and 1 blog per week
0 website pages and 3 blogs per week
The posting cadence you choose will depend on how many website pages you wrote initially and how many you still need to add.
If you are still missing some important service pages that you would like to have on your site, you should go with a more website page heavy content cadence until you have created the rest of the website pages you need for your site.
However, if you don't have a lot of website pages you want to add initially, you could start full force with blogs (3 blogs per week) and then transition to 3 blogs a week, 3 social media posts a week, and 3 google updates a week once you have the 3 blogs a week down.
For more information about determining your post cadence, read our article “How Often You Should Add Content to Your Contract Service Business Website.”
Successfully Market Your Contract Service Business With Your Website
By taking the time to understand what you need to know about creating your contract, service, business website, and completing these six crucial steps, you will get your marketing heading in the right direction.
With a clean looking website that provides helpful information to your customers and clearly explains how you help them solve their problems, you will be able to drive more inbound leads to your business.
If you continue to make content geared towards helping your customers solve their problems, you will be able to almost automate your sales process through the bank of contact you will create.
Even if you continue to perform sales activities, and create content, you can use your content in tandem with your sales process in order to educate customers through every step of the way.
For more information on how to create a contract service business website that drives leads, subscribe to our newsletter below or check out our blog.