2021 Marketing Ideas, Strategies, and Tips For Contractors

If you have ever wondered how to advertise as a contractor in today’s world, you came to the right place. While the traditional strategies involving word-of-mouth, flyers, and in-store sales are still effective, modern purchasing journeys now credit a big chunk of their profits to online marketing.

For years, the steady increase of virtual shopping and home deliveries have led to most businesses establishing some sort of online presence. Especially when COVID-19 spread throughout the world, almost everything had to be transacted online. While local businesses may have taken a hit, large companies who already had a solid online presence were better off as sales still came in throughout the lockdown.

How Are Online Marketing Strategies For Contractors Different?

Online marketing for contractors in general is not too different from promoting other goods and services. The question to ask is how is YOUR strategy different, and what edge do you have over the rest?

Similar factors between businesses:

All businesses are given the same set of platforms to choose from
All businesses have the same advertising service options
All businesses have the same access to a wide audience

Differing factors between businesses:

Budget – Budgets differ with every company and it is up to you to determine how much is most practical for you and your current financial situation.
Utilization – What you choose to do with your available resources can make or break your marketing strategy.

Both your budget and ability to maximize the options at hand are crucial to whether or not your list of marketing strategies for contractors will be successful. Determining which methods are suitable can be overwhelming especially if you are just starting out, so to ease your burdens, check our guide on how to advertise as a contractor below:

Best Marketing For Contractors: Website Strategy

Update your site. Before anything else, start by updating your website. It is a great way to streamline your inquiries, leads, and sales so keeping it modern, and responsive can go a long way. Studies show that over 75% of website visitors judge the business’ credibility on the website design alone.
Make it responsive. Most visitors are surfing the Internet using their mobile phones or tablets. Having a website that is responsive to different devices will make it easier for them to navigate, read your content, find the right buttons, and eventually make a purchase. If you are using a service such as Wix, WordPress, or the like, these are automatically set up to be responsive to mobile. However, if you have hired an independent developer, ask them to optimize your site for this.
Keep the clutter out. A website that is easy on the eyes will keep your visitors on it for a longer duration. Do not overwhelm them with too many colors, pop ups, and endless content. Instead, retain enough white space, use images or infographics, and keep text minimal. Studies show that a website’s conversion rate can increase by up to 400% if its interface is well-designed and user-friendly.
Stick to your branding. While white space is important, you should also mix in your brand colors through the details. This helps build brand recognition and help everything come together as a whole. You can incorporate this in your buttons, font colors, header panel, or other areas your website designer would recommend. Similarly, you should be consistent with your font styles, tone of voice, and image styles. The more consistent you keep your details, the stronger your brand recognition can be.
Have it secured. If you want your customers to trust your website, and for Google to rank it higher than competitors, convert it to HTTPS. You can easily do this by purchasing an SSL Certificate and installing it on your web host account.
Provide customer service. A major benefit that a lot of companies overlook is installing an instant chat or call button in their website. A lot of customers prefer to talk to an actual representative, especially if they have a few clarifications. It also makes them feel more at ease knowing you are easy to contact and are very accommodating.

Best Marketing For Contractors: SEO Strategy

After updating your website, set it up for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This not only helps bring people to your site, but it also ensures your foot traffic is valuable and filled with potential leads – not just random visitors who are not even in the market for home contractors.

A few ways contractors advertising online can strengthen their SEO strategy is by:

Using the right keywords. These should be sprinkled throughout the website, including the meta tags, titles, alt text on images, content body, and more. These are what your potential customers would search for – the more you optimize your content using them, the higher the chances are for the right customer finding you.
Improve page speed. Your developer can help increase your page speed by enabling compression, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, reducing redirects, optimizing your images, and more. How fast or slow your page loads directly affects your SEO ranking since Google will take into account the user experience as a whole. If your bounce rate is higher, your SEO ranking goes lower. So be sure to keep things neat, fast, and easy to have your website visitors stay on longer.
Keep your website updated. Like we have mentioned, Google takes into account your visitor’s user experience as a whole when judging your SEO rank. This means that all we have listed above under Website Strategy should be kept consistent if you want your SEO strategy to take off.
Post quality content. Your webpage content quality and length can also help with your SEO. The more valuable the information you put out there, the more your customers would want to look to you as a reliable source. At the same time, you need to have ample content on each page in order to fit in good information and valuable keywords. Research shows that text-based website pages ranked well if they had around 900 – 1600 words, with the average length of Google’s top 10 results being 2,000 words. We suggest sticking within that range for your blog posts and pages that are informative or text heavy.
Claim your Google My Business listing. When setting up a Google Account for your business, you can claim a Google My Business listing, which is a free profile that allows you to reach local customers on both Google Search pages and Google Maps. Once you claim the listing, fill out your information (contact, address, business hours, photos, website URL, etc).

The better your SEO, the higher you will rank in Google search results, making you top of mind against your competitors. There are tech guys professionally trained for SEO, and they can help you build on this, which can take a couple of months until your ranking starts to improve. It is a slow and steady process but one that is great for ROI.

Best Marketing For Contractors: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads

Once you have established your website and optimized it for SEO, back it up through advertising – specifically pay-per-click ads. While your SEO is still building and your website cannot rank top organically yet, PPC ads help by showing your website at the top of search page results and will be labeled as an “Ad”.

You can start with PPC ads in a few steps:

Keywords. Choose the right keywords to advertise. These will be what you think your potential customers will be typing in the search bar.
Set your maximum bid. Also known as Cost Per Click, this is to cap the amount you are willing to pay for each click on your ad and make sure you do not go over budget.
Check your quality score. Your bid plus your quality score will determine which placement Google will put you in which is crucial in order to get enough reach. You can check your ad’s quality score through your reports.
Set your schedule. Set up your start and end date, then launch your campaign.

Digital Marketing For Home Contractors: Social Media Strategy

Social media marketing is hands down one of the most effective strategies available today. It has multiple benefits, such as:

Allows you to easily promote your products on your very own business page, on multiple platforms.
Facebook has a built-in advertising service through its business suite that you can use for both Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook also offers analytics for you to monitor your ads, get to know your audience, and make necessary changes according to your goals
Allows you to easily engage with your audience in various forms, such as:

Comments, shares, and reactions on your post.
Private messages
Polls
And more!

There are many platforms to choose from and it is important to note that you do not need to be on every single one of them – just those relevant to your customer base and where you think they spend more time on.

Which platform should you choose?

Some great social media platforms for contractors advertising online would be Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. LinkedIn may also help you get in touch with companies needing your services. Once you have chosen your platform/s, tailor your content to look best in them. Here’s a quick guide to help you get a better idea:

Facebook – Great for short videos, images, text, polls, industry updates, and shared posts.
Instagram – Great for images, behind the scenes posts of your team, and live updates via Stories. The new Reel feature is also great for short videos.
Pinterest – Great for images.
YouTube – Great for how-to videos, informative videos either short or longer in duration, and videos of your finished work (with client’s consent).
LinkedIn – Great for images and industry updates.

What kind of content should you post?

Your posts should not always be about selling, make sure to include your team, customers, and other aspects of the industry. Aside from photos of your work, you can also include client testimonials, funny stories, photos of your team doing great work, homeowners smiling with your team, and all sorts of content that make your brand more human.

As mentioned, Facebook has its own built-in advertising service that can help you run ads on both Facebook and Instagram. There are multiple types you can choose from and it would be great to explore them to see which fits your company best. You can run ads to get page traffic, messages, video views, clicks to website, purchases, and much more.

Digital Marketing For Home Contractors: Email Marketing Strategy

With your website, SEO, and social media strategies in place, you can get enough leads to start email marketing. A few ideas on how to get your potential customer’s emails are:

Have them sign up and get a discount on their first purchase in return.
Offer members-only discounts throughout your page so they would be more inclined to sign up.
Start an online contest and have them submit emails as part of the requirements.

Remember to only get emails organically, this way you can get more value from your advertising budget by ensuring it does not just go to spam or left unread.

After getting some leads, now what?

Now that you have people that showed interest in your service, you can help convert them to sales by sending regular emails. By regular, we do not mean too frequently – once a week or once a month is a good start. These emails should be personalized with their names and information that you can automatically set up through your email marketing platform.

Not sure what emails to send? These depend on where the customer is on your sales funnel. A few ideas are:

Welcome email with discount or freebie on first purchase
Emails about any promos or discounts you are having
Emails about any events or store locations opening
Emails of new products or services
Emails of photos featuring the place before and after your work
Emails of your featured blog

Digital Marketing For Home Contractors: Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is the backbone of your entire digital marketing strategy. This can greatly help populate your website, improve your SEO ranking, and support both your social media and email marketing strategies.

Types of content marketing:

Maintaining a blog
Posting videos on YouTube
Designing shareable infographics
Writing eBooks or other downloadable material.

The more you offer, the more engaging your audiences will be towards you.

When creating content, remember to provide value by answering common questions, explaining technical information in layman’s terms, and sticking to topics related to your industry. Producing good content can help readers get to know your business, trust your company, and keep you top of mind.

Digital Marketing For Home Contractors: Measure Your Results

Lastly, track your results. You can measure your leads by setting up Google Analytics on your site. This can help you study how visitors navigate your website and if there is a road bump in their purchasing journey. Through analytics, you can check your click through rates, dwell time, bounce rates, conversions, and more.

Facebook’s built-in business suite also provides analytics for you to monitor your ads and engagement. By progressively updating your advertising strategy based on your ad results, you can continue to improve and generate more valuable leads as you go along.