Contractors & Home Services Digital Marketing (Ultimate Guide)

Many contractors, builders, and professional home services businesses rely on word-of-mouth marketing, fliers, and somewhat old-fashioned marketing methods to build their workload. By investing some time and resources into some simple contractor marketing strategies, you can greatly boost your lead-generation and win more jobs online.

Whether you are a roofer, plumber, general contractor, or other home services provider, an intelligently built contractor & home construction marketing plan can get your business found online, increase your lead funnel, and turn those leads into high-value customers. There are dozens of ways to start, so digital marketing can be a bit overwhelming at first, but this guide provides step-by-step instructions on where you should focus your efforts to scale your professional contracting business.

Table of Contents

1. Define Your Ideal Customer
2. Create a Memorable Brand
3. Get a Professional Website
4. Technical SEO
5. Publish Quality Content
6. Video Marketing
7. Newsletter Marketing
8. Create Lead Magnets
9. Lead Nurturing, Follow-Ups & Up-Sells
10. Local SEO
11. Reputation & Citation Management
12. Social Media Marketing
13. PPC & Social Ads
14. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
15. Use Data & Analytics

Define Your Ideal Customer

Before you start your digital marketing plans, it’s vital to understand who your customers are (or who you want them to be). This will help you better relate to your potential customers in your marketing language, understand what home services they are searching for, know how to best serve them, and find out in which locations or neighborhoods they live. This targeted approach will give you an edge and allow you to be more intentional with your time and marketing budget.

Ask yourself, who do you want as your client? Do you (or do you want to) primarily serve residences or commercial spaces in a very specific location, certain types of homes, individuals of a certain income level, etc.? These are all great things to consider as you determine your target market.

Make Better Marketing Decisions

By becoming intimately in-tune with your target market, you will have more leverage in creating a successful digital marketing plan for your professional contracting business. For instance, if your target market is primarily small-medium businesses in your area, you may find that advertising with your local chamber of commerce can help your business become known amongst other businesses in the community.

Every small business new to marketing should “thrown spaghetti at the wall” and see what sticks—although, in an intentional way. By simply trying new marketing tactics, your contracting company will gather valuable data that will help influence future marketing decisions. So, once you have your target market, make educated guesses and revise your strategies as you see what works and what doesn’t.

Create a Memorable Brand

A unique and memorable brand can help your contracting & home services business become a staple in the community! A brand consists of a logo, color palette, font selections, aesthetic rules for usage of elements (icons, photography, etc.) and even elements that are not entirely visual—such as a jingle, how you interact with customers, your attire on the job, how you perform the work, and much more. Your “brand” is the all-encompassing word that defines your business’ identity in the contractor marketplace.

It should be a goal to make your contracting business a household name in the community, and become a localized consumer brand. Here are some strategies that can help make that happen:

1. Choose a catchy, memorable business name
2. Register a domain name (i.e., website URL) that is easy to say and spell
3. Design a modern, unique, and simple logo

Hire a Freelance Designer to Assist with Logo Design and Brand Guidelines

Unless you have experience with brand design, don’t try to design your logo yourself! Even simple logos require high attention to detail and a much more than just slapping something together in Microsoft Paint (RIP). This doesn’t mean you have to spend big on your brand—we don’t recommend it either. Though freelance platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr, you can search, hire, and work with a talented brand designer to make a professional brand for your professional contractor business. Some logos can even cost as low as $25, but we think the sweet spot is in the $200-$500 range to get a great outcome.

Don’t be afraid to show some personality when it comes to selecting color palettes and typefaces! We are working with consumers, after all, and by injecting a bit of fun and flare into your brand, you’ll have a better chance of being remembered. Let your designer reach for colors and fonts that bring some fun, but still enforce the idea that you are a serious contractor providing top-tier home improvement, electrical, plumbing, roofing, etc. services!

Create You Unique Value Propositions (UVPs)

As mentioned, your brand is not just visual elements—it is also about what makes your business and contracting services better than competitors. So, how do you feel your services outperform the rest of the market? Are you more reliable, the most honest, faster, better communicators, specialized in some sense, more cost-effective? Whatever your competitive edge might be, use that throughout your brand to enforce the idea that your home improvement business is “the most [your value prop here!] contractors in the area.”

Get a Professional Contractor Website

Every professional contractor who is serious about their business needs to get a solid website that works for them. We don’t mean “works” in the sense that it is functional, but in the sense that it “works around the clock” as a tool to collect inbound leads.

Your website is the foundation of all of your general contractor digital marketing plans. This is where you should be directing the masses, whether you are marketing on social media, through email newsletters, cold outreach, PPC advertising—and even on printed materials such as fliers, business cards, etc.

Your Website Promotes Legitimacy

When someone visits your website, you want them to have a great first impression of your home services business. Even if you get most of your business from referrals, you still need a website. For instance, many of our clients asking for new website care mainly establishing legitimacy via their website and to show off their past home improvements projects.

How to Get A Great Website

Building a website can be an overwhelming task, as there are dozens, if not hundreds, of platforms to choose from and choosing the wrong one could be a huge pitfall in the grand scheme of your online contractor marketing efforts. The most common problem we see is, many contractors attempt to build their own contractor website.

We have seen several professional service businesses try to build their own websites and the outcome is usually the same… They waste time, lose money, and start over by hiring a professional. A website is an investment for your business and should be treated as such—put some money down and get it done right. You don’t see your customers trying to hand their own electrical work or perform model remediation in their crawlspaces, do you?

Website design & development is unlike your craft—it is complicated, requires years of experience to perfect, is best done by a professional. If you want a cost-effective freelancer, Upwork is a great place to do find one, however, you will have to vet candidates, which can be tricky. A small digital agency would likely be easier to manage but will come with a higher cost.

With Command, you can get a unique, conversion-focused website for your home services business in just days, for much cheaper than you’ll get at a glitzy digital agency.

Need some design inspiration for your contractor website? Check out some of the Best Roofing Website Designs by Command.

Your Website Content Management System (CMS)

We recommend you go with a popular website platform. Our preference is the open-source CMS, WordPress. It has been around for decades and has has 63.5% of the market share for all CMS-based websites on the internet.

Other popular CMS website builders you may consider looking into include Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, and Drupal. Aside from Drupal, all of the others listed here are proprietary (or, closed-source) platforms that do not provide true website ownership. If you choose a proprietary website platform, your website (or its backend CMS functionality), cannot be migrated elsewhere if you wish.

Command has chosen to build our contractor websites on a custom WordPress theme, due to its wide adoption, flexibility and intuitive admin area.

Recommended Contractor & Home Construction Website Sitemap

For most contractors, a website should include (at least) the following pages:

• Homepage
• About Us
• Leadership or Staff
• Leader/Staff Member Bio Template (one page for each manager, technician, etc.)
• Services
• Service Landing (one page for each service vertical)
• Project Portfolio (optional)
• Project Template (one for each prominent project)
• Blog/News
• Contact us

Quick tip: start with fewer pages and grow your website pages and content as you generate website traffic and marketing data. A smaller initial sitemap will get you to launch sooner, which helps build Domain Authority (DA) for your future SEO marketing campaigns.

Technical SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex, multifaceted, ongoing practice. When we explain it to clients, we like to split it into three, separate areas:

1. Technical SEO
2. Content SEO
3. Local SEO

We will be presenting the three types of SEO as they are listed above.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the practice of adapting your website’s code, metadata, accessibility, loading speed, and much more so search engines are able to properly “crawl” and “index” your website content. Given the highly technical nature of Technical SEO, we recommend all contractors and home services businesses find an SEO professional to diagnose and fix any SEO errors on your website. Attempting to fix there issues yourself could result in catastrophic issues that further degrade your search engine rankings.

Common Technical SEO Errors

An SEO audit can help reveal some of the technical pitfalls hindering your search engine rankings. While fixes are relatively quick and straightforward, others can be quite tricky. Some of the more common technical SEO errors include:

• 404 Errors due to URLs that no longer exist on your website. These URLs should be redirected (301 or 302) to an existing webpage with similar content, or to your homepage.
• Missing Title Tags on webpages. A <title> tag is an on-page SEO element that show up on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
• Missing or Duplicate Meta Descriptions on webpages. A <meta description> tag is a short description of a page’s content. It helps search engines understand the page’s content and shows below the Title in the SERPs.
• Broken Internal/External Links and Images within website content causes crawling issues for search engine robots, and can hurt that pages’s potential to rank.
• Duplicate Content caused by multiple pages having too similar of content. Duplicates of given page should use Canonical URL pointed to that given URL.
• “Unminified” JS/CSS Files are uncompressed versions of website source code. By “minifying” these files, the bundle size will be lower and that helps loading speed increase.

Consult an SEO professional upon website launch to ensure your site is in working order before you start any other marketing campaign. All Command websites come with a complimentary SEO audit upon launch!

Publish Quality Content About Home Remodeling, Repairs, etc.

Publishing content on your website blog is referred to as “content marketing.” An intelligent content marketing strategy is to publish content that is inline with the buying motivations, common questions, home repair needs, etc. your target audience. You might have a few ideas already, but if you’re not sure, here are a few ways to find good content topics:”

Find Topics to Write About

There are quite a few ways to find relevant commercial & home repair topics to turn into blog articles:

• Benchmark competitor blogs by visiting their websites and looking through their recent posts. You can also find which of their blogs have the highest traffic using SEO platforms like SEMRush and ahrefs. These platforms provide highly useful data that can help you devise a strong content strategy and schedule.
• Google Search provides a list of common & related search queries on the results page. Simply type in your service offerings and see what questions people often search—we have created entire blogs off of these simple, little recommended searches.
• Online keyword tools (such as ahrefs’ Keyword Generator) provide related search queries that include monthly search volume to help you find out which queries are the most searched.
• Data & analytics from Google Analytics and Google Search Console provide data that shows you the content your visitors like the most, and what search queries are bringing them to your site. Use this data to realign your content strategy, by doing more of what your visitors like and less of what they don’t like.

Post Templates

The format of your articles can play a huge role in their success. Some strong content formats include articles such as:

• Listicle Template: People love lists. Whether it’s a checklist for home chores or a list of the top-ranked neighborhoods in their area, people are obsessed with them. Example: “The 10 Most Important Home Maintenance Tasks to Do Every Spring“
• Comparison Template: Are there a few service options that a potential customer can choose from? And are you constantly explaining the difference, benefits of one over the other, etc.? Make an article out of it! Example: “Screen Gutter Guards vs. Micro-Mesh Gutter Guards“
• How-To Template: Nothing makes me trust a company more than them divulging that hard-earned knowledge for the world to see. This show confidence. Write an article that tells your customer exactly how to do it and they’ll have all the proof they need that you know how to do it yourself! Example: “How to Test Your Drywall for Mold“
• Ultimate Guide Template: Much like this article, an “ultimate guide” is the one-stop resource for a customer to read all about a given topic. Example: “The Ultimate Guide to Finding the best General Contractor“

Consistency is Key

Consistency is one of the most important factors for contractors and home construction businesses to find success in content marketing. Determine your schedule, whether its weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. and stick to it. And when you publish a new article, share it! Share across your most engaged social media accounts with relevant hashtags and a short introduction.

The Backbone of “Content SEO”

If you want to see real SEO results, you have to write quality content—this is called Content SEO. By publishing relevant content based on your audience’s needs and buying decisions, you will naturally hit the keywords they are searching online, which will improve the chances they end up on your website. And if you’ve got a great website for your contracting services or home construction business, it’ll also help convert that user into a lead!

Want to learn more about writing content that is optimized for building search traffic? Check out Part 1 and Part 2 on our series: 20 SEO Copywriting Tips for Contractor Marketing.

Update & Repurpose Content

One of my favorite content marketing tricks is polishing older articles to make them more relevant and thorough. We routinely analyze content data using Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see how well it is performing. If we are seeing a healthy amount of organic search traffic, and the queries leading that traffic to the article are spot-on, we’ll add more quality content! And if the queries leading to the article aren’t hitting the mark, revise it!

Video Marketing

Video marketing can be a huge benefit to your contractor marketing strategy—but it does take some learning and resources to output quality content. If you have the time, resources, and patience, we recommend publishing informational videos to educate people about your home contractor service offerings. For instance, you can teach them how to check if their electrical panel is wired correctly, how to check their roof and gutters after a big storm, and so on.

You may even opt to publish videos instead of written content. After all, over 70% of people prefer watching videos to reading the very same content in a blog post.

YouTube likely comes to mind on the topic, but it isn’t the only place to post your videos. Popular video platforms include TikTok, Instagram (reels), and Facebook. These platforms are fantastic for short-form videos that could even be a cut-up teaser for your more lengthy YouTube videos—this cold help capture users’ attention and direct them to your other channels.

Start Simple & Go From There

You’ve likely seen contractors and home renovation businesses that create quick videos on their smartphones with quick, simple tips that can be uploaded to social platforms on the fly. For example, I recently got served a short video of regrading, another for carpet cleaning, and many others. You’d be surprised how much engagement these videos get!

Shooting a professional video will require more preparation, such as script-writing, proper lighting, video editing skills—in which case we recommend you hire a professional.

Email Marketing for Contractors

Email marketing is a great way to check in with your your existing customers and leads and serve them with relevant content. The idea behind a newsletter is to send occasional or scheduled newsletters with valuable information pertaining to your audience’s wants and needs. This could be something you do seasonally (e.g., “Spring is Here! Time to Power-Wash Windows and Siding!”)

Not only can you send these more general, informational newsletters to your subscribers, you can set up intelligent onboarding workflows that will nurture your new leads and help educate them through their buyer’s journey. More to come in a later section about lead-nurturing!

Email Platforms & Design

Modern email newsletter platforms such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc. include intuitive functions for “segmenting” (or categorizing) your subscribers based on user-defined criteria. This will help you target certain subscribers who will find the newsletter content most relevant. For example, if you are an HVAC professional, you can include a segment parameter in your lists for customers who recently got a new furnace—and when 6 months has passed, send a check-in email reminding them to change their filter. In this email, you can even sneak in a bit about a referral program, or discounts for those customers who own multiple properties.

As for newsletter design, stick with simple! Most newsletter platforms come with a multitude of varying themes, layouts, and content structures to choose from—but we recommend keeping it simple, branded, and easy to scan. Through your email platform analytics, you can see what devices your audience uses to view newsletters. For those on mobile devices or tablets, a simple layout will be the most user-friendly.

Building a solid list is a marathon, not sprint, so don’t get discouraged if it takes a while to get subscribers. Just remember, quality content (whether written or video) will greatly help improve your sing-up rate and attract more readers to your home services & contracting website.

Create Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is a piece of valuable content that you trade to website visitors in exchange for their contact information. This can be an incredibly powerful way to generate highly qualified leads—that are ready to buy now!

Lead Magnet Ideas

This exclusive piece of content should be “premium” or “inside knowledge” relative to the content you publish for free.

The content you exchange in return for the user’s contact information can be a “The Ultimate Spring Home Maintenance Guide” in PDF form or even a video series about “How To Plan Your Kitchen Renovation Like a Pro.”

The Lead Form

Your contractor website will need a lead form for users to signup for access to the content. Here, you can add any fields that you would like, but keep in mind that generally, fewer fields (e.g., email address only) typically leads to more form submissions, while a greater number of fields leads to fewer, although more-qualified leads. Adding resistance (i.e., many form fields) can cause less-qualified or less-motivated buyers to avoid the additional work required to submit the form.

Once a subscriber submits their information, they are considered to be at the “top” of your “funnel.” From here, you should have certain, systematic steps to get in contact with this lead to motivate them to choose you are their home renovation expert or general contractor.

Lead Nurturing, Follow-Ups & Up-Sells

Lead-nurturing is the process of creating & maintaining relationships with your leads and customer base. Ideally, your nurturing strategy starts from the moment a potential customer calls, submits an inquiry, subscribes to your newsletter, reaches out on live chat, etc. Common lead nurturing strategies include sending onboarding emails, direct contact via phone or email, or scheduling a time to provide that lead with a customized quote for the work they need done.

Automated Follow-ups

Automated responses sent from your email newsletter platform are a great way to send an initial follow-up for new leads. Dedicated WordPress form-builder plugins (such as GravityForms and WPForms) also have intuitive tools that let you send an automated messages saying something like, “we got your contact inquiry!”

Alternatively, a manual follow-up strategy might give you a higher conversion rate on those incoming home services leads.

High-Touch Follow-ups

Manual follow-ups are more work, but help make a great first impression on your business’ behalf. A quick phone call could even be a time-saver, so you can understand the lead’s unique needs, and have an opportunity to make your interaction more personal and personalized.

Up-Sell Contracting & Home Improvement Services

It is a lot harder to get a new customer than it is to up-sell an existing customer. A strong up-sell strategy can be a major source of income for your business. For instance, if you just got a new flooring installation project, ask about other rooms in the home that may need flooring, discuss material upgrades with them, mention an optional extended warranty you offer, maybe you offer a flooring touch-up program every set number of months. Whatever your home improvement service offering is, get creative with how you sell your services to better take advantage of opportunities where clients might want more assistance, security, or quality of product.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your contractor website and online presence (referred to as “off-site” SEO) to help your Google Business listing rank for searches that have local-intent. A local-intent search includes a bit about the searcher’s location, such as “commercial roofers in Dallas” or “electrician near me.” The ultimate goal of Local SEO is to rank within the “local 3-pack” on the Google search results page:

Ranking in the Google’s “3-Pack” as a Contractor & Home Services Provider

Showing up in the Google’s Local search results isn’t bound to happen overnight. Like all types of SEO, it will take some time, patience, and consistent attention to your search presence.

The first step is to create or claim your contracting business on Google Business, Yelp and Facebook Business Manager. We’ve provided links below to each platform’s signup page:

• Google Business Signup
• Yelp Signup
• Facebook Business Signup

Be thorough and consistent when building each profile, especially when it comes to your contact information. Consistency of your Name, Address, Phone number (NAP Data) across these platforms and other online business directories is a Local SEO factor.

You will have an opportunity to select the products/services which you offer as well, through the business categories section on Google Business—this will be a factor when a user searches for a handyman, contractor, or home improvement business. Some of the categories that you might select as a contractor include:

• Bathroom remodeler
• Building restoration service
• Concrete contractor
• Contractor
• Custom home builder
• Design engineer
• Electrician
• Fire damage restoration service
• General contractor
• Handyman
• Home builder
• Interior design
• Kitchen remodeler
• Landscape designer
• Painter
• Remodeler
• Structural engineer
• Water restoration service

Once these three, main business directory profiles are finished and published, add links to each one on your website, within your email signature, and anywhere else that your audience might find them. Next, we want to focus on getting some five-star reviews and descriptive testimonials posted across these platforms— discuss this in the next section.

Add a Google Map to your Website

Embedding a Google Map on your website has been shown to provide an SEO boost, and also helps customers with a visual of your shop location when they visit your website. Instructions on how to do so to follow:

1. Enter your home improvement business address into Google
2. Click the map box that shows on the search results page
3. On the next screen, click the “Share” icon
4. Within the resulting popup, select the “Embed a map” tab at the top
5. On the right, click the “Copy HTML” code
6. Login to your website backend, paste the code within an HTML block, and publish the changes

Pro Tip: Google map iFrames are not automatically mobile-responsive. Use Embed Responsively to generate a mobile-responsive embed code that you can instead paste onto your webpage.

Add Local Keywords to Website Content

By combining your home services keywords and the geographic locations that you service, you are can climb higher in the rankings for organic searches with local-intent. Localize the text within the <H1> tags (“headers”) on your website, such as “Top Asphalt Pavers in Columbus” or “Atlanta’s Highest Rated Floor Layers.”

Pro Tip: Google Analytics and Google Search Console will provide you with data to determine the amount of website traffic stemming from searches with local intent—try creating a landing page for the most popular cities, areas, and neighborhoods you serve. When writing the copy for these page, inject the city or region name into the headers and body.

Reputation & Citation Management

If there is one thing we can’t stress enough when it comes to contractor marketing—it is that social proof is hugely important! Generating reviews from (happy) past clients is great for Local SEO, but more importantly, it provides prospective buyers with genuine endorsements that the home improvement services you provide are top-notch. As you are aware, there is a lot of speculation in the contractor industry and shoddy work being done on a daily basis in just about every market. Gathering a strong testimonial base and high star ratings will help your contracting business stand out from less-equipped competitors.

Back to the Local SEO aspect of reputation management: factors that search engines consider include as your number of customer ratings, quality of ratings, overall sentiment of reviews, frequency/date of reviews, and more.

Generate & Display Reviews from Clients

Most customers will happily leave a strong review if you just ask them to—so reach out to those past customers who loved the work you did, check-in with them, and mention it would be very helpful if they spent a couple minutes to leave a review. You can even have an “off-boarding” email automation flow where once you mark a customer as complete, it will automatically send them an email and within that email, you can request a review on Google, Facebook, and/or Yelp.

Pro Tip: Google Business offers has a way to create a direct link for customers to leave a review. Consider embedding this link on your website and/or within your email signature.

Use new reviews to your advantage by placing them on your website, posting across social media accounts, and adding them to other marketing collateral, such as flyers. As we mentioned, showing proof that you are a solid contractor who customers love working with can go a long way.

Handling Bad Reviews

You will get a bad review at some point—it happens to every business. When it happens to your, leave a response to show your genuinely care about the customer’s poor experience and consider working with them to make it right. If you are willing to help, you could very well salvage that relationship and even get them to edit their bad review. Even if that customer is being stubborn, future clients will see your heart-felt response and perceive you as a professional who truly cares about the quality of home improvement work you provide.

Citation/Listing Management

Google, Yelp, and Facebook are just a few of many online business directories; there are dozens of others (e.g., YellowPages, CitySearch, Bing, Waze, etc.) where you should submit your business listing, to help get your name out there and improve Local SEO. Manually submitting and managing these dozens of listings would be inefficient. Platforms such as Yext, SEMRush’s Listing Management, or Birdeye automatically submit your listing data to all of these online directories and help you centrally manage it from an intuitive dashboard. Some of them even offer functions to monitor reviews, and allow you to respond.

Online Directories for Contractors & Home Services Providers

There are directories out there that cater specifically to accounting firms as well, such as Angi, Thumbtack, and others. Create a profile on these platforms to see how much traffic and how many leads they generate for your contracting business. If they are a consistently reliable source for new home improvement work, you might considering advertising with them—more to come on that later.

Social Media Marketing

People are obsessed with home improvement and renovation social media posts. If you’re not convinced, go to TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram and look at the amount of engagement the top posts receive. Even if you are not providing much in the way of the interior or landscape design services, people are still interested in watching and understanding the work that goes into recreating a space, whether that is installing new flooring, performing demo & putting up drywall, installing kitchen cabinetry, and so on.

Start your social media marketing journey by doing some research on the most popular platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest) to get a feel for which platforms have the greatest audience engagement. Once you’ve selected the platforms that you feel suit your business best, build a social strategy.

For simplicity and efficiency, use a templates approach to social media marketing. By that, we mean, create a few post formats for the type of conten you plan to post. For instance:

• Before & After Images: Post image slideshows of how a room, floor, bathroom, kitchen, etc. looked before and after your work.
• How To (Informational) Videos: Maybe there are some things dealing with a specific job that you feel potential customers should know if they are seeking a similar project. Create a quick video to show how to do something, or simply to educate them on the subject.
• Customer Reviews: Create a standard template and plug-in each new review you receive to share across your social accounts.

By creating a standardized format, you can make a daunting task like social media marketing fairly simple. If you aren’t too keen on doing social media marketing yourself, hire a social media marketing consultant/freelancer to help build your contracting business’ presence.

Creating Social Media Accounts

Regardless of your target audience, we recommend starting with some of the most popular LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Here’s how to get started on each platform:

• To create a TikTok account for your contracting & home services business, follow the instructions here.
• Facebook requires that you have a personal Facebook account in order to create a business account. Once your personal account is set up, follow these steps to create your Facebook Business Manager account.
• If you didn’t know, Instagram is owned by Facebook—this makes it very easy to share posts across both platforms at once, which can help shave off some time. Follow the simple instructions here to create your Instagram Business account for your contracting business.
• Create a Pinterest business account by following this link.

Posting on Social Media

Posting on social media should be about sharing value & information with your followers, and be less about self-promotion.

Post across your account when you publish a new blog, newsletter, or if there are seasonal factors that influence customers in your home improvement services market.

You don’t have to be a professional graphic designer to design attractive and engaging post artwork. Use Canva to quickly and easily create optimized social media posts using their vast array of artwork templates, sized according the needs of each platform’s specs. We recommend picking just a few of these and adding your branding (i.e., logo, fonts, colors)—then swap the content on the next post!

If you have the time and resources to shoot video, do it. A DataBox study found that marketers across various industries tend to generate twice as many clicks than image-based posts, and video post conversion rates were 20-30% higher than those for image posts.

Managing Social Media Profiles Efficiently

I’m an efficiency addict, so logging into each social media platform separately to post the same content drives me crazy. Lucky, we use social media management tools such as HootSuite and Buffer to centrally manage all social media activity. Buffer even has a free tier that you can start with to see if it works well for you.

These platforms come with additional features to help boost your social media marketing strategies. They include functions for engagement, social listening, advertising, analytics, and host a multitude of integrations with common mar-tech tools. We love having the ability to schedule posts for the future, so we can plan out several posts at once and publish them at specific times over the course of the week.

Staying active on social media show potential clients your contracting business stays engaged.

PPC & Social Ads

Advertising on search engines, social media platforms and other online directories can help your business generate more website clicks—but keep in mind, you are paying for each and every click (PPC actually stands for “Pay-Per-Click”).

Advertising on Google

PPC advertising on Google can help you get get more impressions and website traffic on your contracting business website. When you bid on certain keywords and search queries via Google Ads, you are essentially competing with other businesses for those queries similar to an auction, and Google will place the winning links at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Search Ads are exactly what they sound like—when someone searches, for instance, “plumber and pipe-fitter” you can choose to bid on that keyword/search query in order to show up in the SERPs. If your bid amount is high, the ad copy you built will show within the first few results on the page, accompanied by a “Sponsored” or “Ad” tag. This lets search engine users know these are ads sponsored and not organic rankings. When someone clicks on your ad link, you pay.

Local PPC ads show up in the Google Local 3-pack that we touched on within the Local SEO section. This works in the same fashion as the traditional PPC ads, but the 3-pack will only show for searches with local-intent, such as “Detroit basement finishers” or “deck repair near me.”

PPC advertising is a relatively complex marketing strategy that requires thorough keyword research, consistent monitoring, campaign editing, ad copywriting. If you are interested in running ads, we recommend finding an advertising consultant to help with initial implementation, campaign management, and ongoing ad-spend optimization.

Social Media Advertising

Every social media platform has advertising opportunities—this is actually how they make money! While we do not run social media ads, we have seen clients have major success with this strategy, using Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

If you are interested in learning more about social ads for your home improvement and contracting business, check out these guides below:

• Read How To Advertise on Facebook in 2023 [Complete Guide] from Hootsuite
• Read 8-Step Guide to Using Instagram Ads [2023 Edition] from Hootsuite
• Read The Complete Guide to YouTube Ads for Marketers from Hootsuite
• Read TikTok ads 101: How to get started with TikTok advertising from Sprout Social 

Advertising on Directories

If you see relatively high web traffic stemming from online directories, such as Yelp, consider running ads to see if it boosts your success further.

Pro Tip: Some online ad platforms come with promotional offers, such as free or matching spends for new users.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

CRO is the process of testing & updating elements on your trades business website, newsletters, social posts, etc. to increase your rate of converting that user (e.g., to generate a lead, get a website click, get a newsletter subscriber, etc.).

Website CRO

Typically, it is businesses with larger marketing budgets that hit CRO hard. This is because CRO requires constant updating and testing, which both rely on marketers, designers, content writers, and website developers. If you run a large home improvement or trade business and have a few-thousand per month in your marketing budget, CRO is not a bad way to invest those dollars.

A/B Testing is a common CRO strategy, which calls for comparing for the performance of two variations of the same marketing asset. For example, in the below graphic, we change the CTA colors across a commercial & residential electrician website for one month to see which performs better (i.e., gets more clicks). From there, we keep the more performant version of the website run another A/B test with the button size with copywriting, graphics, section orders, etc.

If you’re looking to start your CRO journey in a simple way or just gather data that’s not only numbers and graphs, set up a tool such as Hotjar. Hotjar provides user session recordings and webpage heat maps that show how users are navigating your site and what they are clicking on most, respectively. We use Hotjar internally to gain usage insight and adapt our website’s navigation, call-to-actions, and design elements to be more in-tune with our user base.

Optimizely is another fantastic CRO tool, although you should know some HTML/CSS/JS to use it effectively.

CRO in Other Contractor Marketing Mediums

You can perform CRO on email newsletters, PPC ads, social media posts, blog writing style and more. Each of these platforms capture data points so you can try test different layouts, color patterns, advertising language, and more.

CRO is about being both creative and data-oriented. It helps you understand your users better, and how to better serve them assets that help them make their home improvement buying decisions.

Use Data & Analytics

Collecting and using your website & marketing data is fuel to supercharge your construction & contractor marketing plans. With quantitate feedback, you can make better use of your marketing resources—by filling the holes in your strategy and killing any strategies that aren’t leading to great Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

Google Analytics & Google Search Console

Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free and provide vital information that helps you understand user demographics, engagement time, most trafficked pages, and much more.

Google Analytics (GA) is relatively straightforward to set up but can be a bit complex to use unless you get familiar with the interface. If you’re the dedicated data-analyzer at your home services business, check out Google Analytics Academy. While GA is a universally beloved tool, there are more sophisticated tools exist, such as Segment and Mixpanel, but they come with a high-cost and are typically in use for more enterprise-level organizations.

Google Search Console (GSC) is a simpler platform that gathers Google search and crawling/indexing data for your site. You can see your ranked search queries, number of impressions per query, and even the number of clicks seen by each query. We love the intuitiveness of GSC and use it to influence our pillar pages and blog content strategy.

Other Data & Tools to Consider

Most notable social platforms and online directories provide some level of analytics/data. For instance, Instagram Business accounts display post and account engagements, and even allow a quick way to “boost” posts. If you find a post format, content type, or media type generates more than other types, run with it!

Another tool we love is Google’s Campaign URL Builder. It allows you to add “URL parameters” so when a user clicks the provided link, Google Analytics will give you additional information about how that traffic was acquired.

This is a fantastic idea for email newsletter links, for instance, as you can add a URL parameter to know how many times a URL from a specific newsletter was clicked. You can use this same approach for affiliate marketing, blog “backlinking,” and more to see what mediums, channels, campaigns, etc. generate the most website traffic for your home services & contracting business.

Leveraging data will help your business reach more potential clients, serve them more relevant content, increase your lead-generation efforts, and spend your marketing dollars more efficiently.