The home renovation industry is a multi-billion dollar market and there are hundreds of thousands of businesses all trying to do the same thing — get leads and be the best in their market.
It’s because of this reason that most companies willing to hire a home renovation business end up with at least four or five quotes from different companies before they finalize one.
For example, for a larger project, you could easily get 12-15 quotes from contractors.
However, what most business owners do not realize is that the traditional marketing methods are receiving less and less attention from potential clients.
Despite the tough saturated marketplace in which they operate, renovation businesses can still get an edge over their competition by spending time marketing themselves.
So, how can you make your brand stand out from the crowd? Learn how to market a home renovation business!
Getting More Home Remodel Leads as a Small Business
Do What You Do Best
Specialize in what you do best, and if you don’t know what that is, figure it out.
There are all kinds of contractors who can fix your roof. But if you’re a contractor who specializes in new homes or rooftop solar panels, for example, you can charge more for your services because those are more challenging projects with higher profit margins for the contractor.
And when you have a track record of doing excellent work on difficult projects, then homeowners will be more inclined to hire you for the easier jobs.
Encourage Word of Mouth
A popular way of keeping customers happy is word-of-mouth advertising, the idea that your happiest customers will advertise for you by telling their friends about you. Customers who are really thrilled with your home remodeling services will refer you to others all on their own, without any prompting from you.
The best way to encourage word-of-mouth advertising is by doing a great job for your clients every time they do business with you.
That means paying attention to details, being responsive, communicating clearly, and delivering what you promise promptly. But there are also some specific strategies you can use to help develop an enthusiastic pool of consumers.
In this article, we’ll touch upon the 4 steps to take if you want to market a home renovation business:
- Diversify your marketing channels as much as possible;
- Leverage local SEO and focus on specific locations;
- Use visual content to promote your business on social media;
- Offer premium content and valuable information.
Diversify Your Marketing Channels
If you have been building your renovation business online, you will find that there are a wide range of sources through which you may attract traffic.
Some are cost-effective, while others aren’t.
As a business owner, you need to be as visible online as possible to foster good relationships with your current client base and attract new ones.
There may be a time when you started building your home renovation business and the only marketing source was word of mouth. But as you grew, you soon found that these days face-to-face interactions don’t generate the number of leads that you need.
In today’s digital age, most people find their contractors through online searches. This is where attracting good traffic comes into play.
Home Improvement Ads
One way to get it is by investing in pay-per-click (PPC) ads through Google AdWords, Bing Ads, or Facebook Ads.
An efficient way to do this is to offer incentives, like a certain percentage of the total home improvement cost. Advertising incentives aren’t only about sales. They’re also about brand awareness and repeat traffic. When a customer sees a home improvement ad that says, “We’ll match any competitor’s price,” they may or may not buy that day, but they do see your business’ name. They have seen it, and it’s likely to stay in their memory. That’s brand awareness.
Advertising is also about repeat traffic. If a customer comes in for a specific sale item, like a total kitchen remodeling project, and goes home with something else as well, that’s good for your business. They see the value of your business, and they’re likely to come back when they need something else.
The timing of the sale is important. You wouldn’t want to run a “Buy One Get One” program for new patio furniture in December. It would be too late for summer parties. The best time to advertise BOGO sales is around Labor Day when customers are thinking of what to buy for fall gatherings.
It’s worth taking the time to plan out your sale advertising strategy so you can hit all three points: sales, brand awareness, and repeat traffic
But the other way is by targeting people who are actively looking for what you have to offer. This essentially means running search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns.
When a consumer is looking for a service in your category, they usually google some keywords related to their needs.
Finding a company to do the job is easier than it has ever been thanks to the internet – especially if you have an online presence.
However, the process of bringing potential customers in could be quite difficult without the right strategy.
With so many options available, it can be intimidating to figure out where to start when it comes to driving traffic to your home renovation business. But one of the most effective strategies is to utilize the tactics already made available to you.
By using platforms that are familiar to homeowners, like your website, Facebook, and Twitter, you can bring in clients that may be more enthusiastic about the services you provide.
Use Local SEO to Your Advantage
Local SEO involves optimizing your website to achieve a higher ranking when customers search for home renovation businesses on Google.
If your potential clients are searching for your services online, and they are likely to be in close geographic proximity to you, they can find you in their search results.
That increases the likelihood that they will contact you and purchase your services.
One of the most challenging SEO strategies is local SEO because every city has different ways to rank a business or local website in their search engine.
One area might favor linking root domains, whereas another area frowns upon it. Another region may prefer local citations, whereas another may prefer Facebook business pages instead.
Local SEO may seem like a daunting strategy at first, but once you see how it all comes together, it’s pretty easy to grasp. You need to take into consideration:
- The need for home renovation businesses around your area;
- The strength of your online presence such as reviews, your Google My Business profile, or location pages on your website;
- Your competition.
How to market a home renovation business locally
Local marketing is a great way to connect with your community and build trust, which will allow you to reach more people. You can use local marketing to position yourself as an expert in your industry or even just as someone who cares about the people in your area.
While this type of advertising may not be as effective against national brands with huge budgets for advertising, it’s still better than nothing. Local businesses tend to have smaller budgets than their competitors. Still, they also have closer ties with their communities—and those relationships can go far when it comes time for them to make buying decisions.
You can develop a good relationship with other local professionals in your field and leverage their expertise to market your business. These people can refer customers to you and refer their clients to other professionals in the home improvement industry.
For example, if you specialize in landscaping, it’s good to partner with an interior designer who specializes in color and design. They will be able to help you know what colors are popular for certain types of homes so that when customers come into your office, they understand what kind of services you provide and how much those services cost.
Use Visual Content on Social Media
There is an SEO trend that isn’t talked about much but can still have a big positive impact on your website’s visibility in organic search results.
That is – visual content.
Social media has made us all more visual-oriented and it’s important for SEOs and businesses to catch up with this trend and find a way to make both social media and their website as visual as possible.
And if you’re good at the art of creating visual content (images, animated GIFs, memes, and so on), you’ll be able to improve your local SEO performance at the same time!
Visual content is at the heart of modern content marketing, and people love good visual content. In fact, businesses that use visual platforms are usually more likely to get shared, are viewed for longer, and are helped to convey their message better than a local business without visuals.
Visual content is a fickle beast, and sometimes you have to approach it in a different way than you would with text-based content in terms of strategic planning.
While the overall goal of content marketing is still there – to build brand awareness and reach potential customers – subtle changes in emphasis are required to attract users to the words you post on visual media.
But what should be your main platform for sharing visuals?
Pinterest has become one of the top networks for home renovation inspiration.
When the concept of Pinterest first started in 2010, it was mainly used as a platform to save ideas and style trends. But since then, more homeowners are using Pinterest to find home renovations ideas.
Not only that, it’s being used as an online window shopping tool for homeowners who want to get ideas for renovation projects or find out how much something they found on the internet will cost to have done themselves.
This poses a great opportunity to market your home remodeling business as an authority in the field. If you don’t have a Pinterest profile, and you are starting a home remodeling business, it’s not only time to create it – it’s vital. Pinterest is a huge social media resource for interior design, decorating ideas, and renovation projects of all sorts.
Offer Valuable Information and Be The Go-To Source
Creating valuable content is an essential part of both traditional SEO and local SEO.
People love researching and finding out as much information as possible about the services they want to buy, before actually buying them. Information gives them a sense of security and control and comparing offers reduces friction in their minds.
As home improvement professionals, you naturally want to be the best at what you do.
And just as in any industry, that takes a lot of specialization.
However, increasingly it also takes something else: the ability to communicate with your clients. Content marketing is proving to be one of the best tools for doing this.
It goes beyond simply blogging about topics and sharing information in hopes that it gets picked up. Rather, it is a strategy for building trust, cultivating loyalty, and getting new leads while moving prospects along the sales funnel.
Building your blog helps build your brand, as well as get website traffic to your homepage or service pages.
It’s a whole lot easier to have people see your site when you have great content consistently flowing out from your blog.
What does this mean for you? There is an opportunity there if you are willing to get started with content marketing for your remodeling business.
So, what kind of content should you create? When it comes to content for your home remodeling business, you’re going to want to look into all the options. By creating content in the forms of blog posts, videos and infographics, you will have a range of ways you can market your business.
While blog posts are great, everybody does them. However, not enough businesses leverage videos to increase their traffic.
When it comes to marketing tactics, video is one of the best ways to engage homeowners. People view videos more than any other type of content in a search engine.
Videos can be used to market your home remodeling projects, build authority, establish your business as one that cares about its clients and communicate the uniqueness of your services.
On the other hand, infographics are some of the most powerful tools for traffic generation and conversion optimization.
They are not just about pretty pictures. Well-made infographics can be very useful to your readers as they visually display data, statistics, and even processes or procedures. This makes them ideal for marketing your business or project.
Leverage online reviews
Online reviews are a great way to get more business. Reviews are crucial for marketing your home renovation business. You can use them to market locally and increase the number of customers you get through word-of-mouth recommendations.
Reviews help potential clients find you by boosting your local search ranking in Google or Bing. They also give potential clients confidence in working with you because they see that others have already done so successfully.
Online reviews can be an excellent opportunity to showcase your company’s unique personality and values and what makes it stand out from other companies in the industry or community.
One of the best ways to get feedback is to ask for it. Tell customers that you’d like their input, and make it easy for them to leave a review. Tell them how they can do this, and make sure that you provide contact information on your website where they can reach out with any questions or concerns.
When you have a bad review, respond immediately. Replying to a bad review shows you care about your customers’ experience. It can make the reviewer change their negative opinion of your business into a positive one. You may also turn a negative review into an opportunity for growth: if someone has taken the time to write about what they didn’t like about your service, treat it as a way to improve.
Conclusion
Marketing your remodeling business online is much harder than it used to be a few years ago.
Your competition is huge, and they are probably investing a bigger budget in their digital marketing efforts.
Make sure that you gain enough leverage across your chosen online mediums and that you invest heavily in local SEO.
Go through the options above, bring your marketing and sales department together, and build a roadmap that will bring results long term. Your business will thrive, without a doubt.
Looking to get inspired for more ideas? Check out 35 Construction Marketing Ideas