Digital Marketing Guide for the Home Improvement Industry

Creating a Digital Strategy Worthy of the Click Through

Sunroom additions, pool decks, concrete patios, bathroom renovations, kitchen makeovers – they all lead customers to the home improvement guy (or gal). Ideally these needs will lead homeowners to your business, as long as your digital marketing strategy is on fleek. If it’s a little lackluster though, don’t worry – you’ve come to the right place. The Get Smart Group has the digital marketing guide you need to get you on the right track.

Stating the Obvious

As you may well know, digital rules the world now. While TV, radio, and direct mail advertising aren’t dead and gone, they aren’t typically the first point of contact that a homeowner has with a home improvement company when they are specifically looking for one. 

That said, digital marketing goes beyond having a website folks can land on when they might be looking. It’s about being at the forefront of their mind long before the inclination to actually hire a home improvement company comes into play. You need to have an active digital presence that homeowners see regularly and want to follow even when they’re not ready to sign on the dotted line. That way, when it comes time to get their bathroom renovated or add a front porch to their new home, your home improvement company is the first one they think of without even initiating a Google search. 

Boost Your Visual

With a Facebook or Instagram business profile, you have the opportunity to create targeted advertising so you can get your business in front of the market you serve. Choose to boost a post on Facebook that showcases your work or develop a specific post for advertising purposes for either platform. Both give you the opportunity to choose your goals from the post (engagement, shares, messages, calls), or to trust the digital algorithm to utilize an advanced feature that aims to get ideal results by displaying your ad in ways to which each user will respond best.

You can also target the audience of your boosted post or ad. Settle on a specific service area, gender and age demographic. Enter in home improvement keywords on Facebook that users may be interested in, posting about, or searching for so they’re more likely to see your ad.  

Finally, you determine how long your ad runs, how much you’re willing to spend each day, and your overall budget for that particular boosted post or ad. You can pause the ad at any time as well. Both platforms will tell you how many users are likely to see your ad each day based upon your budget parameters. 

Make sure that the post you’re boosting have an eye-catching image (before and after photos of the home improvements you’ve done work great!) and engaging caption (tell a story!). You’ll do better to boost posts that don’t look like an advertisement, but more like a regular post. Homeowners who see these types of ads are more likely to pay attention, thinking it’s a company they’re already following and interested in (we catch ourselves doing this all the time on our own social profiles, actually!). Don’t forget that call to action at the end of the post and those relevant #homeimprovement related hashtags to draw in extra searches (think: SEO keywords in hashtag form). 

Hit the Bullseye with the Right Digital Strategy

Have you ever been away from home, on your phone, visiting a website and noticed that the advertisements that pop up are specific to exactly where you are located at that exact moment? Or have you been watching a video on YouTube that has hundreds of thousands of views and the ad that interrupts is for a business in your hometown? 

This is geotargeting, and it’s another effective digital marketing approach aimed at potential customers looking for a home improvement company. For example, if you have a brick-and-mortar location for your business, you can geotarget phones within a certain radius, pinging neighborhoods closest to your store. Typically, there are three main ways to target potential home improvement customers: 

• Demographic or Audience Targeting – Ads are sent to those that have searched for a specific product, service (think: bathroom renovation), or even brand within a specific time period.
• Location Targeting – Ads that are sent out to potential customers on the premises of your business (such as specials your store is running), within a certain proximity or specific neighborhoods.
• Weather Targeting – Homeowners tend to remember they need a new roof when it’s raining outside, and that pesky leak sprouts up again; weather targeting hits up customers when they’re the most likely to be looking for your services based upon weather conditions. 

Mind you, geotargeted digital marketing only works for those that have activated location services on their mobile device or on apps they’re using. Utilizing GPS or cell towers, geotargeting ads pinpoint those within the radius who are open about where they spend their time. 

Infiltrate Their Inbox

Okay, maybe “infiltrate” is the wrong word – we’re not recommending aggressive tactics here – but you definitely should be utilizing an email marketing campaign to stay at the top of mind for those considering improvements to their home. There are many ways that you can capture leads (your website’s contact form, through social media messages, eNewsletter sign ups and more), but managing them is just as important. 

Utilizing a strong Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program is great for organizing potential leads. It will also help you to stay in touch with those leads regularly through an email marketing campaign, taking the burden off of you to remember who to contact and when. The CRM system knows when to send pre-programmed emails to each individual lead based upon their interactions with your home improvement company and the previous correspondence sent. 

If, for example, an email that talks about concrete patios and wooden decks is sent to two different customers, and one clicks on the link to learn more about patios, then the CRM system will know that the next email to that potential customer should contain more information specifically on patios. On the other hand, if the other customer clicks on the link about decks, the next email a quality CRM will send that customer will provide more information on decks instead. This is digital marketing at its finest, and you barely have to lift a finger once a customer is in the system. 

The Get Smart Group Is Your Ally for Effective Home Improvement Digital Marketing

Whether you’re looking to create an effective social media marketing strategy, want to geotarget neighborhoods in your area, or need a CRM and email marketing campaign to bring it all together, The Get Smart Group can help. Schedule your free consultation today to discover how you can start seeing more leads for your home improvement business.