As a home services business owner, you must not only think like a CEO but also as an advertiser and marketer of a small business. This will help you establish the necessary foundation for effective marketing and advertising strategies that reach and resonate with your local business’s target audience and buyer personas — and ultimately bring in more business.
Digital Advertising
Digital advertising (also referred to as digital marketing or online advertising) can help your home services business get more customers. Continue reading this blog to learn how digital HVAC advertising, plumbing advertising, electrician advertising, roofing advertising, and pest control advertising can grow your home services business.
What is digital advertising?
Digital advertising is a form of marketing that occurs across a number of online channels and digital platforms including the web, social media, email, search, and more. It’s the process of promoting your company, brand, service, and marketing materials through digital channels.
Digital Advertising vs. Traditional Advertising
Digital advertising is a newer form of marketing when compared to traditional advertising — that’s because it takes place across online and digital channels. Due to the fact that digital media lives online, it allows your businesses to share and promote digital ads across the specific channels that your target audience uses — and do so when they’re already active on those channels and platforms. As a result, you’ll increase the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
What is a digital advertising strategy?
A digital advertising strategy outlines everything related to your use of digital ads including your goals, how and why you’ll use them, and how you’ll measure success. For example, the strategy may explain your reasoning for creating a digital ad campaign, which channels you’ll use throughout the ad campaign, and how you’ll track the campaign’s KPIs and metrics.
Why is digital advertising important?
Here are some of the reasons engaging in HVAC advertising, plumbing advertising, electrician advertising, roofing advertising, or pest control advertising is so important.
- Engage and convert potential customers.
- Identify which types of ad space are most successful among the audience your small business targets.
- Increase brand awareness.
- Educate your target audience.
- Place your ads in front of your unique target audience on the platforms and channels they use while they’re active on them.
- Run digital ads across multiple channels at once as part of your ad campaign to maximize ROI.
Next, let's take a look at some digital advertising tips and best practices to keep in mind while creating your strategy.
Digital Advertising Best Practices
1. Set digital advertising goals and metrics.
Tie your digital advertising strategy to the business by aligning goals, metrics, and KPIs. Establish digital advertising goals that align with the business’s overall goals — then identify the metrics and KPIs that you’ll want to track in order to measure and understand the success of your digital ads.
Here are a couple of examples of goals for your home services digital ads and the associated metrics you might track.
- Increase brand awareness. Track overall and organic traffic across your web pages as well as your follower count and engagement across your social media profiles.
- Convert more engaged audience members into prospects. Track clicks on ads (clickthrough rate) and the number of conversions that result from those clicks (conversion rate) to determine how your ads impact your buyer personas.
2. Use a digital advertising platform for home services.
Use a digital advertising platform or tool for home services businesses to help you create, share, and track creative and professional digital ads for your business. For example, Scorpion is a home services marketing tool that has numerous features made specifically for HVAC advertising, plumbing advertising, electrician advertising, roofing advertising, and pest control advertising. Scorpion streamlines and, in some cases, automates parts of your ad strategy. You can also ensure your ads align with your marketing campaign and measure success all through the platform.
3. Prioritize responsive design for your ads.
When creating your ads, think about a responsive experience and mobile ads. This means your ads will have a user experience (UX) that naturally works across all devices including mobile, tablet, and desktop. Considering mobile accounts for approximately half of today’s web traffic, this is important to ensure you’re capturing as much engagement as possible in hopes of increasing conversions and growing your home services business.
4. Invest in affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way to refer and promote another company's product or service on a digital channel that your company uses (such as a website, social media platform, blog, etc.) You, the affiliate, earn a commission every time a visitor makes a purchase using the link that you promote on one of your digital channels.
Whether you are the affiliate, or you partner with another home services business that is promoting your brand, this is an effective way to get your company in front of new audiences and drive conversions (and even bring in some extra cash if you’re the affiliate).
5. Set a budget to manage ad spend.
Whether you’re working on HVAC advertising, plumbing advertising, electrician advertising, roofing advertising, and pest control advertising, it’s important to set a budget to help you wisely manage ad spend and flex that ad budget up and down on an as-needed basis.
You can always adjust your digital advertising budget down the road, but it’s important to stick to a budget that makes sense for your small business to help you to make strategic decisions such as how much paid vs. organic digital advertising you should be investing in and whether it makes sense to use paid vs. free digital advertising tools.
6. Analyze the success of your ads and digital ad strategy.
Take advertising inventory on a regular basis to stay on top of which digital ads you are running (or ran in the past) at a given time. This inventory and analysis will help you identify which ad types work best among your target audience when aiming to reach your business goals. You can then use this information to inform your future digital ad campaigns and strategies, and even help guide any digital ad A/B tests you choose to run among your target audience.
7. Refer to digital advertising examples as inspiration.
Use digital advertising examples as inspiration for your own ads. Below, we’ll review examples of digital HVAC advertising, plumbing advertising, electrician advertising, roofing advertising, and pest control advertising. These examples will help you think through the various ways you can use digital advertising to your advantage as a home services business owner. But first, let's look at the different types of digital advertising that exist.
Types of Digital Advertising
There are several digital platforms and types of digital advertising you can use for your home services business — here are some commonly-used types.
1. Social Media Ads
Social media advertising is a form of social media marketing. With so many social media platforms available today — and so many social media users — advertising your small business via this channel can be very effective.
Use social media to create targeted ads across the platforms you know your audience is already active on. For example, with Facebook Ads, create beautiful and branded ads that are shared with your target audience based on criteria that you set including their demographics and location. Your Facebook Ad will then appear in front of them while they’re active on the platform.
2. Display Ads
Display ads can be shown across a variety of channels including your home service company’s website, social media platforms content marketing materials (such as your blog or a relevant web page on your site), email marketing materials, and mobile apps which are downloaded via the App Store. Display ads may appear in different forms including but not limited to video, banners, and images.
3. Google Ads
Google Ads — previously known as Google Adwords — are a form of display ads. They allow you to set a budget and place ads in front of your unique audience on the web, search engines (i.e., Google search), and YouTube. Google Ads are valuable because you can set a specific budget that works for your business (and change it whenever needed), and ensure your ads appear when audience members are searching for relevant phrases and key terms, and/or are located within the specific geographic area that your home services business is located.
4. Video Ads
Today, video advertising is a must. It helps you build brand credibility and engage your target audience in a way that feels personal. Video advertising is also a great way to show off your work and provide a real view into the types of projects and outcomes your small business delivers to customers. For example, use YouTube Ads to appear when audience members are active on the platform and searching for content that relates to your home services business.
If you’ve never used video before or want to support in creating professional and beautiful videos for your home services business, consider a tool like Scorpion which offers access to a team that can create these on-brand video ads for your home services business.
5. Paid Ads
Paid advertisements enable your home services business to pay to place digital ads in various online locations including search, websites, and social media, so they’re seen by your buyer personas across any digital channel. More specifically, use native advertising (or native ads) to ensure your paid ads are seamlessly inserted into the natural path that a user takes when learning about companies like yours and/or services similar to those that you offer.
Home Services Digital Advertising Examples
Here are some compelling digital HVAC advertising, plumbing advertising, electrician advertising, roofing advertising, and pest control advertising examples to inspire your own ads.
1. Facebook Advertising Example: HVAC Advertising
This is an example of a Facebook Ad for an HVAC company — it clearly states what type of service they offer and provides a way for visitors to read more.
2. Instagram Advertising Example: Plumbing Advertising
This Instagram Ad shows a customer review which is an effective way to increase engagement and clickthrough on a social media post while also building trust between your brand and audience.
3. Google Advertising Example: Electrician Advertising
This is a look at what a Google Ad for your electrical business may look like when you optimize for local SEO. If a user searches for “electricians near me,” they’ll see your business name and information appear.
4. Video Advertising Example: Roofing Advertising
If you use video advertising techniques, you can create YouTube videos that organically appear in the SERP because your videos are search engine optimized. You can take this a step further and add paid ads to your YouTube videos and channels as well.
5. Display Advertising Example: Pest Control Advertising
A banner ad is an example of a display ad — it’s often used across web pages and even video or images. After a site visitor reads the info in the banner ad, they can click on it to learn more about the company and/or book an appointment.
Use Digital Advertising to Get More Customers for Your Home Services Business
Digital ads have the power to help you improve brand awareness, engage target audience members, grow your business, and get more customers. Consider leveraging an advertising platform like Scorpion to streamline the process of creating and sharing effective digital ads among your audience.
Ready to learn how Scorpion’s Digitial Advertising tool can help your home services business bring in more customers?
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