You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Tips for Home Service Businesses

Jordan asks, “What are some marketing tips for home service businesses to know in 2019?”

Home service businesses like cleaning, maintenance, moving, etc. are first and foremost local businesses. Everything you do in marketing should be focused on location. Watch the video for full details.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.

In today’s episode, Jordan asks, what are some Marketing Tips for Home service businesses to know in 2019, so home service businesses, we’re talking junk removal, movers, cleaners, maintenance, power, house painting, anything that fits in the category of, hey, somebody’s got to come to your house and do something at your house. These businesses as a category are all about location, meaning that they are concentrated in a geographic area. And because they are in the physical world, there is not a ton that you can do from a marketing perspective, that should be not global or national, in the sense that of there’s no point in marketing to an area that you can’t service, right? You can’t if you cannot service the state of California, because your business is based in New York that why would you market there now, for thought leadership and inbound marketing, content marketing, for example, it would be silly to put restrictions on your content. But anything that you pay for had better be within the area that you’re focusing on. And your organic efforts should be focused on those areas as well. So what are the different ways to do this? Well, think about all the different channels that you have available to you. If you open up, for example, Google Analytics, and you look at the default channel groupings, what do you see there, you see search, you see social media, you see referral traffic, you see email marketing, affiliates, display advertising, pay per click advertising, this is essentially your blueprint for the channels, the types of things that you could be doing on a digital level. And then there’s, of course, all the local physical world level things as well. Real simple

thing people forget with, with local businesses with and with businesses based in the physical world, physical world, analog marketing still works, and in some cases may work even better. So real simple example, if you are a home service business that does like, you know, cleaning take, imagine taking out an ad

literal sheet, a physical paper that gets taped to the top of pizza boxes that says, hey, if you don’t want to throw this pizza box out, let us come do it for you. And, you know, it’s, you know, maid service, or whatever the thing is, it’s an obvious logical product tie in, right, this box is about to become trash. If you don’t want trash in your house house, come take it away. So don’t discount local things, especially anything that’s local direct, because these days, when you look at how much junk mail you get in your inbox, versus what you get in the postal box out in front of your, your residence,

you will probably get more actual eyeballs on a piece of direct mail. Because it’s relatively rare compared to the swamp that is your inbox online. Now, in terms of the digital things you should be doing, if you are not set up with Google My Business, which is the Google local business listings, that’s kind of stop number one, right, make sure that your company is listed, that you’ve got your hours and all that stuff, make sure you do that across any platform that allows you to declare where your business is located. So on your Facebook page, on your Instagram profile, on your YouTube profile, and on Google My Business on any of the local business directories, you have the yelps of the world, and whatever other services that are the providers of information about local business, make sure that your businesses everywhere, just go through, spend a couple days googling for a local local business directories, don’t pay for anything. But anything that where it is free, like Google My Business, for example, you got to go do it on your website. One of the most critical things you can do for your website is to optimize it for local search means that you need to have content about the areas that you serve. And not the cheesy, you know, I’ve seen this on like a plumber’s page where just put the long list of every city. But he says that that’s like 1990s SEO,

you want content that shows that you serve an area and the easiest and best way to do that is actually testimonials from your existing customers within that area. So

let’s say you run up a plumbing company, right. So you would have a page for one of many on your testimonials like Waltham area resident plumbing testimonial, you have the video of that your customer, you have the the text of the testimonial, you have maybe the location, or at least the general neighborhood of where in that city that they are, and you’re optimizing content and the testimonial at the same time. So you’re kind of getting two birds with one stone, you get to promote the work that you’ve done. But also you get the location benefit, make sure that you’re using things like schema data and metadata to indicate to sites like Google and Bing and all the other search engines what your pages are about. If you go to schema.org, you can look up how to reference specific geographic traits on your website. Like this is our postal address. This is our phone number of things, anything that you can do that tells a search engine, here’s what you need to know about us, our geography, our services, all that stuff, you want to do that on your site, it’s essential to do that if you’re a locally based business, because that’s how search engines populate those like the call one boxes where especially on Google, if you type in your company’s name or plumbing company near me, and you click on a result or a brand will tell you all the information like the hours and then the reviews and stuff like that. You want to solicit reviews, make sure that you’re asking people who are satisfied customers and emphasis on satisfied customers to review your site and give them links to do the yelps and the Google rules and stuff for the world

make sure they’re satisfied customers first one of the things I the dumbest things I’ve ever seen is

hotels will send you a guest survey form with no logic in it and then it will immediately send you TripAdvisor so I just one hotel I was staying at had an unpleasant experience there and reviewed their hotel went through their survey feedback and said you know on a scale one to 10 how satisfied are you 111 over and over again and then at the end of the thing is is now please leave a review on on TripAdvisor. I’m like you should have had some logic on there. That said, if if you read anything under eight, don’t send them to TripAdvisor. Call them and see what you can do to make things better. So instead I left them a scathing review on TripAdvisor.

So again, make sure that you some logic you some brains, if you have an unhappy customer, fix that first before you ask them to write a review.

When you’re doing stuff on social media, make sure that you are doing stuff that is location relevant. So if you’re ideally if you’re you can be creating content that is relevant to your business, and also relevant to the area that you work in. So you could be putting up YouTube videos, for example, about problems that Boston area residents face with

plumbing.

Guess what, there are plumbing challenges that you have in Boston that you will never have. For example, in San Diego, San Diego, you probably don’t ever have to worry about your pipes freezing in Boston, you share do so it creating content that is relevant to the area that you serve. And that is sort of the top concerns that your customers have easiest way to do that. Take your smartphone, right? When you’re out on the road, doing your service, whatever your service is, take photos, take video, record yourself doing your work and use that as your content for your marketing. So you have your phone out and you know you’re doing your video thing and say like, okay, here is exactly what happens when you put silverware by accident down your garbage disposal and your sink, right

how to clear it safely and all that stuff. So you’re teaching people as you’re doing the work because, you know, in a lot of these home based home service businesses, you can tell people how to fix the problem and they you know, they’re not going to do it. 99% are not going to do it. That’s why they’re hiring you so you can publish the information to be helpful to show that you know what you’re talking about the demonstrate expertise well, full well knowing Yes, one or 2% of people like cool I don’t need to call it a plumber to fix this thing. I’ll do it myself. Awesome. You probably don’t want those people as customers anyway, because they’ll nickel and dime you to death you want. The person goes

Wow, that’s exactly the problem. I don’t want to get my hands dirty in the suppose I’m going to call this plumber

and ask them to come to it for me. They clearly know how to do it because they’re showing me on the video. Have them do it. So a lot of different Marketing Tips for Home service businesses. But focus on that local infrastructure work first, get your tags your analytics and your site and your channels all configured create content that demonstrates that you know what you’re doing. And don’t forget about the real world. The real world is incredibly powerful when it comes to marketing because a lot of marketers have gotten lazy and have had let the real world go. So great question Jordan fun question and hopefully you find this useful leave any comments you have in the comments box below and please subscribe to the YouTube channel. The newsletter i’ll talk to you soon one help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems.

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