Home maintenance and improvement businesses provide a huge opportunity for marketing agencies.
Roofers, tilers, cleaners, fencers, and air conditioning specialists, are just a few examples of businesses who thrive on digital marketing leads and rely on the expertise of agencies to help them grow.
Here are a few reasons why:
- People tend to use search engines such as Google to find these kinds of services. So SEO and PPC services are a great match.
- Increased competition in these industries has led businesses who traditionally rely on word-of-mouth marketing to look for alternate lead generation channels.
- These firms often lose money on digital marketing since their owners are inexperienced. which means if they go it alone they tend to waste a lot of money. Not to mention, they simply don’t have the time to manage everything in the business.
Given the opportunity that this sector offers for marketing agencies, many agencies find themselves looking for ways to get more home improvement clients. In fact, home improvement rates in the top 5 industry sectors we run white label PPC campaigns for.
So, then, how do you find and win more home improvement clients?
We have found that the most successful approach to landing more home improvement clients is to understand and focus your marketing efforts on their key business problems. Below are 6 of the most prominent problems faced by home improvement businesses and how you can use them to your advantage when selling your services.
#1. Limited resource capacity
- The difficulty they face in finding quality and reliable staff.
- The inefficiencies and downtime of the at-home business model which includes travel, reporting, invoicing, and quotations, resulting in less time on money-making activities and reduced output.
#2. Minimal digital marketing knowledge
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that most home improvement business owners have limited knowledge of digital marketing. After all, they have 101 other priorities to worry about and have probably come from a background of offline marketing techniques.
This gap in knowledge about what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to digital lead generation can work in your favor. After all, it’s why they are considering working with you in the first place.
#3. Seasonal peaks and troughs
It’s common for home improvement businesses to experience seasonal peaks and troughs in workload. For example, a pool cleaning business will likely be busier during the warmer months of the year and could find it hard to get work in winter.
This seasonality in workload also results in lumpy periods of revenue and staff capacity headaches. An ongoing concern for business owners in this sector.
Now, there is always going to be some element of seasonality in certain businesses – the pool cleaning business is a great example. You can’t influence the weather. However, you can use your knowledge of this problem to build trust with potential clients. For example, if you can maximize their busy months by getting more lead volume or extending them out slightly, the return on investment can be significant over time.
#4. Increased competition
The barrier to entry for new home improvement businesses is lower than ever. This is especially true for niches such as landscaping, handyman services, and cleaning which don’t require rigorous training qualifications. Basically, anyone can set up one of these businesses and start dropping fliers in letterboxes tomorrow.
A lower barrier to entry means that competition is growing and standing out is much harder than it has ever been. This increased competition is forcing many home improvement business owners to look for different marketing channels – digital often being at the top of the pile.
The strategies for overcoming competition aren’t necessarily the most important part. It’s about knowing that this is an ongoing concern for your ideal clients and being prepared with a solution to alleviate these concerns.
#5. High costs
For a business owner, the costs add up quickly. The last thing they want to do is unwittingly spend more money than they need to on marketing without seeing a return on their investment. Being prepared to address potential cost objections will be critical to your chance of landing a new client in this space.
Below is an example of a marketing agency honing in on this challenge by providing a free guide on their website that alerts home improvement businesses to the mistakes they may be making which are costing them money:
#6. Lack of time
