Marketing Foundations: Digital Marketing For Contractors
Digital marketing is for every profession, even contractors. If you’re reading this, and you already know you’re behind, then hurry. The digital marketing bug got a hold of the contracting industry in a big way. Today, most search results are dominated by companies like Home Advisor, Angie’s List, Home Depot, Thumbtack, Buildzoom… Should I continue?
The good news for you is that the digital marketing industry is also dominated by quality, not quantity. Meaning large companies can’t just run over the little guys with bigger budgets. The bottom line is that vendors within every digital channel have more incentive to get paid less and provide a better experience, rather than get paid more and provide users a bad experience.
Why? Because with billions of searches happening everyday, providing a better experience to our prospects assures repeat business. You know what they say, a fast nickel beats a slow dime. So there’s still time for you to build a solid digital foundation. The questions is, where do you start?
In this post, we’ll cover the right digital marketing strategy for contractors. Whether you’re a small family owned shop, or bordering on enterprise, these basic fundamentals are essential to taking the next step.
#1. Technical SEO
Assuming you have a professionally designed website, it’s important that Google knows how to use it. Picture your website as a book. If a user can read through it with ease, then you really have nothing to worry about. On the other hand, if your website is riddled with grammatical mistakes, there are blank pages serving no purpose, the index incorrectly identifies each chapter and the summary completely misidentifies the entire book, then Google will refrain from using it. As you can imagine, even one of these things being wrong is a major red flag for a book, as well as your website.
#2. Content Marketing
You want clients to identify your brand as a resource. Simply put, if your developing and promoting quality content on your website, then you’re good to go. That content is not only available for them to read, educate themselves and address their outstanding concerns, but it’s also there for Google to crawl and index.
Content marketing is an art and a science. Finding the right balance of trending inquiries and creative execution is the key to crafting usable, relevant content. If you’re not sure where to find that data, or how to produce that content, give us a call. We’ll hook you up with a free keyword map of relevant topics, based of market research, to start your content development.
#3. Paid Media for Contractors
Content marketing and search engine optimization take time. You’ll be waiting at least 3-6 months before real traffic comes knocking at your door. Expedite your content awareness with Paid Media, it’s well worth it.
Even if you’ve already accumulated a good amount of organic traffic, the bottom line is you have to pay to play in today’s digital marketing world. Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other tech giants around the globe are in a major cyber war right now. A war for your advertising dollars.
This war, like any competition, has forced all participants to be better. Better at advertising, algorithms, ad spend, targeting, etc… you get the point. They’re trying hard to win you over with results. Take advantage of the digital marketing war by advertising on some of the most efficient Paid Media channels.
We’re digital marketers at Glacier Code. But… if we were contractors… We would recommend diving into the sophisticated algorithm of Facebook, where you can segment by GEO, device, gender, interest and job titles. In other words, you can put an advertisement right in front of a homeowner, in Tennessee, who is a doctor and is interested in home renovations. How bout’ them apples!
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Digital Marketing: Finding Your Audience With Paid Social Media
If you’re new to digital marketing, or struggling to get results, then it’s time to learn more about the innovative Paid Media targeting strategies available to businesses. Paid Media, pay per click search, paid social media and programmatic display offer sophisticated algorithms businesses can utilize to build sustainable lead funnels.
Yet, with the vast amount of information on Paid Media, business owners are turning away from these strategies after being discouraged from their unsuccessful DIY efforts. The reason why Paid Media is not working out for the DIY business owner is because most are incapable of utilizing the proper tools to find their audience online.
In this post, we’ll take a look at one of our favorite Paid Media tools, Facebook.
The Facebook scandal was no fluke. No other platform knows your audience like Facebook does, because few other platforms have collected as much data as they have. To make up for their negligence, Facebook has made significant efforts to scale back on what marketers can target and they’ve become more transparent into why ads are served to which users.
Despite these changes, Facebook has still proven to be an effective tool for savvy marketers. With the right strategy, you can retarget website visitors, generate leads, promote events and create brand awareness. Most importantly, you can display relevant ads based off of your target prospects demographic data. For example, you can narrow the impressions bought by geography, age, gender, parental status, interest and even job title.
Here’s a long list of Facebook’s Ad Targeting options from our friends at Wordstream. Of course, you can find their website and the post to this infographic here:
Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/27/facebook-ad-targeting-options-infographic
