It used to be that home service businesses could advertise in the local paper, on community notice boards, and on local billboards and rely on word-of-mouth to attract new clients.
Now, not so much.
While traditional marketing efforts still hold sway, digital marketing supersedes its counterpart when it comes to targeting local customers.
The fact is, a customer will struggle to find your business unless it shows up in the places they spend their time, i.e., online. After all, according to the Digital Marketing Institute, “4.6 billion people use the internet, which is 60% global internet penetration.”
With a digital marketing plan, you can reach your customers in a scalable, measurable, and effective way at every stage of the buying process.
Let’s look at how a few basic online electrician advertising ideas can help you generate leads and transform them into customers.
Your target audience uses their smartphones and tablets to decide what to buy and whom to hire. So, if you don’t have a professional site, digital-savvy customers will simply turn to your competitors without hesitation.
A mobile-friendly website lets potential customers know what you offer, why they should care, and gets them to act. It communicates your local business’ mission and its unique value proposition (what makes it different).
It also validates your expertise and makes you trustworthy. Did you know that 50% of consumers don’t trust a business without a website?
A big part of having a website is establishing your image online by letting your target audience know who you are and what you represent.
An electrical contracting business website also saves time. When potential clients land on your website, they gain access to your contact details and, depending on your site’s sophistication, may even be able to schedule an appointment or make online payments. Say goodbye to time-consuming back-and-forth customer calls!
So, what makes a good website?
Websites that convert visitors into customers are attractive, functional, useful, and technically stable. A lot goes into building a good website. While there are countless templates online, it may be worthwhile hiring a professional website developer to build one for your local business.
Below are the main pillars of a website designed for repeat business:
The importance of a website can’t be understated. It expands to every aspect of your electrical marketing plan. It’s the framework of your business’ online presence.
Every electrician advertising campaign will drive consumers back to your website, so it’s imperative your website is up-to-scratch.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving your online presence to receive more exposure, increased traffic, and better-qualified leads. SEO has to do with making adjustments to your website and online content to rank higher in search engine results (SERPs).
How it works: When people use Google to search for a product or service online, they type in specific words or phrases (keywords). The search engine then scans millions of websites for these keywords and ranks them according to the algorithm. This, of course, is a simplified explanation as there are over 200 ranking factors.
The point is, when your target audience searches for an electrician business online, you want to come up on the first page of Google. SEO is how you make this happen.
There are four aspects of SEO to focus on:
Barring technical SEO, which more than likely will necessitate professional expertise, you can improve the visibility of your electrical contracting business online by doing the following:
Fresh and informative content informs your readers and provides the right level of depth and subject expertise for your target audience. Most importantly, it answers users’ queries and gets your website to rank higher.
Search engines like Google also love it when websites publish new content. Each time you produce something new, another page is indexed by Google, which pushes up your website’s authority and rank.
Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing, meaning it uses the mobile version of your content for indexing and ranking. Since over 61% of online website visits come from mobile, it makes sense the search giant switched from desktop to mobile views.
Slow pages (over two seconds to load) are bad news for business and SEO. To check your speed, use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool.
HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between a user’s computer and the site. It has long been one of Google’s SEO ranking factors.
If you want to increase more customers’ confidence in your website, then installing an SSL certificate is an easy thing to do. It protects your website from hackers and safeguards data from being stolen.
An electrician marketing campaign involves a bit more than simply placing adverts for your local business on social media. It’s important to define each campaign’s goals, which might be:
Even more significant is the specificity of these goals. Digital marketing is targeted and measurable. So, a good goal might sound something like this: Increase website visitors by 50% in six months, or double current revenue by the end of the year.
When it comes to local services ads, there are two strategies you should use.
An electrical contracting company usually services a particular area. So, it’s a no-brainer that unless you’re a national company, you’ll want to advertise to a particular suburb or town.
Local SEO isolates the searches coming from your area (or any area you’re targeting) and focuses on those people, so they’re going to see more of your pages, ultimately leading them to where you are.
Enter local SEO. More than ever, and especially with electrical services, convenience and proximity have become critical factors in decision-making. Local SEO isolates searches coming from your area to ensure they see more of your web pages instead of competitors that are further away.
You’ll need to set up a free Google My Business account to activate local SEO. Be sure to follow all the instructions and fill out the information as accurately as possible. Next, you’ll want to garner reviews from customers, as Google ranks businesses with positive reviews higher than those without (See: Reputation Management).
You should also have a business listing in other directories like Facebook, Apple Maps, LinkedIn Company Directory, Bing, Yelp, etc. These web directories are well-indexed by Google. Therefore, including your website in them achieves better visibility through backlinks.
You can promote your electrical services through paid search ads without spending a fortune on marketing campaigns. Pay-per-click advertising displays in search engine results based on the keywords your audience uses to search products and services online.
By incorporating paid ads into your electrical contractor marketing plan, you’ll make it easy for potential clients to find you. While PPC should never be used as a replacement for SEO, it can pay off in the short term.
PPC allows you to bid on ad space across different search engines and social media platforms. The only catch is that you pay when a customer clicks on your ad and goes to your website. You also get to control how much you spend and can opt in or out at any time.
Due to its laser-targeting, it’s possible to advertise to potential customers based on location, language, and even device, which gives it an impressive ROI of 200%.
There is a range of online advertising options that charge per click to your website:
Besides minimizing the time needed until you see results, the other major advantage of PPC is that, unlike organic listings that have rich snippets, it’s possible to create PPC advertisements with alluring images or videos that appeal more to customers than written text.
Content marketing is a vital component of online marketing. While nearly 90% of all companies engage in creating content marketing materials, few manage to create the kind of content that ranks in relevant search results.
Unique content helps users solve their problems and appeals to their emotions. Part of having a sound content marketing strategy is defining your audience and doing keyword research to ensure your content answers your target audience’s questions.
Quality, original content is one of the biggest factors in marketing success. You have to consider what interests your audience and where they hang out online. For example, There’s no point in sharing videos on Twitter, if most of your customers use Facebook.
When you give readers something of interest, you’re more likely to retain them as consistent visitors. This builds rapport with your target audience.
If your content is valuable and unique, they’ll read yours first. And you can bet that when it comes to hiring an electrical business, they’ll call you!
Email marketing has been around for some time, and for good reason. It’s the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them, and turning them into customers, and it comes with a whopping ROI as high as 4400%!
Today’s marketing efforts have moved away from one-size-fits-all mass mailings to focus on consent, segmentation, and personalization. Thankfully, marketing automation tools do most of the heavy lifting!
Email marketing is powerful because its personalization is greater than social media; it also costs less than other channels, especially considering reach and conversion rates. Moreover, while prospects might not check social media every day, they will scan their inboxes.
With this type of marketing, you can send acquisition, retention, and promotional emails, as well as newsletters. Email marketing presents lucrative upsell and cross-sell opportunities. For example, let’s say you know a lead has visited your website but has not initiated any action.
You can email them offering a first service discount. Similarly, you might email existing customers on a seasonal basis to remind them of your services. However, keep in mind that a single email won’t accomplish everything.
To quote marketing software company HubSpot: “The aim is to take your recipients on a journey, with each email serving a single purpose. This will increase the odds of each email being successful in its role toward reaching your goal.”
An electrical services business with a positive online brand reputation inspires customer loyalty, drives bottom-line growth, and improves customer confidence in your business. Part of online reputation management is tracking and reacting to brand mentions across digital touchpoints, which may include:
Thanking customers for using your service when they leave a glowing review and responding professionally if they’ve complained about something is part of reputation management. When you engage with customers online, you build credibility and trust, which shows customers you care.
From a search engine optimization perspective, Google ranks businesses with more positive reviews higher than those without. Positive online reviews signal to Google that your electrical company is trustworthy. You’ll even rank higher on local SEO.
Most customers don’t mind providing reviews, so long as the process is easy. Some businesses integrate reviews into the customer journey, sending emails or messages on social media to rate their services.
Asking for star ratings, or using multiple-choice, is the most efficient way for them to respond. If you want a more detailed response, you might lead with something like, “Tell us what you most enjoyed about our service,” for example.
With customer information captured at every stage of the buying process, we can confidently claim today’s marketing efforts are data-driven. You don’t have to guess what your customers want; you just need to know where to look.
If you know your target user’s behavior, goals, pain points, and challenges, you can develop marketing campaigns that cater to their specific needs. Hence, every marketing strategy should be accompanied by analytics.
Collecting information like user browsing patterns, social media activity, online purchase behavior, and paid advertising engagement helps you focus on what works. There is dime-a-dozen analytics to monitor, so just be certain you’re following the right ones!
In marketing, there are what we call vanity metrics. These make a business look good to others but don’t really help you understand your marketing efforts’ performance in a way that constructively informs future strategies.
For instance, receiving 2000 likes on your Facebook page may offer a great ego boost, but this doesn’t actually translate into sales.
Multinational technology corporation IBM outlines four categories for analytical measurement:
If you’re new to all of this, you might consider using Google Analytics for Beginners, where you can learn how to implement tracking code and set up data filters.
Around 92% of marketers use social media as part of their marketing strategies. With the built-in capabilities of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn, there are so many ways to share content and promote your service-based business online.
Social media is primarily used as a communication conduit to foster brand engagement rather than hard selling.
You can use it to:
Harking back to our previous point about analytics, you’ll need to know which social media channels your target audience uses, as this will influence the type of content you share and the channels you post on.
With social media, you don’t need to spread yourself too thin; you really only have to be where your customers are.
Current Electrics Facebook Page is a good example of social media marketing. It has a mix of promotions, FAQs, reviews, and helpful tips. From sharing user-generated content to posting how-to-videos or before-and-after content of new construction projects, you can do much to encourage new business.
Like any other marketing campaign, you’ll want to be specific about your goals and measure results to track progress!
An electrical business with a robust online presence, a coherent electrician marketing strategy, and correctly managed social media accounts will increase its number of potential customers. With the right marketing strategies, it’s possible to outperform other local businesses.
If you’re looking for an agency to help you develop an effective marketing strategy, then we can help. From website design to local service ads, we’re your one-stop shop for digital marketing success. Contact us today to initiate these electrical contractor marketing ideas.
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