Remodeling contractors’ traditional marketing campaigns are not as effective as they once were. With the launch of Google Ads in 2000, businesses started to advertise and reach their target audience based on keywords they searched for and websites they visited.
Undoubtedly, a remodeling company stuck in the pre-2000s is missing out on 63% of its market share as nearly half of all consumers shop on mobile. Digital marketing for contractors isn’t just relegated to search engines; it exists on social networks, in apps, and on devices.
Remodeling companies can target and retarget prospective clients with advertisements based on their demographics, websites they’ve visited, things they have searched for, and more.
While digital marketing has ushered a paradigm shift in personalization, real-time decision-making, as well as testing and measurement, the creativity and passion required from brands to stand out among the millions of websites online is now more important than ever.
The main advantage of digital home remodeling sales tactics is that a remodeling company’s prospective customers can be reached in a cost-effective and measurable way. Other benefits include increasing brand loyalty and boosting online sales.
In this blog, we explore what’s required to reach digital marketing success and explain some foundational home remodeling marketing ideas you should implement as a remodeling contractor.
Home Remodeler Marketing Efforts Should Start with a Strategy
Before we talk strategy, let’s discuss the difference between remodeler marketing and remodeler advertising:
- Remodeler marketing: Identifying customers’ needs and determining how to meet those needs.
- Remodeler advertising: The process of promoting a company and its products through paid channels. Therefore, it is a component of marketing.
You can’t develop a strategy unless you understand the difference between the two. For a marketing strategy to be successful, it must be multi-faceted, realistic, and implemented consistently over time.
Start by considering these foundational basics:
1. Determine Business Goals
When determining home remodeler marketing goals, always start with the end in mind. Obviously, the overall objective of marketing is to generate more revenue. However, there are other milestones you’ll need to achieve to accomplish this, like improving brand awareness and reach.
So, you might say you want to increase revenue, but what exactly does that mean in terms of daily marketing efforts and KPIs?
For example:
- We need 1000 more website visitors per month
- We want five new clients per month
- We should rank on the first page of Google search engine results (SERPs)
Every business has different goals. Regardless of what yours are, they should align with the SMART goal methodology, meaning they need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
2. Define Your Target Audience
Defining your target audience is a critical part of the digital marketing process. Businesses tend to think they know their audience, but often this is generalized, and they don’t put in the extra effort to define segments (different groups) within their audience.
When you know your audience’s pain points, you can better market your solutions. For example, clients wanting a custom-built home have different needs than those who require a simple addition.
Creating buyer personas (fictional descriptions based on in-depth research of your audience) helps focus your time on qualified remodeling leads and builds effective marketing strategies based on your clients’ needs.
3. Understand the Buyer’s Journey
The buyer’s journey can be summarized as “your customer’s path to purchase.” It is the process they go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a product or service.
For example, let’s say a potential client wants a double story addition. Before contacting your company, they might do some general research about the pros and cons of such additions compared to buying a new house.
If they’re convinced it’s a good idea, they will likely use Google to find local businesses that do remodeling, and then examine their websites and read online reviews before contacting a few for quotes.
Can you see how involved this process is? The good news is you can create content marketing that appeals to them at every step of this journey and influences them to choose your local remodeling company instead of your competitors.
Ergo, understanding the buyer’s journey is vital to generating more leads and developing your home remodeling marketing strategy.
4. Set a Home Remodeler Marketing Budget
Deciding on a marketing budget is a balancing act. Spend too much, and you won’t have enough capital for other parts of your business; spend too little, and no one will know you exist. Determining a budget based on the percentage of your company’s revenue is the best bet.
For companies operating for one to five years, dedicating 12% to 20% of their gross revenue or projected revenue is a fair percentage to capture their market share, whereas older companies should spend between 6% to 12%.
While it is a significant chunk of cash to fork out, it’s absolutely necessary. Having a renovation marketing budget allows you to scale your business effectively by reaching your target audience. A well-planned budget helps plan, measure, and manage the money you have, ensuring expenditure garners a positive ROI.
Top Home Remodeling Marketing Strategies to Utilize
The famous four Ps of the marketing mix are the product, price, place, and promotion. These are key factors involved in successfully marketing remodeling projects and can be achieved through the tactics listed below:
1. Website Is Everything for Remodeling Companies
A robust website is the gold standard of any home remodeling marketing strategy. Google’s Core Vitals assesses a website’s performance, responsiveness, and visual stability. It offers unified measurements to gauge user experience quality.
With home remodeling marketing, everything comes down to providing valuable information to the right customers and creating a pleasant website experience that encourages them to do business with your home remodeling company.
So, what makes a good website?
User-Centric Design
Consistency, typography, colors, imagery, simplicity, and functionality all contribute to good website design. Every page should be easy to navigate and have a strong call to action, meaning potential customers should be encouraged to do something, for example, call, download a resource or “find out more.”
Quick Loading Time
40% of customers wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a website. Bounce rates (the percentage of visitors who enter a website and leave) skyrocket around the two-to-three-second threshold.
Unoptimized images, too much Flash content, unclean code, countless on-site advertisements, and a poorly performing web host can affect a website’s load time. Resolving these common issues will improve conversion rates and user satisfaction, as search engine optimization remunerates quick loading times with higher search engine rankings.
Mobile-Friendly
Google’s algorithm prioritizes mobile-friendly websites. 70% of web traffic comes from mobile phones, with users spending 90% of their media time on mobile devices. When your remodeling company’s website is mobile-friendly, you allow users to seamlessly interact with your brand across devices.
Being mobile-friendly ensures you leverage every opportunity, no matter the time of day or where they are, to convert interested prospects into new customers.
Ready to invest in a standout online presence? Learn about the expenses associated with crafting a high-quality website in our latest blog post.
2. Build Authority through Link Building
This search engine optimization technique entails getting external, high-authority domains to funnel traffic to your website pages to improve domain authority and search engine rank via backlinks.
The tactic works as follows: If other websites link to your website, search engines view it with authority and boost its credibility.
Link building is often one of the most challenging parts of home remodeler marketing because it takes time and isn’t always within a business’s control, i.e., you have to implement strategies that get other websites to link back to you.
Tactics that work include syndicating articles to reputable publications, guest writing, and press release optimization. To generate worthy backlinks, you have to provide value to readers or to the host website.
Don’t underestimate the power of link building in driving SEO results – explore why it’s crucial and how to excel at it in our informative article.
3. Check the Competitors in the Remodeling Industry
A thorough competitor analysis helps you understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, and, most importantly, where there’s a gap in the market. Once you’ve identified competitors, you should analyze them using the long-standard tool called a SWOT analysis.
SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It assesses internal and external factors, as well as current and future potential. SWOT analyses are most effective when done by a team, as your personal assumptions may be prejudiced.
When analyzing what they do better than you, you might ask:
- Are their products and services of a higher quality?
- What do their customers have to say about their service?
- Is their marketing material more engaging?
- Do they offer more value?
It’s possible to conduct competitor research on your own, although occasionally, it is beneficial to hire an online marketing agency for remodeling contractors as they will have the time and resources to conduct in-depth research and compile reports.
Delivering Business Results: Our Digital Marketing Case Studies
4. Invest Time and Money into SEO
According to Optimizely, SEO is “the art and science of getting pages to rank higher in search engines. Because search is one of the main ways in which people discover content online, ranking higher in search engines can lead to an increase in traffic to a website.”
SEO is a long-term renovation marketing strategy that takes a few months to yield results. There are over 200+ factors that Google uses to rank websites. Some include:
- Keyword phrase usage
- User experience
- Page loading speed
- HTML and schema markup
- Domain authority
- Social media signals
- Mobile optimization
- Number and quality of incoming links
As an essential marketing activity, it targets quality traffic and creates a trustworthy experience for web users. The Digital Marketing Institute concludes that approximately 70% to 80% of searchers click on organic SEO results, which provide the lion’s share of organic website traffic.
Unlock the potential of your online presence by learning how to create an SEO plan that maximizes lead generation – read our article today.
Unlock the power of SEO with Comrade Digital Marketing Agency. Schedule a free consultation.
4.1 Don’t Forget about Local SEO
Then, of course, other remodeling marketing ideas include local SEO. This involves optimizing your online presence for better local visibility. Roughly 97% of people who use online search look for local businesses, so if prospective customers are searching within the geographical area you serve, you want to ensure you pop up in search engine results.
The way to do this is to register a free Google My Business account. This lets you connect with customers across Google Search and Maps. Once you’ve registered your remodeling business’s particulars, you’ll want to encourage customers to leave reviews, as this improves rankings too.
Getting into Google’s Local Pack (the section of Google’s search results that shows the local businesses related to your query) also requires reviews. The reason Google values reviews so highly is because, as a search engine, it strives to provide users with the best possible information.
When remodeling companies have excellent reviews, it signals to the search engine they are credible, and so they are prioritized over companies with weaker or no reviews. To give you perspective, 48% of consumers won’t even look at businesses with less than 4-stars.
Don’t miss out on potential customers in your area! Learn how to optimize your local SEO for maximum impact and business growth.
5. Attract Customer’s Attention with New Content
Your remodeling business needs to promote its services to increase brand awareness. Regularly adding new articles will result in increased visible pages in search results. This enables more people to find your site, which can result in a significant increase in traffic.
The point of digital marketing for home remodeling companies is to attract, engage, and delight customers, and by doing so, bring new visitors to your site and generate revenue for your remodeling company. Content marketing is important because it answers your audience’s questions and builds trust, establishing your company as an industry leader.
According to expert inbound marketing company HubSpot, “engaging content impacts audience decision-making more than any other technique.” Original content improves conversions and search engine rankings because traffic regularly visits your website.
And, digital marketing for home remodeling doesn’t just have to be blogging. Online videos currently make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic. Evergreen content (the type that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers over long periods of time) is also important to publish, as it can be updated easily when needed.
Master the art of content marketing with expert tips and strategies outlined in our blog post. Read now!
6. Take Advantage of PPC Campaigns
Pay-per-click advertising campaigns provide total control of your budget, targeting, and ad placements. When done correctly, it offers a sweet spot between results and budgeting.
We’re often asked if SEO is better than PPC and vice-versa, but the truth is that they work in tandem.
SEO is a long-term strategy, whereas PPC can be applied over the long term, but its results are short-term, i.e., campaign based. PPC caters best to the middle of the marketing funnel, fostering advertising content downloads, newsletter sign-ups, and pushing for app downloads.
With PPC advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked on. Essentially, it’s a way to buy visits to your website. For example, if you search “remodeling company in New York”, the results you’ll get on Google will be organic and the paid results will be on the top.
You can also run remodeler advertising campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. These platforms allow you to target your audience based on age, gender, job role, and so on. Long-tail keywords are particularly useful as they suggest a user is closer to the point of making a purchase.
For example, “bathroom addition Des Moines” is more specific than “home addition.” This indicates a prospect has done research and is at the beginning stages of understanding the details of their desired home addition.
7. Build Your Brand
Why do we recognize the Nike tick? That’s down to good branding, which also espouses values and emotional appeal. Digital branding is about creating value around your remodeling company (not just a logo).
It produces customer recognition, which is vital in a world of endless content where you need to be instantly recognizable.
As such, today’s companies are more approachable and have a far more personal connection with their prospective and current customers.
A remodeling company can build its brand via multiple components:
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- An optimized website
- SEO efforts
Social media marketing is an excellent arena to connect with your audience, but before venturing online, you should consider your company’s look and feel, both visually and in terms of “voice”.
Developing a brand identity ensures you portray the right, consistent image to your customers throughout all marketing and remodeling advertising endeavors.
8. Develop Your Social Media
Social media allows remodeling businesses to engage with potential customers where they are. The power to reach a massive audience within seconds of posting online assists with lowering advertising spend, and amassing immense visibility.
Communication and engagement on social media are the best home remodeler marketing strategies to drive business growth. The trick is to focus on networks where your core audience is already active.
Just like your overall home remodeling marketing strategy, you will also need to develop your social media KPIs. On social media, it’s important to stick to content themes (sequential posts that follow a broad topic). For example, you might cycle between memes, product photos, and user-generated content while sticking to a specific theme, like “custom homes”.
It’s also useful to join specific online communities. For example, on Facebook, you might join a home remodeling group where you’ll find an audience in need of your remodeling services and can advertise accordingly.
9. Reach Out to Customers Through Email Marketing
Email marketing has an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent. It is one of the most cost-effective home remodeling sales tactics to date. What makes email marketing somewhat special is that it is one of the few channels that potential clients ask to receive.
This means higher conversion rates as your business is only targeting those who have already begun the buyer’s journey. Email marketing is also excellent for reigniting cold leads. For instance, let’s say someone signed up for your newsletter last season, but business was busy, and they didn’t actually request your services.
It’s still possible to send content marketing material to them with new offers. Email list segmentation can also be used to improve engagement rates.
You can literally only send emails to subscribers who meet certain criteria, like age, or geographical location.
73% of millennials (the largest generational cohort) prefer communications from businesses to come from email.
Think about the last email you opened from a brand you loved. You probably enjoyed the experience. Perhaps you bought something, visited their website, or followed them on social media. Either way, they’re cultivating a strong relationship with you, which is precisely what you should aspire to do with your business’s customer base.
10. Watch Your Reputation
Online culture wars and cancel culture have taught everyone from the normal guy on the street to businesses how important online reputation management is. At its core, online reputation management is about monitoring and improving how your business is perceived online.
Before online searchers visit your website or call, what will they find when they look for you? And, will they like it?
Checking online reviews, social channels, and Google searches, as well as business listings is a good place to start. You’ll be able to gauge where you need to ramp up content marketing efforts and improve review ratings.
Offering excellent customer service and responding timeously to queries online is obviously the first initiative necessary to provide a positive customer experience, which in turn should generate good reviews.
It’s possible to outsource reputation management to an agency to improve your web presence, as well as use chatbots to help with instant customer service.
Take control of your online reputation with Comrade Digital Marketing Agency. Schedule a free consultation.
11. Build an Engaging Portfolio
As a home remodeler, you need a little more evidence than your good word to convince clients they should hire you. Your home remodeling marketing strategies should include a well-crafted portfolio of unique projects and demonstrated achievements. This offers your business a powerful opportunity to differentiate itself from its competitors.
Your portfolio should demonstrate you have the experience, resources, ability, and track record to deliver results. A great portfolio is more than just a laundry list of projects; it showcases your company’s talents, technical skills, and creativity.
Think of your portfolio as a way to communicate your services and accomplishments in a compelling and informative way. You can establish credibility by showcasing your big-ticket wins and design strengths. A thoughtful selection of high-quality images, along with some details about each project shows new clients what they can look forward to in the future.
And remember, you don’t have to showcase every single project—only the ones that elevate your brand are worthy of attention. Ultimately, your portfolio should put clients at ease that they’re making the right decision by hiring you.
Work with an Online Marketing Agency for Remodeling Contractors
These home remodeler marketing strategies are the tip of the iceberg, yet they offer a solid foundation that brings results.
The first place to start is to develop a robust mobile-first website before attempting other tactics. If you need help with your website development or any other aspects of your home remodeling marketing strategy, we can help.
Comrade Digital Marketing Agency is a full-service agency dedicated to achieving the highest ROI for remodeling businesses. Why not chat to us about your digital marketing ambitions?
Frequently Asked Questions
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How do I market my home remodeling business?
The best way to market your business is online through digital marketing. Hiring digital marketing specialists or an agency will significantly boost your ROI if you aren’t a qualified marketer, as they have the knowledge and skill to deliver the best value for money.
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How do I get more remodeling customers?
You can promote your business and connect with customers through measurable digital marketing efforts.
This entails having a search engine optimized website and creating content material that’s published organically or via paid ads to convert leads into customers.
Marketing campaigns can take many forms, including online video, blogging, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads, and even social media posts.
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What is the difference between home remodeling and home improvement?
A renovation is a process of updating an existing structure with cosmetic changes, whereas a remodel involves changing the structure through demolition and construction.
For example, a kitchen renovation might entail replacing existing sinks and countertops, whereas a remodel would mean extending the space and perhaps changing the electrical wiring and plumbing to accommodate these new updates.
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In what cities do you work?
Comrade originates in Chicago, but we worked all around the United States. We can help your business grow and increase revenue whenever you are. We have offices across most major cities in the US. For example, we can offer digital marketing services in Miami or Denver. You can even find our internet marketing experts in Cincinnati! If you want to know more about our Austin digital marketing agency or find out how exactly we can help you, contact us via the phone or email.
