Whether you’re a carpenter, a home care service, a gardener, a personal assistant, or any one of many practical and useful home services businesses offer, it’s vital that you can reach the people who need you with your marketing. There are as many ways to put a marketing plan together as there are companies, and however, you choose to market your business, it will be individual to you, but one decision can make the difference between whether your marketing is as successful as possible, or whether it isn’t.
Sounds scary! What is that decision? Well, we’ve given you a clue with the title. When marketing, you can either use a range of different software solutions—what we call the duct-tape solution—or you can choose an all-in-one platform for home services marketing, such as the one we offer at Surefire Local, where, on average, we provide a 34% increase in SEO traffic and many of our clients gain a 385% return on their investment.
What’s the difference between the two solutions? We’ll explore that below:
Your marketing software: where the duct-tape solution falls down
Some companies have different departments for each marketing activity, with different software that can’t necessarily be integrated. It is harder to work if departments don’t communicate with each other and if software in one department doesn’t work with software in another. This is the duct-tape solution, or, as you may have heard it called, siloed marketing.
With the duct-tape solution, you can quickly run into the following challenges:
1) It’s harder to collate data
Both business owners and marketers need regular access to reports showing the impact of their marketing efforts. If each department uses different software, there’s no way to easily run one report that brings together all of that vital marketing data.
What happens is that each department runs their own report and then it has to be gone through and collated to give a picture of what’s happening in the company, how many leads they’re getting, whether budgets are being spent on the right things or not, and whether the marketing is having a positive impact on the bottom line.
Even worse, bringing different reports together still doesn’t reveal the complete picture of what’s going on in the marketing department. This leads to marketers being unable to say what is getting results from all the things they’re doing, and how exactly they’re providing a return on investment. If they can’t prove return on investment, there’s a very good chance they can’t justify their budget either, which can lead to budget cuts, staff cuts, and other unpleasant problems, all because no one has all the information they need to make the right decisions.
As the owner of your company, how can you think about what to spend on marketing and have any idea if what you’re doing is working if you don’t have fully integrated and complete data?
Of course, the answer is that you can’t. You’re flying blind.
This leads to the second problem with the duct-tape approach:
2) You’re wasting money and resources
With no clear picture of which campaigns and channels are successful, it’s impossible to say which ones you should increase the budget on and which ones need to be stopped because they aren’t working.
If you continue to run all your marketing campaigns on all platforms without proper reports to tell you how they’re doing, you’re losing money and resources for certain. Was it Facebook ads and campaign A that brought you those thirty highly targeted leads last month or blogging and improving your SEO that got you more visibility and drew in more potential customers?
If you don’t know for sure, you could be throwing away money, time, and effort on something that isn’t bringing results, when you could be increasing the spending on your successful marketing efforts and getting more and even better quality leads.
You’re not just losing money spent on campaigns with lower results, you’re also losing the increased income you might have had from focusing on better-performing campaigns. And you’re probably paying more to have multiple software platforms than you would for an all-in-one solution.
3) You’re losing time
If you have to log in and out of multiple platforms to look at what’s happening with your marketing, you’re losing that time. While it might only take thirty seconds to switch from one software to another, those seconds add up when you times that by the number of staff having to make that switch and the number of times they need to do it over a year.
There’s also the extra time needed to share information between departments because different ones are using different software and they can’t all see the same data, and the time compiling reports from each piece of software to look at your marketing ROI.
How many hours a year could you rescue if everyone could log into one platform that worked for everything?
4) Poorer customer experience
If your marketing isn’t working as well as it might, there’s also a possibility that your customer experience is suffering too. If you aren’t reaching your clients on the platforms they use, with the right messaging, they won’t feel understood and heard, and they won’t feel that they’re getting an outstanding experience when they interact with your company.
A big part of good marketing is knowing what customers want and, without the right data, it’s highly possible that you might not be giving it to them. This can obviously lead to lost sales, fewer returning customers, fewer referrals, and unfortunately, more negative reviews, which can impact your reputation, your local reach, and the bottom line.
However, there is a solution that can make for integrated marketing, deep insights into what’s working and what’s not, automation to save you time, and so much more.
5 benefits of using an all-in-one platform
The right all-in-one platform can bring simplicity and clarity to your online marketing, with a range of time and money-saving benefits that don’t just keep more dollars in your pocket but can also help you to increase your ROI and add to the bottom line.
With the Surefire Local Marketing Platform, you can:
1) Reduce your marketing expenses
There are so many marketing programs out there, from email managers to CRMs, and from social scheduling tools to search tools, and paying for them all individually adds up. Instead, cut back on the fees paid for multiple tools by only paying for one all-in-one platform that tracks all your marketing efforts and lets you work on all your campaigns in one place.
With a solution like Surefire’s Local Marketing Platform, you can work on all of your marketing from one dashboard and pay only one price. You’ll get tools to help you keep your business listings up to date, search engine tools, a place to manage your reviews and easily keep track of review requests, a place to write your blog posts and manage your content, and so much more.
Build your online presence and consolidate all your marketing into one place to save time.
2) Measure your performance/ROI easily
With an all-in-one solution, one of the biggest advantages is that you can run reports whenever you like and easily gain deep insights into your marketing results. There’s no guesswork and no wondering which platforms and campaigns are working for you. You can ditch the spreadsheets for good and let your marketing platform come up with your reports in seconds.
With a local marketing platform, data from all your marketing is pulled together in one place, and auto-generated reports are given, providing insights you never would have noticed before. And you can keep an eye on your competitors and stay ahead of them.
3) Improve your marketing results
With automatically generated reports, you can easily see which channels are bringing you the best results. You can then make sure your budget goes as far as possible and drives results by investing in the strongest channels.
You can also adjust and tweak the campaigns with lower results to see if you can improve your conversion rates or close poorer-performing campaigns so you aren’t wasting any money on something that doesn’t work.
With more targeted marketing, you can find you get an increase in high quality, ready-to-buy leads and reduce your cost per lead.
4) Create and publish content all in one place
Save time and build a more cohesive content marketing plan by creating and publishing all of your content on one dashboard.
You can more easily maintain an active online presence by planning out the right content for your audience right on your dashboard, and writing your blog posts, social media posts, and other content on our marketing platform.
You can also quickly update all of your business directories, including Yelp, Angie’s List, and Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) without leaving the marketing platform.
5) Streamline communications
Create an excellent experience for your customers by managing your communication on the marketing platform.
You can keep track of every conversation you’ve ever had with your customers, and manage your email campaigns, website chat messages, and text messages all in one place.
With all-in-one software, you can ensure that no messages are ever lost and that you don’t forget whether you’ve replied to a customer or not. You’ll have a full history of what you’ve said and when you last contacted them right on your dashboard.
Request a demo of the Surefire Local Marketing Platform
Every company wants not only the best experience for their customers but the best results from their marketing for the lowest cost. Instead of making things difficult for yourself with separate software and tools, why not take a look at the Surefire Local Marketing Platform and see how we can help?
With our all-in-one platform, you can manage your ads, content, leads, business listings, social media, images and so much more without leaving our software. Add in superb insights and reports giving you all you need to manage your marketing and your business, without wasting dollars on things that don’t work, and we think you’ll like what we’ve got to offer.
With a single sign-in for our all-in-one platform for home services marketing, you don’t have to hop from software to software and you can focus on running your business while knowing you can market with ease and bring in the right leads with your marketing efforts.
Book a demo with our friendly team today.
