There’s a lot involved in online marketing, especially if you’re a local home services contractor trying to do everything yourself. At Surefire Local, we’re all about helping our local businesses to keep growing and increasing their profits, and we do that by making marketing far easier for you.
Instead of struggling to keep up with everything you need to do and wondering how you’re ever going to accurately calculate your home services marketing ROI, you can simply log into our all-in-one marketing platform and everything is right there at your fingertips.
When measuring your ROI, there’s so much to take into account, from different platforms and strategies to what metrics you choose to measure.
In the next section, we’re going to explore what’s involved in measuring your ROI accurately, and then we’ll tell you how you can take the hard work out of the equation and manage everything simply and quickly.
Measuring Your Home Services Marketing ROI
You really can’t run a successful contractor business without knowing and thoroughly understanding your return on investment. You need that information to give you a complete overview of your business and understand where your profits are coming from and what parts of your marketing are working well for you. You also need to know when things aren’t working well enough so you can focus your budget on the right things that are bringing you results.
Your tracking needs to be in-depth, accurate, and efficient or you’re wasting time and resources that you could spend on the things that add to your bottom line.
The New Customer Journey
It’s no longer the case that customers simply visit your website and decide to buy. You may get visitors via your social media, via your Google Business Profile, through the search engines, or even in person.
The customer journey isn’t so much a sales funnel anymore, with a linear progression from top to bottom, as it is a flywheel where the different stages of buying can and do overlap.
A potential customer may spend time searching for the solution you provide online, comparing you and your competitors. They may then spend more time reading up on what you do and all the options available rather than calling you to discuss what they want. They’re also likely to research you on social media and look at how responsive you are, look at your reviews and how you handle the negative ones, and read your FAQ before they ever reach out.
Customers are likely to educate themselves via your content first and only then get in touch.
In some ways, that’s an easier customer journey as customers are educating and persuading themselves without you being involved. But it’s incredibly difficult to manually track all that activity and figure out your ROI from all your marketing efforts.
Maintaining Your Digital Footprint
When calculating your ROI, you also need to look at all the different tactics and strategies you have in place, while you also keep up your online presence and somehow find time to actually run your business.
With a local home services contractor business, you’re likely to be investing in digital marketing, social media, paid advertising, managing reviews, SEO, referrals, content marketing, search engine marketing, and website listings.
Imagine tracking all that by hand! In fact, this was the exact reason why Stratum Structural Systems partnered with Surefire Local.
Tracking Your ROI Takes Skill
You have to ensure that you are consistent everywhere online and, on every channel, to ensure you can track everything. You need to do that with phone calls, lead sources, keywords, UTM codes, landing pages, follow-ups and surveys.
Complexity Makes Tracking Difficult
Right there, we have a major understatement. There are so many channels you need to cover, different tactics, and different ways you could track your data, especially if you’re also using different software for each part of your marketing. Without help, you’d be struggling to understand what your ROI is and if you’re close to being accurate.
This overcomplicates your calculations needlessly and leaves you wondering if you’re making the right decisions for your business.
Here are just some of the ways to calculate ROI:
This is the simplest formula to give you your ROI:
(return – investment) / investment
If it was that easy, however, you wouldn’t need help.
Not every marketing tactic has the same impact or value. You may spend money on paid ads and get a great return for your dollars, but how do you know what your ROI is for your content marketing or your SEO?
The short answer is that you don’t, without some more complicated formulae. As well as the basic formula above, you might also need to use formulae as below:
Sales growth – marketing spend
Time spent vs. money generated
(ad spend / new customers) x customer lifetime value
[((number of leads x lead to customer rate x average sale price) – cost for marketing) / cost for marketing] x 100
If you’re getting a headache just looking at that, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. Here’s where it gets easier.
Improving Your Home Services Business Marketing ROI the Easy Way
You do still need to put some work in, but you really can simplify what you’re doing and improve your ROI too.
Here are our five simple steps:
1) Decide on Your KPIs
Obviously, you can’t tell if you’ve reached your marketing goals if you haven’t decided what to track. Choose the most relevant KPIs for your business before you try to calculate your ROI.
Your KPIs will be individual to your home services business, but you’ll probably want to include new leads, new sales, traffic, customer retention rates, and your profit margins.
2) Focus on Multiple Marketing Channels
You do need to focus on more than just one marketing channel, but you need to choose the right channels for you. You’ll need to focus on email marketing, reviews, directory listings, digital advertising, and your website. Of course, you’ll need social media, too, but choose the platforms where you know your customers hang out. You’re more likely to be able to reach your target audience easily and you can focus on the content you need to provide and your messaging to attract good leads.
3) Test Everything, then Test Again
Just like not measuring your results, not testing is simply asking to waste money on things that aren’t working. There are so many different variables that might mean a customer clicks and buys from you, or bypasses you for a competitor, and if you’re not testing, you don’t know how to improve and increase your conversion rates.
Test your content, including your headlines, keywords and phrases, and your calls to action. Look at what messaging people respond to the most. Test your ad copy, email copy, and your web copy. Take the time to even test what fonts and colors you use. Even a change of color on your CTA buttons or a different message can make all the difference.
Keep testing and improving as you go to optimize your conversion rates.
4) Measure Everything
Just as much as you should be testing everything, you need to measure everything and see what results you’re getting. Focusing on what works and dropping the campaigns that don’t make your marketing dollars go further.
5) Commit to Your Strategy
While testing, measuring, and adjusting depending on your results is important, you do need to pick a strategy and stick to it. You can focus on your strategy and concentrate on getting the most out of it, and over time, you’ll have meaningful data to work with that will guide future decisions.
You’ll have noticed that there’s a lot of measuring and testing going on in our fives steps after we promised we’d make it easier for you. Well, the answer to that is to use an all-in-one local marketing platform that will keep track of everything for you across multiple platforms.
No more hours with spreadsheets and reports from different pieces of software just to get a partial and probably inaccurate picture of what’s going on in your business.
Instead, simply use Surefire’s marketing software and get all your data in one place.
Marketing ROI Made Simple
Surefire’s all-in-one marketing platform really does help you quickly, easily, and accurately measure your ROI. And you can manage all of your marketing in one place, without trying to make multiple pieces of software work together.
Take a look at just some of the features and how they can help your business:
Surefire Local’s ROI Dashboard
When you open our software, our Home tab gives you all your metrics in one place and in near-real time. You can see your leads, star ratings and reviews, online visibility, where your leads are coming from, email statistics, how your ads are performing, and so much more.
With clear insights and accurate data, you can firmly control your marketing spend and be sure what you do spend goes on the right things.
Keep On Top of Google Tools
With your Surefire Local marketing platform, you can see how easy you are to find on Google Search and discover how your customers are finding you.
Even better, you can also analyze what actions your potential customers take after looking at your Google Business Profile (GBP). This allows you to adjust your GBP to increase phone calls, direction searches, and clicks.
You can also look at your Facebook Ads and your Google Ads in one place where you can track performance, see what you’re spending on, and make sure you’re not wasting money. You can even get down to details such as lead generation and visibility from customer to customer.
Want to look at Google Analytics without leaving our software? You can do that too. You can see searches, click conversions, monitor your traffic, and see where your traffic is coming from. You can also look at your results compared to your competition and manage Google Maps results too.
Manage Your Content and Social Channels
With our platform, you can manage your entire content creation workflow, right from noting your ideas as you have them to publication of your posts. You can write your posts in our software, schedule them, and publish them without leaving our platform.
There’s no need to sign in to Twitter, then onto Facebook, and into Instagram, etc, etc, and repeat posting the same content ad nauseum. You can manage all your social platforms from your marketing platform. It’s smooth, it’s easy, and it saves you time and frustration.
In addition, you can post straight to Google Business Profile and ensure everything’s up to date and ready to be found by potential customers.
Update Reviews and Relevant Information
Your online reputation matters and reviews are excellent user-generated content that can build trust and encourage others to buy from you. With Google Business Profile, you need to consistently get new reviews as older reviews lessen in value after a month or two. Also, the newer the review, the more likely customers are to think that they can trust your business with their requirements.
You also need to respond to every review, even the negative ones, quickly. With our platform, you get a newsfeed of all your review platforms and you can reply and update right from our software. No more signing into all your individual review sites.
You can also ensure that all your data and vital information is up to date on over 80 directory sites, including your opening hours, location, service areas, photos, payment methods, your business description, and your products and services.
Take Us With You Everywhere You Go
You can use our all-in-one marketing platform on your laptop, Mac, or PC, on your tablet, and on your phone, whether you use Android or iOS.
Manage your business whether you’re in the office, at home, or out on the road. How’s that for convenient and easy? If you haven’t yet seen a demo of our software, why not book yourself a time to see just how much the Surefire Local platform can make your life easier. Get in touch with us today.
