Are you a home services contractor looking for new ways to promote your brand and build your online reputation?
What if we told you there was a way you could do just that for much less than you would spend on traditional marketing methods? You’d be interested…right?
Of course you would!
So what is this mysterious brand and reputation-building marketing method we speak of?
Content marketing!
Yep, you heard that right—content marketing!
Content marketing for home services contractors is one of the best ways to attract, engage, retain, and build your brand and your brand’s reputation. The problem is…most businesses don’t know exactly how to go about it.
So let’s dive in and look at how content marketing works and how you can make it work for you too. Then we’ll go over the best way to make your content marketing easy to develop and implement using a content calendar.
What Is Content Marketing?
One of the best home services marketing tools for your arsenal is content marketing. But what exactly is content marketing?
The first thing you and almost everyone else on the planet do when they need information or want to purchase something is to go straight to the internet. The internet is full of content that will provide a searcher with loads of information to answer their questions or to help assist them in making a buying decision.
That’s where content marketing comes in. Content marketing for home services contractors is a strategy used to attract and engage consumers. This is done by producing high-quality content using articles, images, videos, and other types of media. The more content you put out, the more visibility your business will receive. And the more visible your business is, the higher its perceived authority is.
So in other words, content marketing will help build your brand and your brand’s reputation. This, in turn, will generate leads and ultimately sales.
Fascinating Content Marketing Statistics
- 47% of potential customers look at 3-5 pieces of content before contacting a business.
- Successful businesses invest 46% of their marketing budget in content creation.
- 90% of people say user-generated content means more to them than promotional emails or search results.
- 60% of consumers believe user-generated content is the most authentic type of marketing content.
- 72% of consumers search for visual content before they make a buying decision.
The Benefits of Consistent Content Marketing
Regardless of whether you use local marketing software or a local marketing platform, the benefits of consistent content marketing are huge.
- It’s cheaper than traditional marketing and it builds your brand, as well as a loyal following.
- Consistent content marketing helps build brand trust and labels you as an authority in your industry.
- Consistent content marketing creates more visibility for your business.
- Content marketing creates more opportunities for audience engagement and conversion rates. Not to mention better quality leads.
How Do You Develop an Effective Content Marketing Strategy?
There are six parts that should be used to create an effective content marketing strategy. And these six parts should be geared to your particular home services niche.
1. Identify Your Ideal Audience
Begin by identifying your ideal audience. You can do this by answering a few questions. What market demographic do you want to reach? And where online does that demographic spend most of their time? Now take that information and develop a customer persona. What types of home products and services does that customer persona generally seek out and purchase?
2. Content Types
Now you need to create different types of content so you can provide everyone in your ideal audience with the type of content they prefer to consume.
This could include:
- Blog posts using home industry topics of interest
- Videos, these could be educational step-by-step pieces
- Articles (how-to’s, stories, tutorials, trending topics, eBooks, etc.)
- Images and infographics
- Reviews, customer stories, testimonials, case studies
- Website landing pages
- Ad Copy
- Emails
- Audio, podcasts, webinars
- FAQ’s, frequently asked questions are a great way to get Google’s attention
3. Content Messaging
You should personalize your content to match the customer journey. This can be done by writing different types of messages that a customer might relate to while they are going through their specific search and research process. Make sure your content stands out from the crowd and that your messages are clear, concise, action-oriented, and helpful.
Your messaging should build awareness, educate, and spark curiosity about your industry. It should also show comparisons that confirm why your business is the better option. Then encourage the reader to take quick action while reinforcing why your brand is the better value.
4. Writing Style
Your writing style should be engaging and conversational, not robotic in nature. If your writing and messaging aren’t interesting, people are not going to read it. And, always avoid industry jargon and only use language and terminology your audience will understand.
The best way to form an engaging writing style is to find other publications that catch and keep your attention and mimic their style. Ask yourself if your writing is something you would read yourself to gauge interest-level.
5. Content Design
You can write the best content and have the best messaging in the world, but if the content design is poorly crafted or doesn’t grab a reader’s attention, your message will be lost.
Poorly designed content is confusing and frustrating to your readers. No one wants to read something they have to keep rereading to try to figure out what you are asking them to do.
So make sure your content is written in a way that can be read in small bite-sized chunks and that the page can be easily scanned. You can do this by using smaller paragraphs, bullet points, numbering, bolding, italics, and inserting quotes, images, and other things that help draw a reader’s eye down the page.
Focusing on proper content design will draw a reader’s eye down the page and straight to your call to action where it will be obvious as to exactly what action you want that reader to take.
6. Platforms
Now that you have all that content, what do you do with it?
If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! You are done with the hard part, but you still have a few things you need to do.
All that content won’t do you any good if no one sees it. So now it’s time to publish that great content all over the internet.
Blogs:
- WordPress
- Wix
- Medium
Business Directories:
- GMB (Google My Business)
- BBB (Better Business Bureau)
- Bing and Yahoo
- Yelp
- Nextdoor
- Angi and Home Advisor
Social Media:
- YouTube
- TikTok
And any other places people go for information about your industry. Are there any industry websites, local media, or print magazines you could post your content to? Think outside the box and you will probably come up with some other great places to post your industry-related content.
Now, let’s talk about how to make sure all your content is distributed regularly and proportionately. You can do that by using a content calendar.
What Is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar is simply a designated schedule of when and where you’ve decided to publish your current and future content. A content calendar should also include status updates, a place for your promotions and other activities, as well as when to update your currently published content.
A content calendar will help you work faster and save you loads of time in the creation process because you will know exactly what you need to do and when.
5 Steps to Creating a Content Calendar for Home Services Contractors
Using local marketing tools, small business marketing software, or some other type of small business marketing platform is your best bet for creating a content calendar. Here are the five steps needed to create a content calendar.
1. Understand Your Customers’ Needs
What matters to your customers and how can you help them? Identify your customers’ pain points and struggles, then develop content that helps eliminate those issues. Find out what questions your customers are asking and answer them. Learn your customers’ search patterns and behaviors, then use that to decide where you are going to publish your content.
2. What Social Media Platforms Do Your Customers Frequent Most?
It’s important to share your content on as many platforms as possible. However, it’s critical that you prioritize them properly. This is so you can concentrate most of your efforts on the ones where your customers are most active, the ones that drive the most traffic, and the ones that have the highest visibility. Think GMB, Yelp, Facebook, or wherever your particular customers spend most of their time.
After you’ve done that, you will need to determine your posting frequency. Balance your content properly. If you post too often on certain platforms, you run the risk of your readers tuning you out. And if you don’t post enough, you might be forgotten, which results in being lost in the crowd.
Remember one thing though…when it comes to publishing, quality is much more important than quantity. If you are not providing your readers with value, they will stop reading and move on to other content that does provide value.
3. Develop Content Themes
Categorize all the content you create into different themes. This is so you have a balance of content your customers will respond to.
- Written, video, audio
- Seasonal, promotions, giveaways
- Informational, educational, how-tos, step-by-step walkthroughs
- Updates, announcements
- Company highlights, testimonials, stories, reviews
4. Brainstorm Topics
Have regular brainstorming sessions with your team. And it doesn’t hurt to ask your current customers what type of content they would like from you also. You can create lists of topics from which you can draw on for your future content needs.
And don’t forget, you can take one content topic and turn it into different formats using the same content. For example, take your article and have a video made, then use it to create an infographic, etc.
5. Putting It All Together
Now take everything you’ve just done, then arrange it accordingly on your content calendar. Mark which days you will publish your new content and where. Keep your themes in mind so you don’t put too much of one specific type of content too close together. You will want to balance out your content.
Next, you will take the content list you got from your brainstorming session and put those content ideas on your calendar as well. And before you know it, you will have a year’s worth of content all planned and scheduled out.
Now go and treat yourself and your team to lunch! You deserve it!
But wait…are you saying you don’t have time for all that?
We understand. Consistent content marketing is extremely time-consuming, and it must be done correctly if you want it to be effective. So what should you do?
Keep reading and we will tell you how we can help.
What’s Next?
OK, we’ve talked about content marketing and how a content marketing calendar can make things easier. But what if you don’t have time for all that? Well, that’s where we come in.If you want the benefits of content marketing, but don’t have time to do it yourself, we can help. Why not let Surefire Local take that off your plate for you? Contact Us today and let us show you exactly what we can do for you!