Successful marketing strategies all have one thing in common: They do much more than just promote a product or service. The best campaigns—the ones that leave the biggest impact—make us think about the industry and the world at large.
Believe it or not, you don’t need to drain your marketing budget to create an effective strategy. Leaving a lasting impact isn’t always about spending the most dollars—it’s about storytelling. When you master the art of storytelling, you can build strong relationships with your target audience, providing high-quality content relevant to them on a consistent basis.
Eventually, when your customers are ready to hire an electrician, their loyalty already lies with you—and they already prefer your products and services to the competition.
With a powerful creative digital strategy, you can get your electrical company in front of the right people at the right time—all while cementing your industry expertise and showcasing your value proposition.
We hate to break it to you, but your customers don’t care about you. They’re sick of dealing with faulty switches and burnt-out light bulbs. They want to know what you can do for them and how you can solve their problems.
That’s where personalization can be your secret weapon. Your customers don’t just enjoy personalized marketing—they expect it. In fact, 99 percent of marketers say that personalization helps advance customer relationships, with 78 percent reporting it has a “strong” or “extremely strong” impact. And if that’s not convincing enough, an incredible 80 percent of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.
So, how can you captivate your customers with a personalized experience? It’s easier than you might think—you just need the right customer relationship management (CRM) tool. CRMs gather user data into one centralized dashboard so you can tap into key insights, from a customer’s transaction history to their previously viewed content.
Chances are, your competitors have probably started personalizing their messaging with outreach programs like email marketing. Maybe their emails include their prospects’ first name, or they send targeted content based on a prospect’s stage in the sales funnel.
It’s time for you to step in and take personalization even further. You’re going to take a different approach, and that means personalizing every step of the customer journey. By rethinking your customer journey, you can create a seamless, tailored customer experience for every lead.
Wondering how to get started? Here are some tips to help you craft a well-planned, strategic marketing strategy tailored to your prospects:
Whether you’re a marketing pro or just getting started, it can feel impossible to figure out what kind of content your target audience will be interested in. But putting in the time and effort to create content that actually engages your leads is the key to marketing success.
Let’s face it: Nobody wants to feel like they’re reading a textbook filled with industry jargon or a paragraph stuffed with keywords. Your audience wants content that is informative, engaging, and useful. That’s where video content can help you dominate the competition.
In 2020, 96 percent of consumers watched more online video content, and nine out of 10 viewers said they want to see more videos from brands. As of 2022, the average person is predicted to spend 100 minutes per day watching online videos. There’s no denying that video content gives you a valuable opportunity to cut through the noise and connect with your prospects on a deeper level than your average blog post.
And yes, video marketing really is worth it. In their 2020 report, Wyzowl found that 89 percent of video marketers say that video gives them a good ROI, and 95 percent plan to increase or maintain their video spending. Even if you’re working with limited resources, hiring a professional marketing team can help you create strategic video content to use across your website and social media pages.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Your website is the backbone of your digital marketing.
At the very least, you should be updating and optimizing your website each year. Ideally, you should take a look at your website infrastructure, content, and UX quarterly. This includes optimizing your website for new keywords, learning from CRM data to improve conversion flows, and updating landing pages to provide more accurate information.
Along with your website, your blog content needs to be relevant—and that means scheduling seasonal and year-to-year refreshes of your current content. Maybe you created a blog post about autumn generator maintenance in 2021. It’s time to refresh that post for the new season so you can reel in SEO traffic during the spring.
Any blog post that includes the year, references a season or current events, or mentions any other dating material should be updated to the current year, season, and time. If you’re refreshing old content, update it to reflect it as a current post. This way, you’ll get a boost in SERPs and drive traffic to older content.
And don’t forget the value of adding new content to your site with a focus on local search: Consider the impact it had for Blue Collar Electricians, a Northeast Ohio-based business. They implemented a location-specific content strategy to grow their audience and reach more homeowners in targeted geographic areas. In one year, they grew their organic search traffic by 46 percent—and increased form submissions by 65 percent.
You’ve heard it over and over again, but you need to be active on social media. We know—it’s not easy to keep up with every platform. Between answering the phone, working in the field, and running your business, it’s all too easy to let your social media presence fall by the wayside. That’s why it’s so important to stick to a social media calendar.
Your social media calendar shouldn’t just dictate when to post—it should be filled with content that’s ready to go. Your calendar helps you stay organized, ensuring you create content in advance for all of your social marketing campaigns. Not only that, but it also helps you stay on top of your regular mix of content, plan promotions, and launch seasonal campaigns. It should be a non-negotiable component of your social media strategy.
But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all posting schedule. The ideal frequency and timing of your posts will depend on your target audience and the specific platform, among other things. There’s a lot of competing information on how often you should post on social media, but the final decision is yours to make. You might post once a day to stay top of mind—or you might only post if you have high-quality content to share with your followers.
No matter what strategy you choose, it’s worth taking some time to research your audience, get to know their routines, and figure out the best times to post different types of content. Then, you can schedule posts across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other platforms to maximize engagement and reach the most people.
If you can’t find the time for social media, it’s worth hiring a social media professional to do the work for you. Or, if you just need a helping hand to hit the ground running, tools like Hootsuite AutoScheduler choose the best time to post based on your performance history and target audience.
Stagnant traffic and poor social media engagement are the last things you want to see when reviewing your metrics, but it’s something every business owner deals with at some point. If your content isn’t driving the results you want, try shaking up your strategy by refreshing your older content.
Repurposing old content doesn’t just boost engagement and traffic. It can help you reach new audiences, target new keywords, and improve your organic visibility. In turn, repurposing old content can make all the difference in building brand awareness, helping you leave a long-lasting impact on your audience.
You probably have a goldmine of content just begging to be repurposed. You don’t have to spend hours reinventing the wheel, either. This strategy can be as simple as finding new ways to repurpose your past content to captivate your target audience.
For example, you might update your blog post on generators to reflect the most up-to-date technology, use client testimonials for social media content, or repurpose your most popular blog posts into videos. The possibilities are endless—it’s all about figuring out what works for your target audience.
When it comes to repurposing, you already have a huge head start on the creation process. That’s why this strategy can be especially valuable for electricians who have created content in the past but don’t have the time to publish new content. The best parts of your blog don’t have to be kept in the history books, so create a list of your top-performing pieces and take them to the next level.
What’s a content gap? Simply put, it’s what your competitors are talking about in their email newsletters, blog posts, and social media posts that you haven’t mentioned yet. If you’re running short on content ideas, it might be time to start spying on the competition.
Of course, you don’t want to copy everything your competitors are doing. Start by scrolling through their blog posts to get a feel for their content. Can you create something similar, but higher quality? If the answer is “yes,” congratulations! You’ve found a content gap.
Content gaps are great opportunities to create useful, informative content and reap the rewards (website traffic and backlinks). If you’re not sure how to spin your competitors’ content in a unique direction, our clients have used the skyscraper technique to completely transform their content marketing strategy. Basically, the skyscraper technique is a powerful link-building strategy where you find top-performing content from your competitors. Then, you capitalize on its weaknesses to create a better, more comprehensive piece of content.
Pro tip: If you don’t have hours to spend behind a desk reading your competitors’ blogs, SEO analysis tools can do the hard work for you. To get started, run backlink reports on your biggest competitors to figure out what content is performing the best (i.e., getting the most backlinks). Alternatively, you can use a keyword research tool like SEMRush to research top-performing keywords on your competitors’ websites.
Once you’ve analyzed your competitors’ content and identified any content gaps, you can start creating a content strategy around those topics. Ideally, you’d “fill in” all of the content gaps you’ve identified with your own content, but this can be a time-consuming process.
Instead of creating mass amounts of content to fill in all the gaps, focus on creating high-quality content that fills in one or two gaps. This way, you’ll increase your chances of leapfrogging your competition in the search results.
A highly focused creative strategy can drive more attention to your business and more dollars to your bank account, but it’s not going to happen overnight. If you’re relying on old-school marketing strategies, it’s time to audit your marketing plan and figure out what needs to be updated.
Struggling to get your creative strategy off the ground? We get it. Whether you’re new to digital marketing or putting the finishing touches on your content marketing campaign, our team can answer any questions you have along the way. And if you’re too busy running your electrical company to even think about marketing, we can do the hard work for you.
