As a contractor, you’re constantly looking out for ways to build a business you can be proud of. You love getting your hands dirty and working in the field—and you started a gutter cleaning business to do more of what you love. Marketing might feel like your last priority, but in today’s competitive digital landscape, you need powerful solutions to keep your business alive.
If marketing is at the bottom of your to-do list, you’re not alone. In 2019, there were about 830,000 construction companies in the United States—and the majority of them experienced the same struggle: building a successful digital marketing strategy. In fact, according to a 2018 survey, only 45 percent of businesses in the contracting and construction industries are growing.
But there’s good news: You don’t have to spend thousands to reach local homeowners and keep the phone ringing. Even if you run a small business with a limited budget, you have plenty of marketing opportunities available to grow your business, build brand awareness, and generate new leads. Our clients tell us that cohesive digital marketing makes all the difference on their bottom line.
From optimizing your website to posting on social media, digital marketing is the tool you need to keep your appointment book full—and you don’t have to be a marketing pro to build a successful strategy.
Your website is the home front of your gutter cleaning business. Your customers are doing less face-to-face communication—and they’re turning to the Internet to research and hire their next gutter cleaner. According to Blue Corona, 63 percent of consumers primarily use a contractor’s website to find and engage with them, and 92 percent of consumers look at a company’s website when choosing a service provider.
Whether you’re running social media ads or optimizing blog posts for SEO, your main goal is to drive potential leads to your website. And in today’s competitive digital landscape, having an “OK” website isn’t going to cut it.
You need a professional, user-friendly website that impresses users and showcases your credibility. Here’s how to transform your website into your best sales rep.
A better, smoother user experience can make all the difference for your website visitors. They’ll come back multiple times, and more of them will follow your sales funnel and convert into paying customers. At the same time, a better UX can boost your dwell time, which is a significant factor in SEO rankings.
So, how do you impress leads with an amazing UX? Start by implementing UX reviews and analyzing your user flow, exit pages, and heatmaps. This way, you’ll be able to identify UX problems and brainstorm potential solutions. Once you’ve identified potential areas of improvement, you can A/B test different components of the page to maximize your conversions.
When it comes to web design, consistency is everything. Website visitors are going to judge your website based on its appearance and how it lines up with the competition. To differentiate your gutter cleaning business, you want to impress visitors with a professional, modern, and trustworthy web design.
How can you build a better website than the competition? Start by choosing colors that reflect your business to build brand recognition. You need to be consistent with your design choices, including your heading sizes, font choices, button styles, and photo choices. Everything should follow a theme to make your design coherent.
To provide visitors with a seamless experience as they click through your website, they need to know that they’re still on your website. Design changes from your Home page to your landing pages can make visitors feel lost. Even simple inconsistencies in web design can lower the quality of your website, leading your leads straight to the competition.
It’s not enough to have a website that looks great on laptops and desktops. To keep the phone ringing, you need to focus on your website’s mobile experience.
According to local search statistics, 97 percent of people learn more about local businesses online than anywhere else, and 61 percent of mobile searchers are more likely to contact local businesses with mobile-friendly websites. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you could be losing thousands of leads to the competition.
With the growth of mobile search, Google has switched to mobile-first indexing, where it primarily indexes and ranks mobile pages. Any issues with your mobile experience won’t just cost you mobile conversions, but also the opportunity to rank for relevant search terms. In other words, if you offer a mobile-friendly experience, both search engines and potential customers will reward you.
No marketing plan is complete without social media. Social media isn’t just a great marketing tactic to reach potential customers—it also helps boost your SEO. Nearly 90 percent of marketers say their social marketing efforts have increased exposure for their business, and 75 percent say they’ve increased traffic. Even though there’s no denying the incredible potential of social media for contractors, only 32 percent of small businesses invest in social media marketing.
Before you start using social media, consider what social platforms would work best for your business. You want to meet your customers where they already are—whether that’s on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram. To choose the best platforms, look at your target audience to figure out what platforms they frequent.
It might be tempting to post on every platform, but avoid spreading yourself too thin. Our clients have the best social success when they master one platform before moving on to the next.
Once you’ve picked a platform to start with, it’s time to create your social media strategy. Here’s how.
The key to social media success? Consistency. Believe it or not, you don’t have to post on Facebook every single day to grow your following. To build a strong social media presence, you need to provide valuable, quality content to your followers on a consistent basis.
Of course, you’re busy answering the phone and managing contractors in the field—and posting a new picture on Instagram is probably the last thing on your mind. That’s why you need a social media calendar to guide your strategy.
In a nutshell, a social media calendar is an overview of your upcoming posts. It can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet or detailed as an interactive dashboard—you just need to find a solution that works for your business. A social calendar will save you time, keeping your posts organized across every platform. It’ll also help you post consistently. Instead of scrambling for last-minute Facebook post ideas, you can plan future content whenever there’s downtime.
Creating a social media calendar isn’t rocket science. Trust us: Putting in that extra time and effort now will save you from headaches and late nights later on. To get started, check out our guide to social media for contractors to level up your social media strategy.
You already know that consistency is key—but consistency goes far beyond your posting frequency. For your audience to recognize and resonate with your gutter cleaning business, you need to send a consistent message. From your marketing messages to the aesthetics of your social profiles, your brand needs to be recognizable.
So, how do you keep your messaging consistent? First, you need to understand exactly who you’re talking to. If you’re targeting middle-aged homeowners, you wouldn’t use the same voice as you would if you were talking to millennials. Use your customer data to pinpoint your audience segments. Then, tailor your messaging to reach your target audiences.
Your target audience’s age, geographic location, gender, and interests should influence your brand voice—but that’s not all. You also need to keep your brand’s mission, values, and vision in mind when creating content. Brand messaging is a delicate tightrope walk, but finding balance can upgrade your brand from forgettable to top of mind.
By now, you should have a big-picture understanding of social media marketing. To build brand awareness, you’ll need to continuously adapt your strategy to keep your content informative, relevant, and engaging. That means posting different types of content, keeping up with the latest social trends, and posting about current events. But your social strategy doesn’t end there.
At its core, social media marketing is about trial and error. Sure, you can build a strong social strategy based on comments, likes, and shares, but mastering the art of social media requires a birds-eye view of your data. When you monitor the metrics behind your campaigns using a social customer relationship management (CRM) tool, you can tweak your strategy to give your followers exactly what they want.
When you use a social CRM to guide your marketing efforts, you can be reactive in the short term to get the most out of your campaigns. Then, you can proactively use insights to guide your next strategy.
From generating leads to booking appointments, content marketing can be your secret digital marketing weapon. When done right, content marketing can boost your SEO rankings, build stronger relationships with leads, and position your gutter cleaning business as a local authority.
Effective content marketing not only educates your audience on what gutter cleaners do but also showcases the services you offer. When gutters start tearing away from the roof or water pools in the basement, the credibility you’ve built through content marketing will keep your business top of mind. According to a HubSpot survey of 2,300 small businesses, those with active blogs generate 126 percent more leads each month compared to those without a blog.
Ready to tap into the power of content creation? Here’s how to hit the ground running with a strategic, conversion-driving content marketing plan.
To start with content marketing, you’re going to need a list of topics. You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool and Google Keyword Planner to find topics that matter to your audience and rank in relevant search results. Alternatively, you can compile a list of FAQs from your customers and start creating blog posts, videos, and other content to answer their questions.
Once you’ve chosen a list of topics, you’ll need to choose the format. You can create blog posts, instructional videos, infographics, and client testimonials to give value to your audience. You’ll also want to play around with different formats to keep content interesting and engaging.
Why should I spend hours behind a desk creating content?, you’re thinking. To create professional videos, well-written blog posts, and impactful infographics, you’ll probably need to invest time and money upfront, especially if you don’t have an in-house marketing team.
Content marketing is the tool you need to grow your business, and average-quality content isn’t going to get your business noticed. Our clients tell us that professional content creation is well worth the investment. At the end of the day, you need to take a different approach to stand out from the competition—even if it means running toward the fire.
Your website content matters more than you might think. Sure, web design and UX are important, but your website content controls the message you’re sending to leads. Words are the easiest thing to change on your website—but they’re also the most powerful.
From your blog posts to FAQ pages, every piece of content should provide a logical roadmap toward the conversion action you want leads to take. Of course, driving conversions is easier said than done. If you don’t understand your target audience, you’ll never be able to offer solutions to their problems.
To get a clear picture of your target audience, leverage your user data to build buyer personas. Ask existing customers about their customer journey and what ultimately convinced them to schedule an appointment. After you pinpoint who your target audience is and what kind of content they want to see, you can level up your website with tailored blog posts, landing pages, and more.
This is the approach that The Gutter Boys, a Northeast Ohio-based gutter cleaning company, took with the redesign of their website, aimed at bolstering their local search presence in target areas and showcasing their brand to regional homeowners. Their new site generated more than a 25 percent increase in site visits.
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective strategies to keep your business top of mind. Half the world’s population—around four billion people—has an active email account, and that number is only going to keep growing.
Even though email might seem obsolete, it comes with an amazing return on investment: Email marketers make $40 in sales for every $1 spent sending emails. With the right strategy, email marketing can help you build a personal relationship with your leads—and that might just be the push they need to hire your company.
What’s the secret to email marketing? Personalization. To make the most of your email marketing efforts, you need an impactful campaign that delivers personalized content to your audience segments.
Don’t worry, creating personalized content is easier than it sounds. You don’t have to create separate emails for every single subscriber—you just need to get the tone and messaging right for different segments.
Here, you’ll want to tap into your buyer personas to craft personalized messages. You should also segment your mailing list based on their opt-in pathways.
Think of personalized offers that your audiences won’t be able to resist. Do they want home maintenance tips or newsletters? Are they interested in seasonal discounts and package deals? Once you’ve determined their interests, you can create personalized email content to address their needs. To top it all off, customize your subject lines and calls to action for different segments.
Any business owner knows that nothing is permanent—and change is inevitable. To survive and thrive in the gutter cleaning industry, you need to keep up with the constant changes in digital marketing.
Remember: Digital marketing isn’t a “set it and forget it” approach. You need to finetune your marketing strategy to generate leads, maximize conversions, and get the most bang out of your marketing budget.
If you don’t have the time, money, or resources to pour into a holistic, long-term marketing plan, we’re here to help. At Company 119, we take the marketing tasks off your plate so you can focus on running your business. Contact us today to transform your gutter cleaning business with proven digital marketing solutions.
