Overview of Digital Marketing for a Home Service Business

Digital marketing is a form of marketing for a home service business.  Marketing is a business process where you explain your products and services to a potential client or “market”.  The digital part is what makes digital marketing new.  Marketing has been around since businesses needed to find customers.  The traditional marketing methods have been newspapers, radio, TV and direct mail.  Many things in life have changed with the Internet and marketing has changed too.  Digital marketing is a number of new methods enabled by the Internet.  These are websites, business listings, paid advertising, conversion rate optimization, email marketing, reputation management, social media, search engine optimization, content marketing and analytics.

These new methods allow options that didn’t exist with traditional marketing methods.  Traditional marketing uses “broadcast” methods.  Newspapers, radio and TV are broadcast to whoever is interacting with the medium.  You need to reach a lot of people to hope to reach the people that are open to your marketing message.  Digital marketing allows you to target specific traits in your potential audience.  With Google Search ads, a form of paid advertising, you can target keywords that people are searching for that indicate a willingness to purchase.  For example, the keywords “leaky toilet” may indicate looking for a plumber.  A search query of “plumber near me” is someone looking to hire a plumber.  Most of the methods of digital marketing allow for some type of targeting.

Digital marketing allows for interactive with your potential customers that was never possible with traditional marketing.  In social media, you can directly reply to people who reach out to your social media local service business accounts.  In reputation management, people leave reviews on websites which is a new form of “word-of-mouth”.  As a local service business owner who claims their review business profiles, you can respond to both positive and negatives reviews to thank people and address issues brought up.  Digital marketing allows you the business owner the chance to interact with potential and current customers to continue your marketing efforts.

Digital marketing for a home service business allows for the collection of large of amounts of data to help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.  Traditional marketing has limited measurements that were often interpolated.  But digital marketing can be tracked in a large number of ways.  A website can show the number of visitors along with when they visited your website.  You can see if someone opened the email you sent them in an email marketing campaign.  These different data points can be connected to even show a broader relationship to all the data being tracked using analytics.

Digital marketing is more cost effective than traditional marketing because the volume of supply is increased.  You are no longer limited by the number of pages in the newspaper or the number of commercials on TV.  There are almost an unlimited number of ways to reach your potential home services audience.  This large supply reduces the costs.  Additionally, you can start and stop marketing efforts at any time if they aren’t effective for your business.  You see exactly what a digital marketing method is costing and can decide on its effectiveness.

There are drawbacks with digital marketing.  The first is it is sometimes confusing.  Unlike traditional marketing, there are a number of new technologies you need to understand like search engines, social media engagements, email deliverability and website technologies.  Second, digital marketing is always changing.  Websites are one of the oldest methods of digital marketing, but new website technology and design are constantly evolving.  Finally, there are so many more possible methods of digital marketing that it is hard to determine what your home service business should focus on and how much to spend.  Nevertheless, digital marketing is the future of marketing and something your business will need to master to succeed and grown.

Digital marketing is a dynamic and constantly changing aspect of your business. Digital marketing allows you to target and interact with your potential and current customers.   Digital marketing gives you the data to monitor the cost effectiveness of your marketing efforts.  Though there are drawbacks to digital marketing, the potential rewards to your business of using it allows to your raise the awareness of your business, get more leads and make more sales.