No matter how great a builder you are, if you don’t have the right online presence your leads and sales will suffer.
Times are changing. More and more people are relying on the internet to help make purchasing decisions, including the largest financial decision that they will make in their lives, purchasing a home.
Your Customers are Online
In 2017 roughly 90% of American adults use the internet including 96% of 30-49 year olds and 80% of 50-64 year olds. Your audience is online, and online is a great place to reach out to them.
Studies show that between 70-80% of people research a company online before visiting a business or making a purchase.
Just Get Started
Your first step should be to establish a website. Websites range from a simple one page site with a few photos, or can be extremely complex, with multiple pages and layers that can include reviews, blogs, and home improvement tips.
If you want to do it yourself, you don’t even need to know anything about coding, there are a number of sites where you can just drag and drop content right on to your page such as Wix.com, Squarespace, Weebly, and Jimdo. You can create the site for free, but generally you will have to pay some sort of monthly fee to maintain it.
If you are fairly computer literate, you may want to try your hand at designing a site on WordPress. The advantage to WordPress is that you are able to purchase different plug-ins to customize your site to integrate a number of features such as shopping carts, sliders, and widgets.
If your needs are more complex, like this site, you are probably best off to hire a professional web designer that can design, administrate, and optimize a site to your specific needs. They can also do search engine optimization, which will help you land on that coveted first page of search results. There are many local and national companies that can help design your site. This site was designed by Aqua Vita Creative. I have used them to create three websites for us and have been very pleased with the results.
Driving People to the Site
Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the single key to getting people to see your site. The best website creators know how to design a site so that it stands out from the crowd. SEO allows your site to appear organically in search engines like Google.
These search engines also offer Pay-Per-Click ads that appear at the top of the page when a prospective client searches for terms that you have set up in your ad campaigns. Be sure to set a reasonable budget for these ads and check on their performance regularly. Also be sure to set up conversion tracking so that you know how well your advertising dollars are being spent.
Always make sure that you set up your site so that you can analyze how many people are visiting your site through tools like Google Analytics. You can find out lots about your customers so that you can target your customers better.
What About Social Media?
Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter can play a large part in your marketing efforts.
Surprisingly, YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world with 3 billion searches a month. 79% of internet users have a Facebook account, and Instagram has over 100 million subscribers. These sites offer targeted marketing that will allow you to focus in on particular age groups, genders, geographic location, a list of interests, or occupations. The costs per impression are generally low and can really make an impact in the 18-54 demographic.
Social media also is a great way to show your jobs in progress, or to quickly update photos of recent projects. Customers also have the ability to give feedback on how your company did for them.
Getting Good Reviews
All of these online marketing strategies only work if you have good ratings. To get good ratings, ask your satisfied customers to review you on Google, Facebook, and other sites. In general people will be happy to let others know how well you are doing. You can even create clickable links that will automatically default to a 5 star rating. These reviews are the “word of mouth” referrals of today.
Hire a Professional
Sure you could learn to do this all yourself, just like a homeowner can re-roof his own house, but for the best results, it is always wise to hire a professional.