To efficiently run an electrical service business and let the community know about your expertise, business owners and marketing teams need to know the keys to great electrical advertising. The only way to connect your top-notch team of technicians with potential customers is an effective electrical advertising campaign.
At ServiceTitan, we’ve helped thousands of electrician businesses grow using our contractor business software, which gives you tools to manage your advertising and marketing and track the ROI of every campaign. Our all-in-one platform also helps you easily manage your Google reviews, automate direct mail campaigns, and lower your cost-per-lead with targeted email marketing.
In this guide to electrician advertising strategies, we’ll focus on 12 tips that will help you grow your electrical business through advertising.
Top 12 Electrical Advertising Strategies for 2024
Retain your existing electrical service customers with email marketing
Create electrician advertising campaigns that target a local service area
Use different phone numbers for different campaigns to track leads
Implement ServiceTitan’s all-in-one electrical business software
If you want to learn more about how ServiceTitan can help your electrical business generate more revenue through marketing and advertising, you can schedule a call with a product expert for a free demo.
1. Have a Professional and Credible Online Presence
Include the services you offer, testimonials, and contact information.
Social media lets you target customers, “tag” your business, and add credibility.
Make sure your website is secure, fast, and provides a great user experience.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Every electrical services contractor needs an online presence if they want to grow consistently. You don’t have to pay big bucks for an ultra-sophisticated website, however. Many businesses already have someone on staff who is capable of setting up a professional website and running their digital marketing.
The website should let potential customers know what specific services you offer. It should include credibility-boosting information such as testimonials or certifications you or your company hold. It should also list your contact information and your service area location.
As for social media, having a Facebook page or Instagram account, for example, will give customers another way to contact you, let people tag your company directly with a recommendation, and give you one more place to show that you are a credible source for electrical needs.
“Facebook is more of an upside-down pyramid,” says Tommy Mello, The Home Service Expert. “The way I do Facebook is you’ve got a lot of customers at the top who really don’t know about your service or they don’t need it today, but you’re building a funnel. It's at the top of the pyramid, but it’s an upside-down pyramid.”
Some customers will find you because they need your services today, whereas others may find you through brand awareness.
“They call it ‘top-of-mind awareness.’ You’re starting to get that online reputation of ‘Hey, I’ve seen that company before, now I need them.’ Now, they’re going to think of you,” Mello says.
A couple of important notes:
Your website should be HTTPS—not HTTP. The former is a safety certification that stops data breaches and hackers. You need to create a secure site, especially if your website has a place where customers fill in personal information.
Site speed should be a high priority. Why does a website need to load quickly? Because 57% of people will leave your site and go to another one if yours doesn’t load in under three seconds.
Once you’ve addressed the two important notes above—your website is secure and loads quickly—the next thing you need to address is what visitors first see when they visit your website.
Most visitors form an immediate opinion of a website. The site needs to be easy to navigate, contact information should be readily available, and above all, it should be attractive to potential customers.
Finally, your website needs to be mobile-friendly as many customers search for electrical services keywords on their phone, and won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site.
2. Retain Your Existing Electrical Service Customers with Email Marketing
Send a short text or email as a follow-up to personalize the experience.
Offer a free yearly checkup to retain customers.
Send a direct-mail reminder to stay connected.
It’s common knowledge that it costs less to retain a customer than it does to acquire a new one. It’s easy enough to do an electrical job, collect payment, and take the attitude of “call us when you need us.” But that’s not the smart approach. It’s better to have customers keep you in mind.
After you do an electrical repair, maintenance, or installation job, check in with your customers. Send them an electrical email marketing communication or text. Ask them if everything is running smoothly, or if they have any questions.
Another way to create a happy customer for life is to offer a free, yearly checkup to repeat customers. It’s a sign of goodwill. As a plus, it allows you to screen for other maintenance work that the customer might need but not yet know about.
Around the holidays, send customers postcards or reminders that you’re thankful for their business. If you have the budget, send out branded promotional materials (pens, key chains, bottle openers, etc.) as gifts.
Email Marketing with ServiceTitan Marketing Pro
By using ServiceTitan’s add-on product, Marketing Pro, you can reach existing customers and generate more opportunities with email marketing campaigns. You can build hyper-targeted audiences, automate your email campaigns and track true ROI all from one place.
For example, our email marketing features allow you to filter for specific audiences based on customer information you already have in ServiceTitan—such as unsold estimates, aging equipment, and maintenance agreements that are about to expire. This information automatically updates in real time, so you can set your email campaigns once, and emails will be automatically sent out whenever a customer meets the criteria to receive them.
These hyper-targeted campaigns allow for email marketing that truly resonates with your customers, which means they are more likely to open the email, read it, and call you to book an appointment. The more targeted your audiences and campaigns are, the bigger ROI you can expect.
ServiceTitan also provides a range of features to track the return on investment for each email or other marketing campaign.
How a MarketingPro Email Campaign Brought One Company an Extra $4,000 in One Week
Previous A/C customers definitely remembered Jupiter-Tequesta Air Conditioning, Plumbing & Electric when the company sent email marketing using ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro.
The company’s one-time, “We Miss You!” email marketing message triggered a flood of leads. “After one week, the revenue on that one email brought in about $4,000,” says Bill Highsmith, the company’s Process & Procedure Manager.
3. Create Electrician Advertising Campaigns that Target a Local Service Area
Listed locations can make or break getting a client.
Customers look for businesses that are close to where they live.
Ads should be very specific in describing what part of a town your company services.
In the commercial and home services trades, and especially for electricians, geographic location is critical for attracting clients. If a homeowner or business is looking for a repair service, they’re much more likely to call on an electrician whose company is with a 3-mile radius, rather than one that’s based farther away.
Part of that is based on familiarity. Another factor is whether the electrical service is critical and needs to be taken care of quickly. Customers will take the necessary commute time into account when looking for help.
Your advertising campaign should therefore target local SEO keywords based on very specific locations—the city and county where your company is based, as well as the towns or neighborhoods that are proximal to your business.
Creating ads that include specific targeting areas goes hand in hand with a digital marketing plan that targets a local service area.
All your competitors are also attempting to get business within a targeted area, so you have to be very clear and drill down into the location keywords you use.
Realize that even if your targeting and keyword strategy is top-notch, customers are likely to skip over your ad if they see a competitor’s ad that has the location they’re looking for and yours does not readily show that.
It’s even likely that a customer who needs electrical services might pass over an ad that mentions things such as price in deference to the name of the geographic area where they are based.
Use ServiceTitan’s Marketing Tools to Target Locations and Monitor ROI
Have multiple offices in different locations? Use location-specific targeting through ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro to create separate campaigns for each office.
See Where Your Ads Are Working
Understanding where to advertise is as important as how to advertise and when.
The ServiceTitan heat map gives you the information you need to decide the geographical areas where you should focus your advertising. The bigger the circle on the heatmap, the more revenue your business is generating in that area.
Drawing on contact information from current leads, electrical contractors can use ServiceTitan to set up new advertising campaigns that focus specifically on the most profitable areas.
4. Network with Target Customers in Your Area
Look for new construction projects that might be a fit.
Connect with homeowners associations to establish yourself.
Network with your peers for ideas and business leads.
Knowing who your potential customers are—and where to find them—is half the battle when you’re trying to grow your electrical business through electrical contractor advertising.
To find new business and get into specific pipelines, reach out to contractors and architects in your service area. Get to know the facility managers by going to events they regularly attend.
Most importantly, ask them questions: What do they like about electricians they’ve worked with in the past; what have they disliked? Even if facility managers don’t have business at the moment, you can make an impression on them so they remember you when they do have electrical needs.
Is your company most focused on home repairs or maintenance? If so, look to meet and stay in touch with homeowners associations. Volunteer to make an appearance at their HOA meetings and possibly share free advice.
Don’t forget to network with other electrical business owners or marketing managers. Join the local chapter of a professional organization. Having a good relationship with a competitor could lead to a referral when they have too much business on the docket.
Personal relationship-building tactics still work in today’s digital world, according to John Akhoian, owner of 10 Rooter Hero Plumbing locations in California and Arizona, with more than 250 trucks and $50 million in annual earnings.
“Those tactics are still applicable, and I think they still work,” he says. “A lot of people rely too much on digital and don’t do it. I think that’s wrong, and we need to continue to do it.”
Another way of contacting your customers more directly is through direct mail campaigns. Postcards and flyers delivered to commercial premises and homeowners in your area are still a proven way of bringing in leads and starting relationships with potential customers.
Hassle-Free Direct Mail Campaigns with ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro
ServiceTitan Marketing Pro automates your direct mail campaigns to existing customers and prospects. You can set up a campaign in just a few minutes, and send a single postcard or thousands for one flat rate per piece using our system.
You can build target audience lists based on your existing customer data—such as unsold estimates or aging equipment—to target the right customers at the right time. You can also filter by geographical location for new prospects.
You can wave goodbye to the hassle of designing, printing, mailing, and tracking your direct mail campaigns. Simply select your audience profile (or a list of prospect addresses), upload one of our templates, add your own information, and submit. Postcards are automatically printed and mailed to their destination.
Marketing Pro tracks the performance of every postcard campaign you send and identifies how much revenue it’s bringing in. These insights allow you to maximize revenue per contact so you can be sure that direct mail is working for your electrical business.
5. Track and Quantify Your Electrical Marketing Performance
Know which of your advertising strategies are working.
Accurately categorize leads.
Never guess about effectiveness.
Whatever marketing strategy and advertising strategy you adopt, remember to track and quantify your success.
Chris Yano—CEO of Ryno Strategic Solutions and co-host of the “To the Point” podcast—says that if you have a marketing consultant, you should insist they do this for you. And if that agency isn’t helping you track data, it is doing you a disservice. Decisions on how your business spends marketing money depend on lead tracking and reporting. If your business hires someone to help with marketing, they should be sharing all the details of every lead. And if they don’t, “there is something in there that they do not want to be transparent about… something is off.”
That includes defining leads in a fair way, classifying every call correctly, accurately reporting your cost per lead, and charging you for only those that are “real.”
“I get sick of hearing, ‘my cost per lead is $28,’” he says. “Is it like a contact form that is submitted or a call that’s submitted, regardless of whether it was a new customer or a repeat customer? That’s not how we determine a lead.”
If you don’t have time to separate new customers from repeat customers in the reporting, your agency should be doing it for you, he says.
“It’s not that difficult to do,” Yano says. “The reason people don’t do it is bodies.”
Whatever you do, never guess, Yano says.
“I need to know from search to sale how we’re doing if I’m going to truly know how my team is doing,” Yano says. “This is what you should expect from your agency. It will allow you to make very good decisions. You need facts down to the dollar.”
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Get More for Your Advertising Dollars by Tracking ROI with ServiceTitan
Many marketing tools allow you to track the number of incoming calls your ads have generated—but fail to let you know which calls actually result in income for your business.
Two ServiceTitan features boost marketing and track performance: Marketing Pro (an add-on item) and Marketing Scorecards (in the core product).
Marketing Pro presents detailed marketing figures in a single interface. It can tell your company within a few clicks how many calls it received as a result of a specific marketing or advertising campaign.
"What Marketing Pro has allowed us to do is know what’s working and what’s not working, and if something is not working, I can cut it and keep our budget tight," says Vanessa Gonzalez, co-founder and co-owner of Albuquerque Plumbing, Heating & Cooling
“To say that this has saved me hours upon hours of work, and weeks of extra work, is an understatement,” Gonzales said
The scorecards show you leads, bookings, sales and revenue in just a few clicks. It can break down business whether it comes from Angi Leads, local media, Google, the ServiceTitan web scheduler or a postcard campaign.
6. Use Different Phone Numbers for Different Campaigns to Track Leads
Unique phone numbers for each campaign allow tracking.
Domain extensions, coupon codes, unique offers work, too.
This inexpensive tactic provides immediate feedback.
Call and lead tracking is an effective marketing tool that can be implemented through dedicated call tracking phone numbers (local area codes), internet domain extensions, coupon codes, unique offers, and more. Everything you do marketing-wise should utilize tracking to make sure you are reaching the right target audience.
Call tracking numbers or codes are cheap, and they allow you to immediately know which form of advertising is bringing in real leads. Be sure to use them.
Create Trackable Phone Numbers with ServiceTitan
With ServiceTitan, you can create and assign a new, unique phone number to each of your new ads. When that number is used to book new jobs, ServiceTitan's cloud-based system tracks the revenue generated by that ad. You can view the revenue brought in by each of your advertising campaigns in real time, allowing you to drill down into the details of your advertising performance and make quick decisions about where to invest.
ServiceTitan Phone Pro levels up the call taking process by giving you additional real-time reporting and alerts that help you understand how your customer service reps are performing on calls and improve their call handling skills.
7. Create Quality Content to Promote Your Electrician Business
“Content” includes blogs, videos, e-books, guides, and any user-friendly written material.
Quality content creates a bond with customers.
Great content leads to increased business.
Optimize your content so potential customers can find it.
“Content” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of written or recorded material that supplements the process of online marketing. Most people are familiar with blogs. Anything that is written about your company—not just the electrical services you provide, but also the people who do it and the everyday stories they have to tell—is useful for your business.
In regard to your bottom line, nearly three out of four companies report that their lead numbers and quality of leads went up after they started a content marketing strategy.
One of the most powerful ways to generate more leads is to appear in Google when potential customers search for electrical services online. You can either do this by appearing in the organic (free) search results of Google, or through paid advertising.
You appear in organic searches through an approach known as search engine optimization (SEO). Electrical businesses that do it well show up exactly when potential customers search for an electrician.
To be successful at SEO, you need to include top keywords in all the content on your website, social media posts, newsletters, business directories, digital advertising, and all your online content.
To attract local customers in your specific service area, you can also include your city or neighborhood as keywords.
For example, “Dallas electrician” or “Electrical Services Chicago.” When your potential customers search for these terms, Google’s algorithm finds the most relevant results by topic and geographical location and displays them in the results.
On the advertising side, Google reserves a few of the top results as paid ad results. You get listed here by paying for Google Ads (more on this below).
8. Be Active on Online Review Sites
A huge majority of potential customers read review sites.
There are positive and negative ways to encourage reviews by customers.
Research local review sites in your area.
How important are business reviews to your electrical services company? Nearly nine out of 10 customers say they take a look at review sites. If somebody is looking at review sites, they are a customer ready to spend money on a service.
Know that most sites discourage businesses from incentivizing reviews from customers. Don’t get in the habit of offering discounts in exchange for positive reviews. It also can be awkward to ask for a review. But you can be creative in your dialogue with customers. Let them know reviews are important to your business. And, feel free to promote your presence on review sites in your own ads.
Everyone knows about Yelp.com. Realize that there are almost always local review sites in your area. A great way to find these is to do a Google search with the terms “electrician in [your city]” and see what sites pop up.
Manage Online Reviews with ServiceTitan
To help you manage all of your online reviews, and make the most of them, ServiceTitan includes a built-in notification tool as part of its customer experience software by automatically sending survey requests after each job has been completed. That makes it easy for customers to share their experience on an online review site (Google, Yelp, etc.) while it’s still top-of-mind.
Ensure your personalized messages to customers include direct links to your preferred review sites to make it as convenient as possible.
When a technician completes a job, they mark it as finished on their tablet, and that triggers an automatic email to the customer, requesting a review that provides an easy-to-follow link that sends them directly to where you want them to leave the review.
In addition, ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro also offers a reputation management tool that lets you automate sending review requests to customers. Our tool lets you easily stay on top of your online reviews, reply to reviews, show appreciation to customers, and get insights into which technicians or jobs are attached to which reviews, so you can understand which of your employees are performing best in terms of customer experience.
9. Invest in PPC
Paid search ads on Google and elsewhere work well for electricians.
Google has an algorithm that determines how ads rank in their search engine.
A partnership with ServiceTitan streamlines the process for booking ads through Google’s Local Services Ads.
The top part of a search results page are the Pay Per Click (PPC) Google Local Services ads. If you qualify for the Google Guarantee, you are eligible to buy these ads, which can be the first thing consumers see when they do a search.
These are different from Google ads—because you select categories or work you do rather than keywords that prompt your ads.
Google has an algorithm for how this works. Some factors that will affect how an electrical services ad ranks include: your company’s proximity to a searcher, your company’s Google My Business rating and number of reviews, your responsiveness, and even your hours of business.
Focus on Google when it comes to online electrical advertising, says ServiceTitan user Tommy Mello, owner of A1 Garage Door Services, a $30 million-plus home services business with over 200 employees in nine states.
Mello advises spending at least half of your marketing dollars on electrical SEO, PPC digital ads, Google My Business, Google Local Services, and getting more positive customer reviews.
Use ServiceTitan to Schedule Appointments via Online Ads
A partnership between ServiceTitan and Google makes jump-starting your electrical advertising success easier with Google’s Local Services Ads.
ServiceTitan integrates with Google Local Services Ads to allow homeowners to directly schedule online appointments with your company, and provides business owners with ROI metrics on every campaign.
For electrical companies that want to free up their call taker’s time and simplify the booking process, ServiceTitan offers a website widget that lets customers book their own appointments online.
Our widget syncs with your job availability and all your capacity planning parameters, so there’s no chance of double booking, booking jobs that you don’t have capacity to deal with, or assigning electricians without the right skills for the job.
10. Use Best Practices for Electrician Ad Design
The best ads for electricians will stand out from the crowd.
Make your ad visual to make it memorable.
Only convey one message per ad.
To get a potential consumer to hire you for electrical services, your small business has to have an advertisement—be it for direct mail, print, or online—that catches someone’s eye and keeps your electrical company name top of mind. Your visuals need to catch the customer’s attention, and your copy has to hold that attention.
The primary means of catching the eye with an ad is with pictures and images. Visual storytelling is the best way for people to easily grasp concepts and data. Use too many images and the story gets confusing. The best ads feature one strong, easy-to-understand image.
While you’re designing an ad that contains a primary image, use the same approach with the copy that goes with your image. Some in the electrical industry think there are more benefits to including all the services they offer in ads. Nope. A jumbled message doesn’t attract attention; it repels it. Less is more.
11. Come up with a Great Electrical Logo Idea for your Business
Know your brand, and emphasize it in the logo.
Pick colors and fonts carefully.
Keep your logo simple, so you don’t confuse the message.
An electrical services company’s logo can make or break a business and its marketing efforts, says Dan Antonelli, President and Creative Director of home services branding agency, Kickcharge Creative.
The best logos are capable of establishing a rapport with customers. A poorly designed logo can turn off potential clients and discourage customers from giving you a chance.
Logos can vary widely. There might be history to your company’s existing logo—make sure you know what that history is and how it applies to the services you offer. Know the personality of your electrician brand, and make sure it meshes with your company culture.
Knowing the culture and your services will help inform what your logo should be. Realize that logo colors send subliminal messages. For example, red sends the message of a brand being aggressive and energetic. Blue evokes feelings of intelligence. Bright colors grab people’s attention. There’s a science behind every color that’s used in a logo.
Fonts also send subliminal messages. Some can be playful; others are bold and forceful. When putting words into your logo, make sure they match the message your logo image is sending. And if you use more than one typeface, don’t use ones that clash or are mismatched.
Above all, keep your logo simple. Use one or two colors. Limit the number of fonts. A simple logo is much more memorable than one that tries to send a multitude of messages. Complex logos are confusing and therefore unmemorable.
Although a logo is important and a big part of your brand, Dan Antonelli says it’s so much more.
From your van wraps to employee uniforms, branding defines how your company is perceived to the world. According to Antonelli, “branding is how people feel about your company, what they say about your company behind your back.”
12. Implement ServiceTitan’s All-in-One Electrical Business Software
The whole point of implementing the best electrician apps and software is to make tasks easier, quicker, and more effective. Trying to manage marketing for your commercial and home services business using multiple apps, websites, and software tools ends up needlessly complicating things.
ServiceTitan’s electrical business software is a comprehensive, cloud-based marketing software that integrates seamlessly with existing business systems to deliver holistic data and business insights. It creates messages built for mobile devices, since that’s the preferred viewing format for most customers, and gives you best-in-class tools to design professional promotional content you can automate—without an entire staff of marketing professionals.
ServiceTitan offers the leading all-in-one field management software for residential and commercial HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other service businesses. Improve your marketing, and overall business performance with powerful, fully integrated features that facilitate:
Dynamic Data Reporting
Mobile App for Technicians
If you want to learn more about how ServiceTitan can help your electrical business generate more revenue through marketing and advertising, you can schedule a call with a product expert for a free demo.
ServiceTitan Electrical Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive electrical business software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and achieve growth. Our award-winning, cloud-based platform is trusted by more than 100,000+ contractors across the country.
