You know your electrical contracting business inside and out, but is your electrician marketing strategy up to the task of growing your company’s net profits? Implementing an effective marketing strategy can seem overwhelming when you’re also managing tech scheduling, customer service, and many other critical processes, particularly if you run a small business.
ServiceTitan has helped thousands of electrician businesses grow using our service business software, which offers a range of tools to manage advertising and marketing, attract new business, and track the ROI of every campaign. Our all-in-one business management platform also helps businesses easily manage Google reviews, automate direct mail campaigns, and lower cost-per-lead with targeted email marketing.
In this article, we’ll give you 16 tips to help you optimize your electrical marketing and advertising strategy. Specifically, we’ll cover how to:
In addition to outlining how our electrical business software can help you achieve these strategies, we'll detail its additional tools that enable you to automate key business processes so that you can run your company in the most efficient way possible.
Want to discover how ServiceTitan can help your electrical contractor businesses with your marketing strategy and other essential business operations? Book a free, personalized demo.
1. Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Optimize your website for smartphones and tablets.
Put great reviews front and center.
Be where your customers are: on mobile devices.
To tackle the first objective in your electrical contracting business plan, make sure you have a solid online presence and that potential customers can find your mobile-friendly website quickly and easily from any smartphone or tablet.
Mobile-friendly means that, along with your main electrician website, you also need a version of your site that will easily display on a mobile device, such as smartphone or tablet, and give the users a more comfortable viewing experience. A good web developer can point you in the right direction to apply all the required features, including:
Responsive design: The site adapts to whichever screen size is being used.
Dynamic serving: Users see an adapted version of your site, depending on the type of device they use.
Mobile app development: Creating a mobile electrical app for your business is ideal.
The design of a mobile-friendly website should be less crowded than a website designed to be viewed on a PC, with smaller images, fewer blocks of text, etc.
Why is a mobile-friendly website so important? It’s how today’s connected customers find electrical business names online, read customer reviews, and reach out to electricians. Another reason to invest in this area is that mobile-friendly websites with good design rank higher in Google searches. Consumers searching for “electrician near me” want to find one quickly and often do so via their mobile device.
If your electrician website isn’t fast, secure, easy to navigate, and immediately accessible from the device consumers carry around all day, they’ll lose patience and move on to the next company that has a better website design.
2. Add Email Marketing to Your Electrician Marketing Strategy
Put the most relevant message in front of the right customers.
Segment your email audience based on relevant data.
Improve your customer relationship management to target appropriately.
Considered one of the most effective marketing channels today, targeted email marketing can earn your company, on average, $40 for every $1 spent.
The best electrical email marketing campaign gets your company’s name in front of the most customers with the most relevant message at the right time, according to Megan Bedford of Mugyver Consulting.
Why don’t more companies do automated email marketing? Bedford believes it’s because they think they can’t manage it themselves or find a cost-effective provider to do it for them. Mass emails with generic messages don’t typically resonate with customers and result in lower conversion rates.
Use ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro to Automate Your Email Campaigns
ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro allows you to segment your email audience by ZIP code, age of equipment, date of last service, new homeowner, and more. Using data already collected in ServiceTitan, you can target previous customers with a “We Miss You!” email campaign, follow up on unsold electrical estimates, or offer a discount to new homeowners.
Derek Baer, Director of Operations at Gold Shield Services in Illinois, loves the simplicity of ServiceTitan’s user interface.
“I'm a very simple person,” Baer says. “Simplistic usability makes for less errors and less time.
“With ServiceTitan, when a call comes in, it's literally on a dashboard. I can know whether the customer has called before, (and) where the marketing came from. It's all in one spot and not across multiple layers. I don't have to look for it.”
Target Your Email Audience
Companies in the trades no longer need to blast their entire contact list with an email and then cross their fingers for success. Highly effective email marketing relies on a specific target audience.
With ServiceTitan, you can send emails to customers based on unsold estimates, special offers, membership renewals, service area ZIP code, and more using ServiceTitan’s pre-built templates. When customers receive timely and relevant information they can use, they’re more likely to take action.
Automate Email Marketing with ServiceTitan
Ditch the time-consuming manual process of combing through customer data each time you want to send an email. Software like ServiceTitan automates your email campaigns so you can quickly send customized emails to your chosen target audience.
“The way our society is going and the way that we are running our businesses, we need to be automated,” says Sarah Ghirardo, senior marketing operations manager at ServiceTitan, in a ServiceTitan Toolbox for the Trades podcast. “We need to be more efficient because it hits the bottom line when we are not...The tools we are providing you with in Marketing Pro are about creating that automation and efficiency and having transparency in your numbers so you can learn.”
After you segment your audience, customer information automatically updates in real time so you can set up your campaigns and let ServiceTitan take care of the rest.
We also reduce the hassle and expense of designing email marketing campaigns with our range of email templates, as shown in the image above. Pick an appropriate email template, adjust the text for your specific campaign, and send it to your chosen mailing list.
With ServiceTitan, you also get tools to monitor the exact ROI of each email campaign within the ServiceTitan dashboard.
Read more email marketing tips for electricians.
3. Optimize Your Website for SEO
Recognize that 90% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses.
Think local when picking the best keywords.
Sprinkle variations of keywords throughout your website.
As you strategize electrical advertising ideas to improve your company’s search engine results, consider today’s busy homeowner. What do they do when they need an electrician? Ask a neighbor for a referral? Not so much these days.
They fire up an electronic device—whether it’s a phone, mobile tablet, desktop computer, or laptop—and search online for “electricians near me,” and preferably one with good reviews. According to this 2019 Local Consumer Review Survey, 90% of consumers used the internet to find a local business in the last year.
When a customer searches “electrician service” or “electrician near me” online, Google’s algorithm finds the most topically and geographically relevant web pages and displays them on its results page. Because they’re based on relevance, location, authority, and other factors—not just ad spend—smaller electrical businesses have the opportunity to be featured as prominently as larger companies in Google’s organic search results.
If you’re an electrical contractor in Boston, for instance, be sure to use “Boston electrical repair” as one of your main keyword phrases. Sprinkle variations of the keywords on your website’s landing pages, content blogs, headlines, subheads, meta tags, and meta descriptions to improve the SEO health of your website.
Of course, many potential customers who find you on Google, Nextdoor, Yelp, or elsewhere visit your website, so you need to make it look professional, easy to navigate, and optimized for Google organic search.
Learn more about SEO with this guide for contractor businesses.
4. Set, Manage, and Adjust Your Marketing Budget
Dedicate at least 10-15% of sales toward your marketing budget.
Discover where your marketing spend will be best utilized.
Build an online reputation.
For the best electrical business marketing plan, set a marketing budget with a certain percentage of your sales revenue committed to electrical advertising, either in traditional or digital media, or whatever combination works best to reach more customers.
Experts in the industry say electrical contractors need to dedicate at least10-15% of sales toward their marketing budget if they truly want to grow their business. A 5% marketing budget is considered a small “maintenance” budget that yields only minimal results.
Set your electrical marketing budget, then take a look at the marketing costs and where you need to spend those dollars to maximize electrician marketing profits. Options might include traditional advertising on TV, radio, newspapers, and billboards, or on printing and sending direct mail fliers.
Mastering digital electrical contractor marketing ideas—from targeted email campaigns and paid social media posts to Google Local Services ads and 5-star Google reviews—increases brand awareness for your electrical company and helps you build an online reputation.
Test a combination of traditional and digital for best results or focus on one before adding another. Once you set your electrical marketing budget, manage and adjust it regularly by tracking results for each campaign.
5. Focus on Lead Tracking and Reporting
Measure success with lead tracking and reporting.
Demand tracking details about every lead.
Accurately calculate cost and ROI.
To truly measure the success of your digital marketing strategy, advertising consultant Chris Yano advises electricians to focus on lead tracking and reporting for each electrical advertising campaign.
And if your marketing agency isn’t helping you track data, it’s doing you a disservice, according to Yano, the CEO of Ryno Strategic Solutions and co-host of the trade-focused “To the Point” podcast.
How do you know if you’re making good decisions when allocating your marketing dollars? Tracking and reporting give you full transparency and specific details about all of your leads so you can accurately calculate the cost and determine your ROI. Then you can adjust or reallocate, if necessary.
“You’ve got to know,” Yano says. “You have to know 100% where you stand.”
Monitor Your Marketing Spend with ServiceTitan
It’s extremely important to measure the ROI of every digital marketing and lead-generation strategy. Otherwise, you might be wasting a ton of money on advertising and marketing campaigns that don’t produce the results you need. ServiceTitan makes sure you have a system in place for tracking how many leads and customers you generate and from which sources.
You should also regularly analyze your website data to see which sources are resulting in the most leads. Use this information to focus your efforts on the strategies that are producing the best results.
ServiceTitan offers campaign tracking telephone numbers and real-time ROI reporting for all your marketing campaigns.
You can track the number of calls, how many jobs you booked from those calls, and the number of sales made from those jobs right in your ServiceTitan dashboard.
You can also calculate true ROI on electrical advertising campaigns by tracking how much revenue each advertising source generated and identifying total cost per lead.
By measuring the marketing ROI for each campaign, ServiceTitan helps electrical service businesses:
Know how much revenue each electrical marketing campaign generates.
Measure how well their staff converts leads into appointments and sales.
Invest electrical marketing dollars in the right places and in the right proportion.
Stop wasting money on ineffective ads and digital marketing platforms that don’t perform.
Whether you're focused on your SEO strategy, PPC ads, social media, email marketing, or any other type of marketing approach, your business can track what works and what doesn't so you can make informed decisions on the best strategies for getting more electrician leads.
Need a better reporting system? Check out ServiceTitan's electrician software.
6. Demand Transparency with Call-Tracking Software
Listen to every customer call.
Tie calls to specific marketing campaigns.
Adjust marketing spend and training.
If you want to know which electrical service calls convert to real job leads from actual customers, utilize call-tracking and booking software for full transparency and get recordings to reference when you need them.
But keep in mind that simply deploying the call tracking software and listening to every third call won’t give you a clear picture.
Yano says that every call needs to be listened to and classified appropriately. Separate new customers from repeat customers. Take referral leads out of the equation. Remove solicitations and missed calls. Filter requests for parts from calls tied to a direct mail campaign.
Ryno Strategic Solutions listens to and categorizes each call by tracking date, time, location of caller, CSR name, booking status, objections, a call transcript, and more. That level of detail identifies problems and training opportunities, leading to better solutions for business problems.
Call Tracking and Recording with ServiceTitan
ServiceTitan’s core call booking software lets you record every call your customer service reps (CSRs) take, for your future reference. This can help with identifying how well each CSR is performing in terms of closing sales, and because each recording is attached to the booked job it relates to, your techs can also access it in the field when they need to double check job details.
Our add-on service, Phones Pro, is cloud-based and fully integrated with ServiceTitan’s core offering. It is designed to improve your customer-facing team's performance even further, drive higher booking rates, grow revenue, and improve efficiency.
In the office or on the go, you can take your calls anywhere, and your electrical techs can listen to them before they arrive on site to check job details and more. Real-time call transcription and customer sentiment analysis can help you identify the customers who may need assistance, and future training opportunities for your CSRs.
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7. Verify and Promote Your Google My Business Page
Use Google My Business effectively.
Appear on Page 1 of organic Google search results.
Take simple steps to protect your brand.
Verifying your Google My Business page, formerly known as Google Local, is simple to do, and it’s free! Take your time to set up a quality business profile to attract new clients.
If your company operates multiple electrical businesses in a certain region, you can set up a Google My Business profile for each one, as long as you add different addresses and phone numbers for each.
With a well-optimized electrician website, good customer reviews and testimonials, and a verified Google My Business page, your electrical company can gain more leads by showing up on Page 1 of organic Google results when a customer in your area searches online for electrical services.
Companies can also buy Pay-Per-Click (PPC) digital ads for better electrical advertising visibility, as well as set up call tracking to measure ROI.
8. Tell Your Company’s Story in Videos or Blogs
Build authority with your target audience.
Target high-ranking search terms in your market with key text.
Regularly update your company’s website with authentic content.
Get to know your customers by letting them get to know you. Frequently posting blogs or videos about your company helps to build authority with your target audience, improves your search engine ranking, and increases organic traffic for your brand. It’s the best kind of electrical advertising and is relatively inexpensive compared to other marketing tactics.
Use blogs and videos that offer helpful information and tips to target high-ranking keywords in your market, such as “best electrician in Atlanta” or “why outlets don’t work”. Include keywords in the headline, captions, subheads, and throughout the content, as well as photo alt text and metadata fields. Be sure to share that content in your electrician social media marketing to drive more traffic to your website.
Regularly updated websites rank higher on Google and other search engines, and posting content with high-ranking keywords gives you a cost-effective way to improve your website’s SEO. Just make sure the content is authentic, and not simply overstuffed with keywords.
Read more about how to get electrical leads.
9. Make Your Brand Sticky and Disruptive
Do customers remember your company’s name or logo?
How can you make your brand unique, so it doesn’t get lost in the crowd?
Do customers feel at ease and find your company trustworthy?
According to Dan Antonelli—President and Creative Director of KickCharge Creative—branding can make or break a small electrical business, and in times of economic uncertainty, it’s imperative to set your brand apart from the herd.
Start with creative electrical contractor name ideas and electrical logo ideas that tend to stick in the minds of potential customers so they remember you the next time they need an electrician.
How customers perceive your company also extends to your electrician advertising campaigns, signs on your trucks, and the uniforms your employees wear. According to Antonelli, you should always strive to make your brand sticky and disruptive.
“As contractors, we're trying to counter the fact that a lot of homeowners are scared about who's coming to their home, right?” Antonelli asks. “They want to figure out, who can I trust to be inside my home and fixing something of mine?”
Be disruptive by standing out from the crowd. Your brand should be unique, something that doesn’t blend in.
A good brand, Antonelli says, does the following to attract customers:
Puts customers at ease.
Diffuses negative stereotypes or biases.
Aims to make people feel confident in their choice and reaffirms the company values.
Matches the company deliverables.
Takes control of the conversation and sets the tone to show customers why they should choose to do business with you.
Whether you’re leveraging the longevity of your brand, your trustworthiness, or catchy electrical business names, just make sure your foundational branding stands strong.
10. Ask Customers for Google Reviews
Develop a better strategy for securing positive reviews.
Customize your message to make the request personal.
Make leaving a 5-star Google review easy for customers.
A commonly neglected way to improve your electrician marketing efforts and get more leads is to make efforts to manage your online reviews. Before making an appointment with an electrical company, most prospective customers search for trusted nearby electrician services with amazing online reviews and actively avoid companies with negative reviews or low star ratings.
Real customers who leave positive reviews help build trust in your business.
According to the 2019 Local Consumer Review Survey, the average consumer reads 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a business. In fact, 89% of 35-54-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
How ProSkill Services Uses ServiceTitan’s Automated Messaging to Collect Google Reviews
“With more consumers shopping online today than ever before, your company’s electrical marketing solutions better include a strategy for managing online reviews. Your online reputation depends on it”, says Travis Ringe.
Ringe co-owns ProSkill Services, a full-service air conditioning, electrical, plumbing, water heater, and water treatment home services company in Arizona. It’s a $14 million operation with more than 3,000 5-star Google reviews.
Following a marketing strategy to get more 5-star Google reviews, Ringe uses ServiceTitan’s built-in survey tool to customize a personal message and ask customers specifically to leave a Google review. Our all-in-one marketing solution automates the process for better results.
“If you want to drive reviews,” Ringe says, “you have to deliver a full experience worthy of writing a review.” Additionally, you need to make it easy for customers to leave a review. Ringe says, “We get between five and 15 Google reviews per day, on average.”
To help manage your online reviews, ServiceTitan includes a built-in notification tool as part of our customer experience software, 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 they can still recall the service that was provided.
We also have a reputation management tool that lets you automate sending review requests to customers (so you can get more reviews from more 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 see which of your employees is producing the most positive or negative reviews.
Learn more about how to ask customers for reviews and improve your online rankings.
11. Master Local SEO by Geo-Targeting the Right Audience
Learn as much as you can about your service area.
Join local groups on platforms such as Nextdoor and Alignable.
Build awareness and trust for your business brand.
Remember how we discussed optimizing electrical websites above? The same marketing tips apply to mastering local SEO and identifying the right local audience for your company. It’s how you get in front of those local customers searching online for “best electricians near me.”
Do you know how many people own homes in your service area? Do you know the age of those homes? Do you know your customers’ age, gender, average household income, and credit score? Do you know what specific electrical service keywords they search for most often in your locale?
Learn as much as you can about your customers before starting any electrician marketing campaign. Join local groups on platforms such as Nextdoor and Alignable to help build referral traffic, distribute an electrician advertisement in local neighborhoods, or post funny videos to local Facebook groups to engage new customers.
The more your company appears in front of the right audience with the right message, the more awareness and trust you build in your brand.
Learn more about local SEO and other strategies.
12. Invest in Google Local Services Ads
Google Local Services paid search ads are shown at the top of search results.
Craft a snapshot of your business to sell your services.
Pay only when customers contact you through the ad.
While a well-optimized website can produce organic Google search results, buying Google Local Services digital ads makes it more likely your company will appear at the top of Google search results, above organic listings. 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 of work you do rather than optimizing for keywords that prompt your ads to show up when a potential customer searches for them.
Local customers looking to hire an electrician can view a quick snapshot of your business—such as your electrical company name, your electrician website, Google review rating, and years in business—to determine whether your services fit their needs.
Costs for Google Local Services ads vary, but you only pay when a customer contacts your business through your digital ads. This cuts down on useless job leads from customers simply price-shopping for electrical services online.
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 business hours.
Google Local Service ads allow you to advertise your electrical services on Google and receive electrical job leads directly from potential customers. When a homeowner searches “Indoor Air Quality Charlotte,” your Local Services ad appears at the top of the Google Search results.
Ensure your electrical company operates from a physical building in the specific area where you’re advertising your services—not just a P.O. Box address. Otherwise, Google may penalize your company by removing your name from their local electrical list.
“Just understand, Google is God when it comes to home service,” says Tommy Mello, The Home Service Expert and owner of A1 Garage Door Services, a $30 million-plus home services business, explaining how consumers find 70% of all services online through Google searches.
“Half of your marketing dollars should be spent on SEO (search engine optimization), PPC, Google My Business, getting reviews, and Google Local Services,” he adds.
Apartnership between ServiceTitan and Google makes jump-starting your electrical advertising success easier with Google’s Local Services Ads.
Learn more about Google Local Services.
13. Leverage Direct Mail Marketing
Make creative direct mail part of your brand strategy.
Catch customers’ attention with catchy slogans and incentives.
Make your direct mail look professional with the help of a marketing agency.
Leverage the power of direct mail marketing to customers by combining it with smart electrician social media posts and other advertising for electricians. Find the combination of marketing electrical tactics that work best for you.
Some of the best advertising for contractors comes from giving back to the community. This might include offering a free electrical repair for a neighbor in need or donating funds to support a local Little League team. While charitable, these efforts also promote brand awareness and trust.
Creative direct mail marketing can also capture customers’ attention with catchy electrical logo ideas, unusual electrical company names, and interesting electrical advertising. Including an incentive or coupon to inspire action never hurts either.
Manage Direct Mail Campaigns with ServiceTitan
ServiceTitan helps electrical businesses manage their direct mail. With ServiceTitan, you can quickly create an eye-catching postcard for your business by choosing from hundreds of predesigned templates, customizing them with your own text. Each campaign you design through ServiceTitan costs a flat rate per postcard, so you know exactly how much you’ll be spending, whether you send thousands of postcards or just a few.
Similarly to our email marketing tool, ServiceTitan can track the revenue generated by each of your campaigns so you can identify which is the most successful approach (as shown above).
14. Use an App-Based Lead-Generation Service
Generate electrician leads through Yelp, Angi Leads, Thumbtack, and other directories.
Be careful with costs; make sure leads prove useful and cost-effective.
Do research to find which platforms perform most effectively in your market.
App-based services, such as Yelp, Angi Leads (formerly HomeAdvisor), Thumbtack, and other online directories, create other avenues to generate electrician leads. The jury is still out, however, on how effective these lead-buying services really are for growing your business.
Some contractors say lead-generation services pay dividends, while others struggle to see their value when they find themselves, more often than not, paying for useless leads that never turn into real jobs.
With more than 90% of consumers using the internet to find a local business, listing your company on heavy-hitter websites like Yelp or Angi Leads can help your electrical company rise to the top of organic Google searches.
Just be sure to read the fine print before signing up to know whether you’ll gain value from investing. Do some research to find out which platforms perform best in your market.
Learn more about how sites like HomeAdvisor (Now Angi Leads) work.
15. Measure Results for Your Marketing Strategies
Tie all new customers to the marketing campaign they used to find you.
Use call-tracking software that helps you figure cost per lead and ROI by source.
Review and adjust strategy regularly.
No matter which electrician marketing tools or combination of tools your company deploys, what matters most is measuring the results and adjusting accordingly.
Create a marketing scorecard of all current campaigns, then tie all new customers to the specific marketing campaign by which they found you to see what’s working or not working. Boost spending on campaigns with higher returns and drop channels with poor performance.
If your company uses call-tracking software such as ServiceTitan Phones Pro, you can easily track the number of calls, booked appointments, sales, revenue, cost per lead, and ROI for each electrical advertising source.
As we explained above, ServiceTitan Marketing Pro also makes sending targeted email campaigns a breeze and allows users to track real ROI by measuring email performance and revenue attribution.
Ready to market like a pro? Click here to learn more.
16. Implement the Best Fully Integrated Electrical Services Software
The best commercial and home service business software can automate most of the tasks we've discussed here. At ServiceTitan, we provide electrical contractor businesses of any size (and others in the home service industry) with a wide variety of automated pro tools that easily improve their efficiency and lower their operating costs.
For instance, you can track the number of calls, how many jobs your CSRs booked from those calls, and sales made from those jobs right in your ServiceTitan dashboard.
Calculate true ROI on electrical advertising campaigns by tracking how much revenue each advertising source generated, along with the total cost per lead.
By measuring the marketing ROI for each campaign, ServiceTitan can help your electrical company:
Know how much revenue each electrician marketing campaign generates.
Measure how well your staff converts leads into appointments and real sales.
Invest your electrician marketing budget in the right types of campaign.
Reduce wasted marketing spend on ineffective ads and digital marketing channels that don’t perform.
But ServiceTitan doesn’t stop at helping you with a marketing strategy. It’s a full-service electrician software that also gives you features to help you manage your entire business. These features include:
Tools for pricebook management
Estimate and proposal templates and builders
And more
All of these tools are fully integrated with and communicate with each other so you never have to spend time transferring information, making for a seamless workflow across your business.
Find out more about how ServiceTitan can help you implement your electrician marketing strategy, as well as help you run your entire business by booking a free, personalized 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.
