Social Media for Septic Services Businesses: Definitive Guide

How Can Septic Services Businesses Leverage Social Media?

Septic services companies have multiple content formats and types to choose from for building a strong social media presence. They belong to two major groups.

Organic social media 

Organic social media comprises all free social media content. This is useful for building trust, online visibility, and authority, which can translate into sales.

It involves infographics, videos, images, and textual content relevant to the needs of your ideal customer profile.

Organic social media costs almost nothing. You only spend a little time to hiring marketing agencies if you don’t have the time to dedicate to the channel. Additionally, you can access valuable performance insights by paying for social media content creation tools.

Paid social media advertising

This is the direct opposite of organic social media. It involves paying social media platforms to promote your content to an audience that fits preset demographic, geographic, and psychographic criteria. This allows you to reach a broader audience outside the people following your social media handle.

Furthermore, paid advertising lets you target high-intent prospects who fit your ideal customer profile. This makes insights produced very valuable for running other types of PPC campaigns, such as search ads.

Talking about search ads, ServiceTitan created the Home Services Marketing platform to help septic services companies manage, track, and measure pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign performance.

The platform fully integrates with Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts so that users can track their campaign’s exact revenue performance.

ServiceTitan’s Home Services Marketing platform also analyzes each campaign's revenue performance and displays it using intuitive full-funnel digital ads dashboards. You can use this data to identify wasted ad spend and run campaigns that grow your company’s revenue.

Before we explore how to approach social media, let's explain how you stand to benefit.

How Does Social Media Benefit Septic Services Businesses?

Why do you still need to build a presence on social media? Isn't it enough to deliver great work and rely on more traditional channels, which do not require significant effort like social media?

Staying off social media means conceding defeat in the battle for potential clients’ minds, since most people in the United States use social media. Competitors active on social media will build trust with potential customers, making them the first they contact when their septic tanks burst open.

Even better, you stand to gain a lot from a strong social media presence:

• It entrenches your brand in customers’ minds: Growing an active social media presence ensures customers recall your brand. This way, you become the first person they contact to resolve septic tank emergencies.

• It builds brand loyalty: You can use social media to connect with customers and portray your brand’s personality. In the long run, this connection can convert followers into loyal brand advocates, resulting in organic referrals.

• It grants access to valuable insights: Social media analytics and listening tools produce valuable competitor and customer insights to inform successful business strategies.

• It boosts customer satisfaction: Social media is the ideal platform to interact directly with your target market and address complaints. This builds customer satisfaction and portrays your brand in a positive light.

• It’s a cost-effective lead generation channel: Unlike traditional channels, you can start social media marketing with little or no budget. It’s still comparatively cheaper than other channels, even when you factor in the costs of hiring an agency, a social media specialist, and buying social media listening tools.

Now that you understand why you should invest in social media marketing, let’s explore how to start your own immediately.

How to Start Marketing Your Septic Services Business on Social Media

Here’s a step-by-step process for building your social media presence.

Let’s explore these steps in more detail:

1. Define your audience

It’s no coincidence that defining your audience is the first step.

Every social media strategy lacking a foundational understanding of the target audience crumbles. That’s because the content will miss the mark with the target audience, who will not engage with it.

When defining your audience, avoid making blind assumptions. Base your decision on hard data, which you can access using the following media:

• Customer surveys

• Analyzing the audience makeup of competitor social media handles

• Consulting your website’s analytics data

• The type of septic services you offer

Use the insights you gain from audience analysis to build a detailed persona. This document will inform your posts’ tone, content formats, posting cadence, and overall social media marketing strategy.

Another key pillar to a successful social media strategy is picking the right platforms.

2. Select the right platforms

The right social media platform gets you in front of your target audience, helping you achieve business goals. For example, commercial septic services businesses may benefit from LinkedIn, a B2B-focused social platform. However, residential septic service companies can reach homeowners on TikTok and Instagram.

To decide which platform is best for your company, check their demographic and engagement data. Then, pick one whose user makeup aligns with the audience persona you created in the first step.

Also, spy on your direct competitors and businesses in adjacent industries. Identify the platforms they are using to engage their audience.

3. Analyze your competitors

Rather than starting from scratch, analyze the social media profiles of direct and adjacent competitors (e.g., plumbers and portable toilet rental companies) with a strong online presence. This will help you make fewer mistakes and quickly build a strong social media presence.

To find competitors, search social media and search engines using keywords customers will use to find your business. Focus on the high-performing social media handles to reduce the list. Then, identify their preferred content formats, posting cadence, voice, persona, and tone.

Before implementing any strategy, ensure the company’s specifics—revenue and size—are identical or similar to yours.

4. Generate content ideas

The next step is to generate content ideas using the results of your audience and competitor research. The list should include topics targeting prospects and customers in different marketing funnel stages.

Here are some ways you can generate social media content ideas for your septic services business:

• Answer questions your clients have: Create post ideas around common customer questions. To find the questions, check customer support tickets, reviews on competitors’ business listings, and customers’ social media comments.

• Check your competitors: Take a cue from competitors’ social media posts. Use them only as a source of inspiration to create posts that reflect your unique brand identity and perspective. 

• Ask AI: Input a prompt like “generate X social media content ideas for a septic services company with Y voice.” Before using the result, personalize it to your company. Tweak it to match your brand tone and back up claims with real facts.

• Ask your CSRs: Meet with your CSRs to identify the common questions clients ask and the issues they raise.

5. Create your content calendar

A content calendar is simply a graphical representation of your different content ideas, the days they will be shared, and the people responsible for posting them.

Creating a content calendar helps you maintain a consistent posting cadence and track all the content you’ve shared.

A simple spreadsheet can serve as a content calendar. However, if you prefer something more graphical, use a content calendar template online or from a design platform.

6. Track results

Like every digital marketing strategy, you must consistently measure your social media marketing efforts. This helps you gauge your campaign’s success, adapt quickly to evolving social media algorithms, and stay in tune with user behavior. 

Additionally, tracking social media performance data ensures you consistently create social media posts that resonate with your target audience and align with business objectives.

To measure your social media marketing results, poll your followers about the impact of your posts. Also, performance metrics should be consistently reviewed using social media management tools.

Here are some key metrics to track:

• Reach: Indicates the number of unique viewers your post received. 

• Impressions: Measures the number of times your posts appear on followers’ feeds.

• Engagement: Indicates the number of shares, likes, and mentions that your account receives. 

• Conversions: This shows the number of people who take a specific action, like booking a job or visiting your website, after interacting with your posts.

• Follower increase: The number of new followers your account gains over a specific period.

• Sentiment: Indicates social media users’ perception of your brand. You can track it by monitoring business-relevant keywords, comments, and inboxes.

Social Media Post Ideas for Septic Services Businesses

One good thing about social media marketing is that it offers multiple post formats and content options. You can post daily without ever becoming monotonous or boring users.

Here’s a rundown of the multiple social post types available.

Let’s dive deeper into each one:

1. Informational content

This visual or textual content teaches users something related to the septic industry, like how to tell when a septic tank is due for maintenance. It builds trust with your audience and demonstrates septic industry authority.

Informational content can also support your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts by driving website traffic, boosting search rankings, and generating leads.

Some examples of informational content include tips, educational content, and tutorials for handling septic tank issues.

2. Case studies

Case studies effectively showcase your work, demonstrate how you helped a customer, and prove you can successfully execute septic tank projects.

For example, you can highlight how you helped a customer avoid costly repairs by spotting an issue early during an inspection. This will encourage your followers to contact you to prevent similar issues.

A well-written social media case study will have the following sections:

• A short hook that introduces the problem and the customer. It could be something like, “X reported frequent backups that had gone on for two months.”

• An explanation of why the customer picked your company. Was it because of multiple positive reviews? Were they referred by a friend?

• A description of how your company tackled the issue. It explains the process of identifying the cause and designing a strategic approach to resolve it.

• A happy ending—detailing the results you achieved, with supporting images and quotes from the satisfied customer.

• Finally, a short call to action that encourages readers to take action—book an appointment, take advantage of an offer, call your office, etc.

3. Testimonials

Testimonials and case studies are similar, as they highlight your company's success in resolving a customer's issue. However, while case studies offer a detailed narration of a septic tank project, testimonials focus on the customer's thoughts or positive interaction with your company. 

This means testimonials are short endorsements of your company, narrated in the words of a satisfied customer.

When sharing testimonials on social media, ensure they’re short and engaging. Consider accompanying them with image quotes or videos to capture the attention of scrollers.

Finally, seek customers’ permission before sharing testimonials and tailor the format to your audience and platform.

4. Behind the scenes

Behind-the-scenes content gives your audience a peek behind the curtain to see the process involved in executing septic tank projects and the people running the company. This portrays the human aspect of your brand, making it easier for readers to connect with your company.

Below is a great example of a behind-the-scenes video from A-1 Septic Systems.

https://www.tiktok.com/@a1septicsystems/video/7299168645828119850

This video highlights the process of installing a septic tank for a customer. Other types of behind-the-scenes content you can explore include the following:

• A glimpse into your company’s working space.

• Q and A sessions where an employee answers common customer questions while on the job.

• Meet-the-team videos featuring employees talking about their life outside work.

5. Giveaways & contests

Giveaways and contests are an excellent way to generate social media engagement. It involves incentivizing followers with rewards such as discounts and gift cards to partake in a task.

For example, you can run a contest where users share common myths about septic tanks and award a discount to the posts with the most engagement.

Before running a giveaway or contest, ensure the reward is enticing enough to convince your target audience to participate. Also, the ground rules and criteria for picking the winner should be laid down to ensure transparency. 

6. Business news

Sharing business news shows you’re in touch with recent septic industry trends and developments. This shows you know the techniques and technologies required to deliver quality service.

Beyond the basic textual format, you can share business news by livestreaming with industry experts or turning industry news recaps into infographics.

7. Before-and-after content

This type of content is a powerful tool for convincing prospects you can handle their project, as it paints a vivid picture of how you tackled something similar for another client. This demonstrates expertise and inspires confidence in your ability to deliver quality services.

When creating before-and-after content, use high-resolution images and videos to showcase the transformation. You can also combine the visuals with a caption or audio narration to provide more details about the project.

Pro tip: Include your company's logo to promote your brand even when the video is shared outside social media.

Before moving to the next section, we advise you to post more educational and entertaining content than promotional or ‘salesy’ content. People use social media primarily to interact with others, and 56 percent of customers believe brands should be relatable on social media, not salesy.

Social media marketing experts we’ve interacted with share the same sentiment.

“Sell to people on everything else, but make social media fun and engaging,” says Crystal Williams, founder of Lemon Seed Marketing.

For example, Vanessa Gonzales, owner and co-founder of Albuquerque Plumbing, Heating & Cooling, says she tries to keep her company’s social media handles “social.”

“We like to use social media to brag on our team,” she says. “We celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and other milestones. We’ll post our team member of the month. We keep it social. That’s what social media is.”

Furthermore, Hanna, a growth marketer at Niceboard, advises business owners to approach social media marketing with a customer-centric mindset.

“Create 80 percent of your content around your prospect's problems and how to solve them,” says Hanna. “Only 20 percent max. should be about the business (news, announcements, milestones). You want to make the profile valuable and informative to your audience instead of discussing your business.”

Septic Services Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Septic services companies employ the following strategies to run successful social media campaigns.

1. Encourage reviews

The application of social media goes beyond sharing content. It’s also a powerful tool for greeting customer feedback and positively influencing your brand’s perception.

For starters, if you're using Facebook, activate your page’s review feature to allow customers to leave reviews. Prospects can read such reviews and see the star rating Facebook automatically assigns based on the reviews' general sentiment.

Other strategies to encourage reviews on social media include the following:

• Respond to all reviews to show you value customer feedback and encourage others to leave reviews.

• Use an analytics tool—a third-party tool or your platform’s built-in version—to find your most engaged followers and send them a review request.

• Use social media posts to amplify high-quality reviews and prompt others to leave one.

• If you serve businesses, promise to promote their company if they leave a review.

In addition to social media reviews, it’s advisable to claim business listings and fill them up with customer feedback to improve your search ranking and online reputation.

To be fair, we know how difficult it can be to manage reviews from multiple platforms. You must keep switching between multiple windows and checking your profiles intermittently. This can lead to missed opportunities to appease frustrated customers and appreciate commendations.

That’s why we created the Reputation Management platform to automate and streamline the entire review management and request process.

The platform allows you to create review-request workflows that automatically send review-request messages to customers once an on-site technician clicks “complete” on their mobile device. You can include the link to your listing profile and personalize the message to the specific customer or job to increase the odds of the customer responding to your request.

Even better, ServiceTitan's Reputation Management platform consolidates reviews from multiple listings into a central hub and notifies you when a customer leaves a review. You can respond directly from the hub and send reviews with extremely low star ratings to your CSRs for further attention. 

This ensures you attend to every customer complaint and respond quickly to reviews, helping you maintain a positive reputation that attracts customers.

2. Use relevant hashtags

Hashtags boost your content’s visibility and ensure social media algorithms group it with others of a similar topic. This makes your post appear whenever social media users search with that specific keyword or topic.

To find relevant hashtags, go through the posts of your top-performing competitors. You can also discover hashtags using hashtag generators or a social media platform’s search engine.

Keep your hashtags short for maximum impact and recallability. Additionally, the number of hashtags you use for a post should not exceed five so your posts won’t look unappealing.

3. Respond to comments

Aside from sharing content, responding to comments is crucial for growing a solid social media presence. 

Firstly, it helps customers recall your company, as more than half say the most memorable brands respond to comments. Secondly, it increases your profile's visibility as social media algorithms prioritize engagement rate when choosing content to serve users.

Here are some things to keep in mind when responding to comments: 

• Respond to all comments, even the negative ones.

• Begin by thanking your customer for the review. If it's negative, thank them for commenting and promise you're working on resolving their complaint.

• Give in-depth responses to customer questions to demonstrate your expertise and build trust.

• Respond to every comment within 24–48 hours. It can be as simple as “Thank you for your comment. We’ll reach out to you soon.”

4. Test different content types

Experiment with different content formats to keep your audience engaged and discover what resonates best with them. For example, try interactive polls, infographics, Q&As, gifs, etc.

Most importantly, prioritize video content as it has the largest reach and captures the attention of social media users who usually don’t have the time to read text content.

“Investing in this format [15-30 second videos] has been exceptionally effective for our business,” says Farhan Siraj, co-founder and CEO of OSHA Outreach Courses.

“After one of our videos garnered over 10,000 views on YouTube, we experienced a significant influx of website visitors. More than 50 of these visitors converted, which was a pleasant surprise to us, considering we never thought of short videos as a source of conversions.”

5. Use the data

With social media marketing, there’s a tendency to become overwhelmed by several questions.

Which types of content perform best? What’s the best day and time to post? Which post formats generate the most septic services leads or clients?

When in doubt, leverage data from the platform’s analytics dashboards or invest in social media analytics software to access more advanced performance metrics.

Recommended read: Discover ways to track marketing performance using ServiceTitan.

6. Distribute to other channels when possible

The best way to reach customers is to adopt an omnichannel marketing approach—promoting your services to customers using multiple channels. One way to practice omnichannel marketing is to repurpose and distribute social media posts.

For example, you can expand a social media post on “septic tank inspection” into a detailed blog post optimized to rank on search engines. You could also compress an article on “tips for picking a septic services company” into a social media post.

Here are key tips to remember when distributing and repurposing your content:

• Adapt your content to the channel’s or social media platform’s nuances. This might involve varying the content length, changing the format, and tailoring the tone to resonate with the platform’s demographics.

• Retain your brand voice and tone to ensure brand consistency.

• Track your repurposed asset’s performance to refine your approach for future content.

Email marketing is a powerful channel for distributing your social media content. It can help you build a strong community with subscribers and urge them to engage with you on other platforms. You can share reel snippets, expand content shared on social media, and direct people to your social media handle.

For a more seamless social media content distribution process, consider using ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro – Email platform.

The platform allows you to segment your audience and send them personalized content based on their interests and needs. For example, you can distribute social media content promoting a service contract discount to only new customers, boosting open rates and generating conversions.

You can also consistently measure your campaign’s performance using intuitive email analytics dashboards that display the revenue each email generates. This allows you to optimize your campaigns for revenue and reallocate your budgets appropriately.

7. Be consistent with your content

Social media is about consistency. Posting once a week or sporadically without planning won't do much. After all, building and entrenching a brand in prospects’ minds only happens by constantly repeating your marketing message.

Furthermore, social media algorithms reward consistency with more reach. This means more followers, more impressions, and more brand awareness.

Consistency doesn’t necessarily mean posting daily. It means establishing a consistent posting schedule that your resources can sustain and that aligns with your target audience’s social media content consumption habits. This could be once or twice a week.

How can you remain consistent?

Diana Zheng, head of marketing at Stallion Express, shares the following tips for companies to stay consistent:

• Create a content calendar and follow it consistently.

• Leverage user-generated content to have something to post each day.

• Use multiple content types—visual, video, and interactive formats.

Recommended read: Learn how to use ServiceTitan to maximize efficiency to generate more job bookings during summer.

How Can You Choose the Best Septic Services Social Media Services?

If you lack the time to handle your social media campaign independently, you can hire a marketing agency or specialist. 

Because there are many social media agencies and specialists, we have created this list to help you pick the best one.

• Ask to see work samples: Request samples of campaigns they’ve managed for other companies, preferably those in the home services industry. Focus on the results and the strategy they used to achieve them.

• Ask for case studies: Any social media company you’re considering should submit case studies of previous successful social media campaigns.

• Ask if the agency has experience in the septic services industry: Ideally, pick a company that has worked with septic services companies. They will understand the best content formats to use, platforms to prioritize, and your target audience’s needs.

• Read online reviews: Check their online platforms, focusing on customer reviews.

The Bottom Line

Building a social media presence has many immediate and long-term benefits, both in terms of brand awareness and revenue. All you need to do is be on the platforms your target audience frequents and tailor your content to them.

Remember to combine your social media efforts with other marketing channels, such as local SEO strategy, PPC advertising, and email marketing. ServiceTitan will help you manage and track your campaigns on these different channels from one central place, instead of investing in multiple platforms.

ServiceTitan's all-in-one septic services software helps companies automate operations, streamline marketing efforts, and achieve growth. Our award-winning, cloud-based platform is trusted by more than 100,000+ contractors across the country.