To accelerate sales next year, contractors in the trades need a well-defined marketing strategy that aligns with their company’s goals. Start the goal-setting process by considering questions like:
Are you planning to expand into new service areas or add a new service line to your business?
Is it a struggle to forecast your marketing budget due to rising materials costs?
Are you making foundational changes to your company’s operations?
Those questions guide strategy, whether your home service company works with an agency or handles marketing in-house. The following guide uncovers full-service digital marketing agency Blue Corona’s secrets to success when helping home service clients create achievable plans that yield winning results. By following a three-step process—defining goals, planning strategy, and measuring for success—Blue Corona, a ServiceTitan Certified Provider, generates an average 56% year-over-year increase in qualified leads for ServiceTitan customers.
“To put it simply, ServiceTitan + Blue Corona equals better results,” Brandon Doyle, Director of Marketing at Blue Corona, said in a recent ServiceTitan webinar.
Ready to define your game plan for 2023 and beyond? Read on for the highlights.
» Want to grow your business? Click here to get a demo.
1. Define your goal
When it comes to defining your goal, consider the following:
What is your revenue/growth goal for next year?
“If your growth goal is 5%, then your marketing strategy is going to look a lot different than if it was 35% growth year-over-year,” says Blue Corona Account Manager Allie Chambers. “If you have really aggressive goals, then you also need to have a really aggressive marketing strategy.”
What changes in the industry do you need to prepare for?
Sometimes these can’t be predicted, but supply chain issues and price increases continue to affect the industry. Consider how to get ahead of external factors that could affect your marketing strategy and business.
“There are always going to be unforeseen circumstances, so give your budget some flexibility,” Doyle says.
Are you expanding into any new service areas?
“Whether you’re just expanding your current service area or you want to expand into a new service area, it's important to think about how that's going to drive your marketing strategy,” Chamber says.
For example, if you plan to expand to an entirely new market, you should budget for brand awareness campaigns, like Google Display or Nextdoor ads. If you’re adding another location within your same market, you may just want to increase your PPC search budget to accommodate the growth.
Are you expanding into any new service lines?
If you plan to add new service lines, you might start with an email marketing campaign to let existing customers know you offer a new service.
“There are a lot of ways to cross-promote across different service lines, so you need to think about those as you’re planning your overall strategy for next year,” Chambers says.
Do you have other operation goals?
Lastly, consider any operational goals or changes you plan to make in 2023.
“I've worked with clients in the past who say, ‘Hey, we really want to focus on increasing our conversion rates or our ticket size,’” Chambers says. “Consider those process-based internal operational changes that could also impact your marketing."
Once you set your revenue target, download Blue Corona’s free lead goal calculator to determine the lead volume needed to achieve that goal.
Within the tool, input your revenue goal, percent of revenue expected from digital, and average revenue per ticket to receive a calculation of how many closed sales are needed. By inputting your appointment-to-sale conversion rate, the tool generates how many appointments are needed. Then, with your lead-to-appointment conversion rate, you receive your estimated lead goal.
“It helps understand, ‘OK, if this is my revenue goal, how can I work backwards and get to that lead goal for next year?’” Chambers says.
Wondering where you can find the metrics needed for this calculator? They exist right in your ServiceTitan dashboard.
2. Plan your strategy
Discovering your qualified lead goal helps you strategize. Compare where you are currently with next year’s goal. For example, if you are projecting to end the year with 2,500 leads, and don’t make any changes to your marketing strategy for 2023, you can expect to receive roughly the same amount.
If your lead goal for 2023 is higher, you need to adjust accordingly.
Image | Webinar Recap | Blue Corona 2“We need to close that gap by either adding new marketing strategies, increasing budgets, or tweaking things,” Chambers says.
To plan strategies for clients, Blue Corona uses a framework they call the Bullseye, which is a twist on the traditional marketing funnel.
Image | Webinar Recap | Blue Corona 3The Bullseye includes four rings, and you want to focus from the inside out:
Capturing leads
The innermost ring includes your low-hanging fruit.
“These are people who are going online and Googling AC repair, because they know they have a need,” Chambers says. “This is top priority, because these are the people most likely to convert.”
Strategies for this ring include SEO, Local Service Ads, Yelp advertising, and PPC (pay-per-click) search ads.
Nurturing leads
The next ring is for nurturing leads—people who are aware they have a problem and are ready to convert, but need a gentle nudge or a little more information first.
Effective strategies for nurturing leads include email marketing and retargeting.
“Email marketing is great, because a lot of times it's people who have already engaged with your business in some way,” Chambers says. “Maybe they submitted a web form on your website or submitted their information through the ServiceTitan widget, and then kind of fell through the cracks. They're a great warm lead for you to go after with email marketing.”
Remarketing provides another great lead-nurture strategy, because it allows you to target potential customers who visit your website.
Creating demand
Effective tactics for creating demand or urgency include OTT (over-the-top) advertising (the commercials you see on streaming websites) or social media ads across Facebook, Instagram, and Nextdoor.
“These are people who might have an HVAC system that's 10 years old,” Chambers says. “They know it's on its last leg, but they're hoping to get one more year out of it. If they see a really great offer on Nextdoor or Facebook, that could be enough to create urgency.”
Growing awareness
Someone may not be currently in the market for home services, but if they’re a homeowner, they will be in the market eventually. The key is staying top-of-mind for when that need arises. Strategies like PPC Display and YouTube ads help create brand awareness.
“Exposure is always on,” Doyle says. “Every opportunity where a potential customer engages with your brand—whether it’s a truck driving by, a billboard, a YouTube ad—is exposure. But if you need leads, make sure you're maximizing within those lead-capture strategies before spending more money outward (outer rings).”
The #1 newsletter for the trades.
Budgeting
When planning your marketing campaigns across the Bullseye, decide what percentage of your revenue will go toward marketing. The average is 10%, but budget higher for more aggressive goals.
In addition to what you plan to spend, create a marketing calendar to decide when you plan to spend it. For example, if you run a fall HVAC special, you’ll want to reserve a budget to promote it.
Factor in the seasonality of your trade. An HVAC company might have plenty of demand in the winter and summer months.
“So in those cases, focus most of the budget toward lead-capture strategies, because there are plenty of people in that category ready to convert,” Chambers says. “Fast forward to a time when you're not going to see that same search demand, and you’d shift budget and strategy to focus more on creating demand.
“For electrical or plumbing, you're not going to see the same kind of volatile seasonality you might see in the HVAC industry,” Chambers adds. “But there are still search trends you can look at based on your industry or when certain services are in more high demand than others that can really help dictate your budgets on a month-to-month basis.”
Lastly, estimate your maximum opportunity for paid campaigns based on historical data and trend projections.
For help creating your budget, download Blue Corona’s free budget template. Broken out into sections for the different rings of the Bullseye, it helps organize and allocate spend for the upcoming year.
3. Measure for Success
To measure for success, Blue Corona follows a mantra of “Track, Test, Tweak, Repeat.”
“Measuring for success helps you stay within the lanes you're driving in and keeps you focused on your goals both in the next 12 months and beyond,” Doyle says.
Tracking campaigns allows you to see what’s coming and adjust your strategy accordingly.
“If you’re not tracking your marketing investments, whether with a digital marketing agency or ServiceTitan Marketing Pro, it's like driving down the road at 70 miles an hour on the highway, and all of a sudden a deer runs out in front of you and you're blindsided,” Doyle says.
“Traveling down the road at 70 miles an hour as you're trying to hit $25-$30 million in revenue—you’ve got a lot of marketing budget at stake,” Doyle adds. “You want to know what's working and what's not, and that's where the testing, tweaking, and repeat comes in.”
As an example, you could compare two different sets of ad copy to see if one converts users at a higher percentage, earning you more qualified leads for the same budget.
“Don't be afraid to pivot if something's not working,” Doyle says. “Work with your digital marketing agency or in-house marketing manager to say, ‘What's not working, and how can we fix it?’”
With ServiceTitan, Blue Corona ties campaigns to appointments booked, leads generated, and revenue to track real ROI.
And the results speak for themselves—from a 593% year-over-year qualified lead increase for an HVAC, plumbing, and electrical company in Utah to an HVAC, plumbing, and electrical business in New Jersey that grew $35 million in 11 years.
“Short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals, we can help you achieve them,” Doyle says. “When you combine the knowledge and the skill set of savvy marketers and ServiceTitan, you get to bring together different data sets that allow for really rich insights and actionable easy-to-make business decisions that help improve the performance of your company.”
Ready to get started? Request a free marketing consultation from Blue Corona.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
