The business of home services is a fast-paced and competitive one. Within each area of home services — HVAC, house cleaning, pest control, renovation, and many more — there are companies both local and national looking to win customers’ business. Plus, within the past few years, there’s been a labor shortage and supply chain disruptions within home services, making the landscape even more challenging.
Digital marketers are finding success with personalized tactics, strategic AI use, and making decisions based on data, not gut instinct. Down-funnel prospecting is essential for succeeding in the home services market, as is strong creative for businesses of all sizes.
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10 Home Services Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Marketing Goals
If you’re advertising in home services, you likely already know that competition is stiff. Digital marketing is no exception: For example, the cost per lead for the keyword “HVAC” runs about $275. But, it’s still possible to succeed with a strong strategy. Here are some ideas to get ahead — and stay ahead — of the competition in the home services advertising category.
1. Embrace Omnichannel
Home services consumers interact with brands across multiple channels, both digital and in-person, in a non-linear way as they’re moving through the funnel. This includes social media platforms, online reviews on Google Maps, Yelp, and others, billboards and signage, word of mouth, flyers, and many more. From a marketer’s perspective, it’s a lot to manage manually, but for consumers, it has to be seamless and consistent wherever they’re encountering the business. Make sure you can anticipate omnichannel trends and user behavior to tailor strategies accordingly.
2. Focus on the Right Parts of the Funnel
Brand-building and awareness is important for home services businesses, but intent prospecting and conversion targeting are what will power your business for the long haul. Because home services as an industry is so competitive and localized, you’ll have to go beyond native ads and attract users who truly mean to make a purchase or pay for services. This means sharp creative beyond simply search and social, and considering who your users are and how to reach them. Home services, for example, have to incorporate phone calls as a communication tactic with prospects, so that should be a natural part of your marketing strategy.
3. Invest in Good Creative
There’s a 114% boost in conversion rates (CVR) when home services marketers use photographic visuals. Photos are also linked to higher click-through rates (CTR), while illustrations aren’t nearly as successful. Don’t just settle for the illustrations you have on hand — make sure you’re showing off your product or service with high-quality imagery.
This photo for Ace Hardware’s Handyman Services brings in natural light, a human element, and the tools of the trade to tell a story quickly. Showing workers can humanize brands and highlight reliability and skills.
4. Use First-Party Data for Targeting
Home services companies have to personalize wherever possible. As in other industries, prospects and customers have come to expect messaging and offers tailored to their particular needs. Use first-party data as you collect it, or employ the help of a technology platform, to personalize across channels, including in ads, landing pages, emails, social posts, chatbots, and more.
In home services, you might offer a way for prospects to get a personalized quote, or run locally tailored ads. Or, retarget users with ads based on the service they explored on your site. Phone calls can be an important conversion tactic for home services businesses, so you might reroute a customer call to their closest location for a multi-location company. Whatever the tactic, make sure the experience is seamless across channels.
5. Tell a Story
When you’re working in an oversaturated market, consider new or unique ways to attract the attention of prospects. How can you add humanity to your brand narrative and ensure your offerings stand out? Consider seasonality, local trends, and your areas of expertise to offer advice or new ideas to prospective customers.
This Maids ad, for example, reminds a viewer of an important benefit to house cleaning — staying healthy. Rather than showing house cleaning services as a luxury, it positions them as a necessary part of family life during cold and flu season.
6. Spend Budget Wisely
In the U.S. alone, home services are an industry worth more than $500 billion annually. Marketers can easily spend their entire budget on paid social and Google Ads, as cost per lead numbers are often quite high. Make sure you’re spending on the exact right keywords, and take full advantage of lower cost or free options, such as organic search optimization and Google Business Profile optimization. Consider optimized landing pages and email marketing, too.
7. Be Consistent With Branding
Before any ads or creative go out the door, make sure they’re exactly on brand for your home services business. This market is too crowded to let any ads slip through the cracks, so fonts, colors, logos, and photography all have to be extremely consistent.
The clean design, simplicity, and prominent logo in this SmartEase image are easy-to-repeat elements that will help build brand recognition and authority for prospects.
8. Use AI-Powered Technology
Home services businesses don’t often have an entire dedicated marketing team or massive advertising budget, so take advantage of any help you can get in targeting and reaching more users and converting them into repeat customers. Modern digital marketing technology can take advantage of AI, so instead of manually creating and testing home services ads, you can ask generative AI to help based on the information you already have. As well as using AI-powered content creation tools to generate engaging campaign copy or visuals, you can work with an ad platform that utilizes AI to target and optimize creative in real time, continuously A/B testing to find the exact right creative for the exact right user. Speaking of which…
9. Always Be Testing
Testing various creative ad elements is the only way to really understand what works for your target audience. Good A/B testing means that you swap out one element at a time, seeing which image, copy, or CTA (call to action) attracts more attention. With increasing user and creative fatigue, you can’t just guess at what works, or rerun ads without understanding whether they performed or not. Test various elements of your ad creative based on the outcomes or goals you’d like to achieve.
10. Incorporate Data-Driven Elements
Home services consumers are looking for trusted, vetted brands as they’re doing research. Use any and all positive reviews, customer quotes, or other statistics in your ads to attract new prospects. This might include user-generated content, too — look for great anonymized quotes on Google Maps or Yelp, or social media videos that include your business or service.
Specific numbers are also effective in home services ads, as they set immediate expectations for readers and can increase CTRs. Gather and create your own numbers, such as aggregated reviews once you have enough, such as “8 out of 10 customers would recommend this service to a friend.”
This California Closets ad captures positive customer sentiment in a short, digestible way:
Key Takeaways
The home services industry is crowded and competitive for digital marketers and advertisers. It’s essential to know your audience, know your target geography, and get the most out of your creative assets and advertising budget. Focus more on down-funnel tactics, stay on brand, and use all available technology to make your job easier.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How do I advertise a home services business?
There are plenty of options to advertise a home services business, and for newer companies, it’s important to choose tactics, formats, and channels wisely. Try a multi-channel strategy, making sure to build a professional online presence to help reinforce your brand authority and reliability. Use traditional digital marketing tactics like SEO, content marketing, and email, along with local advertising options.
How do I advertise my small home services business?
Your small home services business may be competing against companies of all sizes and locations, but you can use all the available channels to stand out. Make sure every free, low-cost, or owned tactic is highly optimized, such as organic keywords, social media platforms, a strong, professional website, and listings like Google My Business and Google Business Profile. Consider events, partnerships, and local community boards to improve word of mouth and reviews.
How do I effectively create ads for home services?
To create the best, most relevant ads for your home services business, start with what you know about your target audience. Build your messaging for them, and use the best visuals available, along with a single straightforward CTA. Continue to refine your ads based on what performs best, using A/B testing to optimize elements one at a time. Make sure to optimize local SEO and any web presence, too, and consider special offers or promotions to make ads work to build a customer base.
What types of visuals (photos, videos, illustrations) perform best for home services ads?
High-quality photos work better for home services ads than illustrations, and short videos can be effective, too. Consider the ways you can show off your service in these types of visuals, especially how you can show customers benefiting from it. Even the smallest or newest home services business should stick to its established branding and keep the target audience in mind with every ad placement.
How can I incorporate local keywords naturally in my ad copy?
As with SEO best practices generally, write in a simple, authentic way that’s aimed at humans. Consider your target audience and your locale when writing to incorporate local keywords naturally, rather than adding them after the fact, or keyword-stuffing. This should help make headlines, CTAs, and subheads SEO-friendly as well — you should include keywords in those places, but as part of the story, not an afterthought.
Are there specific creative best practices for the open web?
The modern open web brings user and creative fatigue, but savvy businesses can follow some best practices to stand out and attract new prospects. Make your designs digitally accessible and user-friendly, consistently optimized for any device or screen size. For any channel, your creative should be easy to digest and navigate, with clean, minimal design and text, and every piece needs one strong CTA.
