April 28, 2022

Spring is Here: How to Clean Up Your Home Services Brand’s Marketing Ideas

Darcy Bickham

Spring is Here: How to Clean Up Your Home Services Brand's Marketing Ideas

Spring is already here, and the change in seasons usually leads to spring cleaning! As a multi-location home services brand, now is a great time to do some cleaning and refreshing of your own. While you likely already have some form of a localized marketing strategy in place, there's always room for improvement. Throughout this blog, we'll dive into various localized marketing tactics that could likely use some refreshing and provide tips on how to level up your current efforts.

1. Maintain a Strong Social Media Presence

Your home services brand's social media presence is worth revisiting when looking for ways to improve your localized marketing efforts. First and foremost, your multi-location home services brand should have a local social presence for each business location. If not, this is a great place to start. If you already have local social pages, good for you! Now it's time to focus on content. Localized content typically performs 12x better than content that is not considered localized. If you're stuck when it comes to content ideas, our Localized Social Content Guide can help. From video content to posts highlighting local events to content around your local staff, this guide is full of ideas to help dominate your local social efforts.

2. Amplify Your Social Content with Ads

While organic social content is critical, it's no secret that the reach of organic content has been declining. That's where ads and boosting come in. Boosting your content means that you pay to promote an organic post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or other social platforms. For this blog, we'll discuss boosting and ads on Facebook. Boosting is an excellent option because it doesn't add a ton of extra time or effort! Your home services brand can look at posts on your local store pages that are already performing well and put some money behind them to expand their reach. When boosting posts, you can also narrow down your target audience, ensuring your message reaches the right people.

Although boosting is an easy solution to expand your reach on local social, some added benefits come with ads. For instance, on Facebook, Ads Manager allows you to choose the objectives of your campaigns, such as store traffic, conversions, or lead generation. The targeting capabilities are also more advanced with ads. So while ads require you to create different social content, some added benefits are worth exploring.

3. Enhance Your Local Listings

After your home services brand levels up its local social efforts, it's time to rethink your search strategy. If your multi-location home services brand doesn't already have local listings across local search platforms, it's time to change that. When considering where your home services brand should leverage local listings, Google, Yelp, and Facebook are necessary. If there are additional local search platforms that you know your target audience is leveraging, it's worth investing in local listings on those platforms. Data from our 2022 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report found that home services brands have room for improvement in local search. For instance, home services brands have 92.1 percent of their local listings claimed on Google, 95.9 percent on Facebook, and only 86 percent claimed on Yelp. Similarly, profile completeness falls slightly below these numbers on all three platforms. As a home services brand, claiming and updating your local listings is a must. When it comes to profile completeness, your home services brand should ensure that all the information included is updated and accurate such as your:

Name
Address
Phone number
Hours of operation
Local website (if applicable)
Any additional details the platform lets you include

Your home services brand should also incorporate keywords into your company description as well as in your review responses. For instance, if you’re a landscaping company and you focus on artificial turf, including “artificial turf” throughout your local listings is helpful. It’s important to select the category that your business falls under across local search platforms as well. The more specific you can be in your category selection, the more likely your business will be to show up for relevant searches. Using the same scenario above, if there’s an option to choose a home services category vs. a landscaping category, it’s better to select landscaping, which is more specific. Local listings are one component of Google's ranking factors, so the more information you include about your business within your local listings, the better.

4. Refresh Your Online Reputation Management Efforts

Reputation management is another excellent area to clean up as you go through your localized marketing efforts. Is your home services brand's online reputation up to par? Data from our previously mentioned 2022 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report (LMBR) can provide guidance. The report found that home services brands studied in the report had an average star rating of 4.6 stars on Google and Facebook and 3.3 stars on Yelp.

Diving in a little further, the report found that these brands had an average of 190 reviews per location on Google and 21.7 reviews per location on Yelp. If your home services brand isn't already meeting or exceeding these averages, it's a smart goal to work towards. If your home services brand is looking to improve its online reputation management efforts, it's essential to focus on:

The volume of reviews responded to. The more reviews your multi-location home service brand responds to, the better. Though, according to our 2022 LMBR, home services brands respond to more of their reviews than the average business, it would still be advisable to improve response percentages in order to build local engagement and loyalty.
Review response rate. How long does it currently take for your brand to respond to reviews? Forty percent of customers expect a response no more than 24 hours after posting a negative review.
Percent of positive reviews. Only 53 percent of people would consider using a business with less than four stars. To boost your overall star ratings, look at the content of negative reviews and analyze what changes can be made.

For more insight into what it takes to build a solid online reputation management strategy, check out our Multi-Location Marketer's Guide to Online Reputation Management.

5. Level-Up Your Local Pages

Local pages are another strategy that shouldn't be forgotten when dusting off your localized marketing efforts. If your home services brand has local pages for each business location, it's essential to make sure they're up to par. Local pages are one ranking factor Google considers when determining where your business should appear in search results. Local pages also provide consumers with the convenience they're looking for, keeping them happy and bringing business to your home services brand. When building or optimizing your local pages, ensure that your home services brand:

Has determined a keyword strategy - Whether your business has decided to start building local pages for its locations or you already have them in place, it's important to consider keyword strategy to boost the page's online presence.
Included helpful business information - Like local listings, potential customers should be able to find everything they want to know about your business from its local page, rather than navigating to the main website and searching further.
Added in CTAs - Including a call to action helps convert a potential customer without leaving the page, therefore the local pages can be an excellent tactic for collecting leads. Whether your home services brand provides appointments or form fills to collect more information - no matter the model, having a CTA is key.
Maintained brand guidelines and kept consistent messaging - We'll get into this tactic next, but maintaining brand guidelines on your local pages is essential.

Following the steps mentioned above will help your home services brand crush its local pages strategy and bring in more customers.

6. Refocus on Brand Guidelines

Last but not least, when cleaning up your localized marketing efforts, it's important to refocus on your brand. Are you leveraging the same brand guidelines across business locations? Does your tone of voice differ from location to location, or what about imagery? Brand guidelines are created to make your brand recognizable across locations and search and social channels. Your business must have the same tone of voice, values, and a similar marketing strategy across business locations. Suppose one location is posting on social media every day and utilizing a playful or conversational tone of voice, while another location in the next city over is using a very informational tone. In that case, there is a big disconnect between the two, which ultimately negatively impacts the corporate brand. Consumers should be able to recognize that your business location is part of the overall corporate brand, despite where they find you, which is why brand guidelines are essential. Now that we're already well into spring, it's time to put these tactics into action and clean up your localized marketing strategy. Step into the second half of 2022 with a new and improved marketing plan. If the thought of managing these efforts across all your business locations is holding you back, SOCi is here to help. SOCi is the marketing platform for multi-location brands and has everything your home services brand needs to manage its localized marketing efforts at scale. For instance, SOCi's social media management solution enables multi-location businesses to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at both the enterprise and local levels.

Additionally, SOCi Listings empowers you to manage your business listings at scale and optimize your online presence and local search rankings effectively. From syncing, updating, and managing your local listings to custom audits and profile recommendations to the flexibility for local managers to make their updates with corporate oversight, SOCi Listings covers every step of the process to propel your listings to the top of search results.

And it doesn't stop there! From reputation management to local pages, ads solutions, and more, SOCi has every aspect of your comprehensive localized marketing strategy covered. Request a demo today for more insight into how SOCi can help you clean up your localized marketing efforts and dominate the competition!