Contractor Marketing for Inevitable Business Growth

Understanding Contractor Marketing

Any business is either growing or dying, there’s hardly in between. Unfortunately, in the current economy running a contractor business is hard, let alone trying to grow it.

Your business needs a strong online presence and digital marketing strategies that will help you reach out to your potential clients and persuade them to hire you. Luckily, you’ve come to the right place.

dNOVO Group marketing experts have come together to create this guide on contractor marketing. Based on our decades-long experience, the guide provides you with the best strategies to successfully compete with other companies over potential customers and win.

What is Contractor Marketing

Contractor marketing is the business activity aimed at client acquisition, retention, and upselling. Most of your marketing efforts will be focused on acquisition since it’s the most resource-intensive strategy.

However, you should also remember to invest time and money into retaining past clients and sell more construction services to the present ones.

The digital marketing campaign for a contractor business includes:

• Website
• SEO
• Content Marketing
• PPC ads
• Email Marketing
• SMM
• Video Marketing

Why Your Contractor Business Needs Digital Marketing Strategy

Home renovations, roof repair and similar services were on the rise during the pandemic. Many people had returned home and were investing in the betterment of their dwellings. The situation changed with the end of the lockdown.

The Canadian economy has been in recession and until the end of July 2024, the interest rates had been growing. The construction industry heavily depends on interest rates and has been negatively impacted by this growth.

In such a situation, finding new clients and competing over them is getting harder and harder. That’s why, your business needs a complex contractor marketing strategy.

Check out other benefits of online marketing strategy for your business:

Marketing for Contactors

This guide is the third in the series of marketing and SEO guides for contractors. Check out other guides in the series:

• Roofing SEO
• Roofing Marketing
• Contractor SEO
• Construction Marketing
• Construction SEO
• Landscaping Marketing
• Home Remodeling Marketing
• HVAC Marketing
• Plumbing Marketing

Contractor Website as a Basis of Digital Marketing Strategy

The website should be the first step in implementing a marketing strategy for your contracting business. It helps you get your business online and attract potential clients. It will also help them get all the necessary information about your company.

If you already have a website, you can skip to SEO strategy. However, we strongly suggest against it, since this section contains the best practices for the website of a contracting business.

The Essential Parts of the Contractor Website

Let’s begin with the essential elements of the website:

• Book Appointment
• Services
• Gallery
• Rankings
• Service Area

Book Appointment Feature

A good contractor website should convert. That’s why you need Book Appointment functionality. It can be a widget as shown in the screenshot below:

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Alternatively, it could be a CTA with a button that leads to another website with the respective functionality. In our opinion, a widget is a better option as it doesn’t lead your website visitors away from the website.

Apart from conversions, this functionality also enables you to collect emails for your email marketing campaigns. It will come in handy for both retention and upselling.

Let’s say the potential client booked an appointment but never showed up or the appointment wasn’t fruitful. you can later send an email to this client and try to get them interested in similar or different services.

Service Pages

Service pages support contractor SEO strategy and inform potential customers about your services. In other words, it helps people find your business and explain what they can get from you. Check out the screenshot below. The contractor business lists all types of work they provide:

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We want to show 2 more examples of how you can arrange your services on your website. The first example is the construction company Alboreno:

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See how they list only 3 services on their website. These are, however, can be considered categories. For example, House Renovations can include kitchen renovations, bathroom repairs, etc.

Our next example is the website of a contractor business engaged in demolition and cleaning. They decided to create separate service categories in the menu (demolition, cleaning, and abatement) and then list their services under each category with respective pages:

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Each of these approaches has its pros and cons and you need to think which of them will fit best with your contractor marketing strategy.

Gallery

Showcase the projects you did in the gallery. It will help you gain the trust of website visitors and convert more leads. Just make sure that you entrust this job to a good photographer.

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Service Areas

Service area pages can help you improve your local SEO as well as better allocate your marketing resources. If you run an SMB, you won’t probably be eager to move too far from home. It’s best to inform your potential clients about your limitations in advance.

It will cut the number of appointment bookings but, in the end, will bring you more high-quality leads.

Rankings

Rankings help your reputation management. Construction companies create profiles on various websites and showcase their rankings on those websites to gain the trust of potential customers. Check out this HVAC contractor business page:

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SEO for Contractor Business

Search Engine Optimization is a series of marketing efforts aimed at improving website positions in search results. The higher your positions the bigger your website traffic is, and the more qualified leads you get.

The key elements of Contractor SEO are:

• Keyword Research
• Link Building
• On-page SEO
• Technical SEO
• Local SEO

Keyword Research

The backbone of your search engine optimization, keyword research is the process of collecting the keywords for your website and content marketing campaign.

Keywords have three main characteristics you need to take into account when you pick them.

1. Volume

Keyword volume describes the number of times people look for a particular word or phrase in search engines per month in a certain location. Check out home renovation characteristics in the SEMrush SEO tool:

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It has 4,400 searches per month in Canada. Obviously, you would want to rank for this keyword, the problem with this word is this one:

2. Difficulty

Measured in percentage, difficulty demonstrates how hard it will be for a website to get to the top of search results. Home renovation from the screenshot above has 80% difficulty. As explained in SEMrush, you’ll need a high-quality content piece and 178 high-authority domains referring to your page.

That’s a hard feat to attend. That’s why you can try searching for a synonymical keyword with smaller difficulty. For example, house renovation has 880 searches per month and 65% difficulty.

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3. Intent

Keywords differ in the intent of people who are searching for them. For example, those who look for home repair services have commercial intent. It means they are researching the different service providers:

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However, the “where to stay during home renovation” keyword is informational. It means that people are searching for general information about a certain thing.

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The third type of intent is transactional. It means that a person is ready to complete an action (book an appointment, make a purchase, etc.).

We suggest going after all types of keywords, transactional, commercial, and informational, as they all play important roles in lead generation:

• bring more traffic
• warm up new leads
• establish your brand
• build rapport with potential clients.

The main trick with keyword research is to find just about enough keywords with high volume, low difficulty, and commercial intent. Like “handyman services” for example:

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Link Building

As mentioned above, pages built around keywords with high difficulty require many backlinks to get to the top of the search results. That’s why link building is a critical part of SEO strategy. However, your positions will be impacted not only by the referring links but also by those on your website.

There are three main types of links:

• Internal
• External
• Backlinks

Internal links connect pages within your website and inform search engines on which pages are most important.

External links help you prove that your content is factual and truthful since you “quote” other authoritative sources in support of your arguments.

Backlinks show how authoritative your content is in the construction industry.

On-Page SEO

Including keywords in your content isn’t enough. You need to strategically place them on the page. It will help search engine crawlers understand what your content piece is about.

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Your focus keyword should be included in the meta title, meta description, first-level header, second-level header, URL, picture alt texts, and introduction.

Technical SEO

Apart from keywords, links, and on-page SEO, google crawlers check the UX of the page and website on the whole. A website that is not mobile friendly, has chaotic navigation and low page speed will be “punished” and pushed to the bottom of search results.

There are multiple paid and free tools that can help you do the diagnostics of your website and understand the errors that are impeding your digital marketing. For example, in the screenshot below you can see the result of website speed on mobile devices with a free tool:

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As you can see the website isn’t mobile-friendly and needs some serious improvement in its page download speed.

Local SEO

As an SMB contracting business, you probably operate within a limited area of service. That’s why you want to attract local homeowners rather than people living outside your area of service.

Local SEO helps you attain this goal. In a nutshell, it is optimizing your website for local searches. Usually, this marketing tactics include creating a Google Business Profile and adding the names of your area of service (e.g., GTA, Hamilton, Queens County, etc.) to the keywords:

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Benefits of Local SEO include:

• Getting local leads.
• Smartly allocating your digital marketing budget.
• Obtaining high ROI on your marketing campaign.

Content Marketing Strategy

Having large website traffic isn’t enough for a successful digital marketing plan. You need to retain website visitors for a long period of time and give them enough reason to take the next step in their buying journey, e.g., book an appointment.

That’s why you need a solid content marketing plan. Not only, does it boost your website conversions but it also impacts your SEO, since Google loves high-quality content.

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Purposes of content:

1. Boost SEO
2. Educate your visitors
3. Build rapport and trust
4. Showcase your expertise
5. Convert.

How to Create a Content Marketing Plan

A content marketing plan is a detailed timeline of your content creation and publishing. We suggest building it around the keywords you’ve picked for your website during your keyword research.

Start with service pages as they are the most important element of your website.

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Service area pages are another example of valuable content for SEO. They help you optimize your website for local searches and get local leads.

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Finally, you need to create multiple blogs that lead to your service page and service area pages. It’s necessary to demonstrate to Google which pages are the most important on your website and will help increase the position of these pages in search results.

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Tips for your content marketing plan

In this section, we’ll equip you with several content marketing methods that will ease your work.

Manage your processes

The majority of successful digital marketing teams break down the creation of each content piece into several steps and assign people in charge of each step and time frame. Here’s an example:

• choosing the supporting keywords for the content piece – SEO specialist
• writing the content piece – the content writer and company experts
• proofreading and editing – editor
• creating images – designer
• approving – content manager or marketing manager
• publishing – content writer or developer
• on-page SEO & interlinking – content writer, developer or SEO specialist
• indexing – SEO specialists
• performance tracking – SEO specialist
• content improvement – SEO specialist and content manager and designer.

Obviously, each content team organizes this process in their own unique ways. The above example is just one of many ways to arrange the process

Create clusters

Plan your content creation around clusters. Here’s an example of such a process. First, write a service page for “roofing contractor.” Next, add several supporting blogs that link to the service pages “best roofing contractors in Toronto”, and “How to choose a roofing contractor”.

Build buyer journey

The buyer journey is the unique set of actions that an individual takes from the emergence of a problem to the solution. The purpose of internet marketing is to persuade the individual to hire you to solve their problem (or to purchase your product).

You can impact this journey on many stages. The most control you have when a visitor goes to your website. You need to make sure that you have links to all the necessary pages to help persuade a person to make an order from your construction business.

Use SEO tools

Surfer SEO to automate your content creation processes. It can show you the keywords you need to use in the content piece and the number of times they should appear.

PPC Ads Contractor Marketing

Pay Per Click is a type of paid advertising that is spread via the internet. Most PPC ads follow the same logic of the banner advertising. People see Google ads or social media ads and remember your product and brand.

Apart from getting people familiar with your business, banner ads are the doorways to your website. People can click on them and get to the landing page of your choosing immediately. Which is a very valuable feature traditional ads don’t have.

There are several benefits that Pay Per Click advertising provides to your business growth:

1. You reach your target audience rather than all the population.
2. PPC has one of the biggest ROI of all marketing strategies.
3. You drive traffic to your construction business website.

Types of PPC ads:

• Google Ads

Google Ads appear in the top of the Google search results, on websites that live off banner ads (e.g., news outlets), and on YouTube. Check out this example of banner ad on YouTube:

• Social Media Advertising

Social media ads are advertising that you can find on social media platforms. They usually lead on a website or more rarely to your social media business page.

Email Marketing Campaigns for Construction Business

Email marketing is a great way for construction companies to reach its target audience and convert them. It is usually used to warm up leads, retail clients and upsell.

One of the downsides of email marketing is you need to collect emails first before actually reaching out to people. You can purchase such a list for both individual homeowners and companies from a third party:

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The drawback of such lists is that they contain contacts of people who aren’t your ideal customers. That’s why you should also be collecting the emails from incoming inquiries via phone and on your website.

People who contact your business directly are considered high-quality leads. That’s why you need to make sure you get an email from them. Check out the main page of a construction company with a book an appointment form:

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The types of content are good for email marketing for construction companies:

1. Announcing new services
2. Special offers and discounts
3. New blogs (especially “How to”)
4. New videos.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a potent digital marketing strategy that helps generate leads and communicate with your existing clients. It includes creating accounts on social media platforms, sharing valuable content, and building community.

What Social Media Platforms Work for Contractor Business

Social media management requires the full engagement of an SMM specialist and having accounts on many platforms can be resource-intensive. That’s why we suggest focusing on one in the beginning.

Facebook and Instagram are the obvious choice for several reasons. First, the majority of homeowners in Canada are Gen Z and Baby Boomers. They prefer Facebook and rarely visit other social media platforms.

Instagram is good if you want to reach out to Millennials. Also, they can recommend you to their parents or relatives from older generations.

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Topics for Social Media Posts

Several topics will work fine for the social media of contractor businesses:

• Photos of your most recent project
• Videos of your work in progress
• Discounts, special offers
• Memes and funny posts
• Client testimonials

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Video Marketing for Contractors

Video content is one of the most powerful internet marketing tactics to reach to your target audience. Here are 5 reasons why your contracting business should create videos:

• They capture and retain human attention better than other types of content.
• You are free to reuse them across multiple platforms as many times as you want unlike texts.
• Many people find videos of humans working mesmerizing.
• Videos prolong page sessions and improve your SEO.
• Google loves videos and will feature them in may searches.
• YouTube automatically create subtitles for your videos and Google crawls them.
• Links in your YouTube videos boost traffic and helps generate leads.

Check out the types of content that will work best for your lead generation:

1. The before and after videos
2. The video of your work process
3. The how-to content
4. The videos with the results of your work

The best part about creating most of these types is that you don’t need professional equipment or a large team. The work process captured on a mobile phone will work just as fine. In fact, if you create a how-to content it will look even more genuine.

3 Contractor Marketing Ideas to Support Lead Generation

Our final section is dedicated to marketing ideas and tricks that can quickly bring you many qualified leads and help with your digital marketing.

Establish a Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is a free-of-charge tool that helps local businesses to connect with their target audience. Check out an example of a company with a Google Business Profile:

The benefits of this tool include:

• Featuring your business on Google Maps
• Reaching out to local leads and getting local traffic
• Showcasing client reviews to your potential clients
• Boosting your SEO.

Try Account -Based Marketing

This is a tip for large construction companies that participate in commercial tenders. Account-based marketing (ABM) will work if you have dedicated and experienced salespeople.

ABM step-by-step:

Step 1. Plan an outreach campaign:

1. Plan the budget.
2. Choose the channels (e.g., LinkedIn, email, phone)
3. Craft messaging for each channel
4. Plan the sequence (e.g., day 1 first email, day 2 phone call, day 3 second email, etc.).
5. Choose the tools for the campaign.
6. Set KPIs (e.g., the number of qualified leads).
7. Amend the budget.

Step 2. Get a list of high-profile companies owning residential and non-residential buildings.

Step 3. Hire and train a sales team.

Step 4. Purchase tools like CRM.

Step 5. Conduct outreach.

Step 6. Analyze the outreach results by assessing the key KPIs.

Step 7. Introduce changes in the campaign.

Get Client Testimonials

Reputation Management is critical for any business. That’s why we suggest that you get testimonials from your existing and past clients. You can also encourage them to help promote your business through word of mouth.

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Here are several benefits of testimonials:

1. You can add positive reviews on your website

2. You can gain the trust of your potential customers.
3. Word of mouth can help you get clients who don’t use the Internet to search for contractors.

Hire Professional Marketing Agency

Internet marketing can be hard and tricky for any business. Even if you have enough resources for an in-house team, you can spend up to one year just building it, since the hiring and ramping up process takes time. In addition to that, purchasing various tools for digital marketing can be very costly.

That’s why many contractor companies hire a marketing agency to run their digital marketing campaigns, generate leads, and boost company growth.

dNOVO has experience in contractor marketing, SEO, website graphic design, PPC campaigns, content management, and email marketing. We boost traffic and bring new leads to our clients.

Are you ready to grow your business? Book a free consultation with dNOVO.