This post examines the key elements of PPC advertising for marketing home services and expert recommendations on how to make them count.
PPC advertising may hold an essential key in marketing home services to help providers recover from the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If your home service business is one of those that was brutally ravaged by the coronavirus, there’s sunshine after the rain as the economy has reopened and more and more people are now availing once again of various home services. To speed up the recovery of your home service company, PPC advertising can come to your rescue.
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Why Businesses Need Better Home Services Marketing
Home service providers are one of the hardest-hit types of business in the last three years, when lockdowns and social distancing became the norm. CNBC reported that barely a year since the virus started spreading across the globe, over 160,000 businesses seem to have closed, and a jaw-dropping 60 percent of those are permanent business closures.
Citing a study conducted by Federal Reserve economists, an article in the Business Insider revealed that although the Fed reports roughly 600,000 businesses in the U.S. permanently closing every year, the coronavirus-driven pandemic increased that number by 200,000.
The exact number of home service providers in the U.S. that have closed may not be widely reported, but we can imagine that it would be pretty high considering the travel restrictions that were imposed at that time, coupled with people’s general fears and anxieties about the virus.
How PPC Advertising Can Help With Home Services Marketing
If you managed to keep your business afloat (or perhaps you’re opening or reopening one post-pandemic), your finances are likely to be tight. This makes it crucial for you to ensure that it’s spent on the most cost-effective channels in digital marketing for home services.
PPC advertising is one of the top digital marketing tactics you should consider. Pay per click ads are search ads—they display advertising for companies like your home service business on search engine result pages (or SERPs) when users type keywords that are related to your business.
With PPC advertisements, you literally get what you pay for. This is because you’re charged depending on the number of clicks you receive from users, who are directed from your PPC ad to your website or landing page.
Although effective search engine optimization can also get you to the top results when it comes to ad placements, this usually requires more time, energy, and expertise. On the other hand, PPC campaign ads fast-track your marketing results because your ads will be shown on SERPs together with organic search results (basically, those that didn’t pay to appear among the results).
Because of the prime placement of your ad, you can expect more users to visit your website or landing page. Naturally, the more traffic you get on your site/landing page, the more effective your marketing for home services will be. This simply means that more people will know about the home services you offer.
PPC ad campaigns allow you to be seen alongside high-ranking organic search results faster and with less effort.
Although PPC ads are naturally cost-effective, there are things you need to know to make them truly effective in driving high-quality leads to your website or landing page. Two essential PPC elements you need to know (and carefully prepare) are your offer and keywords.
Key Element #1 in PPC Advertising For Home Services Marketing: The Offer
Every successful PPC campaign needs a great offer. After all, PPC is a form of ad, and people are bombarded with ads everywhere they turn.
Your PPC ad needs to outshine others—at least, the ones shown with it in SERPs. Thus, you need to offer something irresistible. It should be something valuable to potential customers, like a free initial inspection of their plumbing system, a generous discount on your HVAC services, or something similar.
Your offer needs to be communicated well using clear and persuasive words. Steer clear of technical terms and jargon that—although may demonstrate your knowledge of your business—may turn off potential customers by making them feel less intelligent. Instead, do your best to translate or communicate technical terms and complicated features into actual benefits or the real value that they can provide your prospects in their day-to-day life. For example, instead of saying that the HVAC system you’re offering has an above-industry standard Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio rating, you can simply explain that it’s more energy efficient than other HVAC systems, which means a lower energy consumption and power bill for their household.
Key Element #2 in PPC Advertising For Home Services Marketing: Keyword Bidding
Once you’ve got a great offer presented in equally great copy, you’re ready to do keyword bidding.
Keyword bid management is considered the core of PPC advertising because PPC ads are shown through a bidding process on certain relevant search terms. Your home service company should conduct thorough keyword research and competitor analysis. Based on those results, you should come up with a list of the most relevant search terms to target using your PPC ads. But, be careful here. It is extremely easy to go down the wrong path here and spend loads on non-performing keywords. Experience is critical here. (If you are worried and need a hand, schedule a free question-and-answer session with one of our team members here.)
Well-targeted PPC ads will present your advertisements to users who are interested in the home services that you offer, as evidenced by the fact that they’re searching for search terms related to your business.
Keyword bidding requires constant refinement to add new keywords and remove low or non-converting keywords to achieve the highest conversion rates. You need to regularly monitor your PPC ads’ performance and update your ads whenever needed to get the optimal cost per click (or CPC). This is another area to be careful here. Data is key. Making frequent changes or too many changes can have very detrimental effects. Again, experience is key here.
All of those can eat up your time, which is why it’s recommended to entrust this task to an experienced home services marketing agency like Zero Company. Our PPC management agency’s skilled PPC experts can bid competitively for your target keywords while staying aligned with your advertising budget.
The top 2 elements of your home service PPC ad campaign are your offer and keywords.
Major Takeaway in Using PPC Ads For Home Services
Your PPC ad’s offer and keyword bidding management both play a crucial role in helping your home service business increase your reach and grow your sales post-pandemic. But knowing them is not enough; you need to ensure that both of them are optimized for the highest conversion by following the tips we discussed above.
If you want to focus on your company’s core strength—delivering superb home services to local customers—let Zero Company handle your end-to-end PPC campaigns. We have over 20 years of experience in doing effective PPC advertising and providing other digital marketing services, such as search engine optimization and paid social media marketing, to home service providers all over the United States.
Get in touch with our PPC advertising experts today so we can start helping with your post-pandemic home services marketing!
