As you head into the new year, it’s a great time to reflect and set goals, both professionally and personally. Reflecting on your business’ success throughout the year can help you better understand where you want to be in 2025 and what you need to do to get there. Depending on your business, you may want to increase revenue, add trucks, or open up a new trade or location. No matter what your 2025 goals are, marketing should play a pivotal role in getting you there.
As you set your growth goals and align your team to accomplish them, ensure you focus on current marketing trends and the strategies and tools to help you throughout the year. Let’s look at three marketing trends to help you answer the call.
1. Consumers Expect Simple Communication, Quickly
Understanding your ideal customer's changing expectations is critical to your business’s success. As technology evolves, it changes how your customers want to communicate with you, and you should be adapting to shifting consumer expectations. To better understand what customers want, Scorpion surveyed more than a thousand people earlier this year to understand their expectations when interacting with home services businesses. Here’s what we learned:
- More than half of consumers choose a home services provider in less than 4 hours. This means you should have a well-planned and efficient communication follow-up strategy for every lead. We also discovered that 90% of people expect a response to their inquiry within 24 hours.
- When looking for local businesses, 3 in 4 consumers feel AI improves their online search. Artificial intelligence enhances many facets day-to-day and the advancements also impact marketing and customer acquisition. Tools like AI Chat and AI-enabled search engine ranking are changing how consumers find your business and how they interact with you. 63% of those surveyed agreed that AI would be helpful in finding home services providers.
2. Reputation Continues to Play a Role in Lead Conversion
Your business's reputation and reviews are essential as prospects consider you in 2025 and beyond. Positive online reviews not only build trust and credibility but significantly influence consumer decisions.
Our research found that 67% of consumers check at least three different review sources before deciding, highlighting the significance of reviews in the decision-making process. Additionally, 50% of consumers read at least seven reviews before gaining confidence in their decision, highlighting the importance of having a strong collection of positive reviews.
Consumers look at reviews to get a better understanding of what to expect when working with you. While a star rating may give them peace of mind about your work, the reviews that go along with it can help them understand the customer experience overall.
Encourage your happy customers to leave their thoughts on Yelp, Google Reviews, and more to get as many reviews as you can. But it’s not just about getting reviews, you have to show that you’re listening, too. Respond to feedback consistently, good or bad, to show you pay attention and care about making things right.
3. Build a Marketing Strategy that Drives Maximum Revenue
While consumers are changing their expectations, businesses are also adapting how they analyze their marketing efforts to drive a higher return on investment (ROI). Over the past few years, the price of getting leads and running ads has increased, squeezing advertising budgets even more. For home services businesses, we found that while advertising costs continue to rise, competition has intensified, increasing those costs even further.
This is evident in cost-per-lead (CPL) data and the increase in advertising spend within home services. Scorpion data shows that the cost of getting leads has increased substantially since 2021.
As advertising costs rise and consumer search behavior evolves, monitoring your spending and assessing its effectiveness is crucial. Instead of focusing on CPL or other metrics, you should focus on the ROI or return on ad spend (ROAS) that your efforts are producing. This will allow you to make more informed decisions that are focused on revenue growth.
To maximize your advertising budget, consider the following tips:
- Diversify your ads and target audiences strategically: Determine which ad channels are best for your ideal customer, and focus your efforts on channels that bring in the best ROI, not just the most leads. Evaluate other channels like Bing, Angi, Facebook, and others to see if they are a better fit for your marketing strategy.
- Combine marketing data with revenue information: Better understand the ROI of your efforts by integrating your marketing results and FSM or CRM. By looking at the whole customer journey, you can understand the true ROI of a marketing channel. Scorpion offers an integration with ServiceTitan that can help you determine the true return on your efforts.
Along with advertising, reviews, and customer expectations, you should also make sure your website, social media, and organic efforts are fine-tuned for the highest performance. When you invest in paid advertising, your website and online experience are paramount in converting leads once they’ve clicked on an ad.
Reach Your 2025 Goals
As you gear up for 2025, remember that success in the home services industry hinges on adapting to the evolving landscape. By prioritizing clear and rapid communication, cultivating a strong online reputation, and optimizing your marketing ROI, you can position your business for growth. Embrace the power of technology, listen to your customers, and stay agile in your strategies. With a commitment to these key areas, you'll be well-equipped to navigate the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities that lie ahead.
