The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Home Services Businesses

When potential customers need answers to their burning questions, where do they turn? These days, most people depend on social media to learn about a business - including what home services they should rely on.

If you’re not already investing in social media, you’re missing out on potential leads. The next step in marketing your home services company is to build your online presence. Your target audience is already searching Google, checking out reviews, and looking for your portfolio of work and recommendations on social media. If you want to make sure they land on your company first, it’s time to get on board with the digital marketing world.

Why Social Media Marketing Works

From contractors to electricians to plumbers, there’s no shortage of people who need your services if you're in the home services industry. But with endless options out there for customers, how can you get the exposure you need to be successful?

When it comes to home services, the game has changed. Businesses can’t rely on in-person marketing or word of mouth alone to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace.

If you want to compete on a larger scale with your company, that’s where social media marketing comes in. Content marketing strategies can get results for businesses of all sizes. You don’t need an overwhelming budget or a huge marketing team to compete - social media can level the playing field.

But some people are still not on board with social media marketing for small business. For those who aren’t experienced with social media, you might be wondering if it’s worth it. Do you really need it?

Yes, you do - and we’re here to break down some of the most compelling reasons why.

Social Media Is the Future of Marketing

At this point, not having an active social media presence is the marketing equivalent of owning a flip phone. You might have excellent services and even have a great offline marketing strategy. But without social media, you could be severely limiting your reach.

Social media is used by people all over the world. Between July 2019 and March 2021, social media usage increased by 13%. This brought the total reach of social media to over 4.2 billion.

There are millions of potential customers just waiting to stumble across your business online. A total of 93% of marketers worldwide use social media for marketing their business. Another 90% of marketers say that social media marketing has increased their business exposure.

Social Media Drives Traffic

If you’ve already dipped your toes into digital marketing, you have a website and perhaps even a blog. While blog content provides value and brings in new leads, social media is a great way to bring attention to your posts and drive traffic to your site.

Social media makes it easier for people to find your brand. Once they do, they can click through to your site, read your blog entries, or give you a call to book your services.

Using social media lets you tap into a massive pool of potential customers, driving more and more traffic to your site. And because of carefully curated social media algorithms, your content will end up in front of users who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. This means it won’t just boost traffic to your site, but it can also attract the kinds of leads you want to attract.

Social Media Connects You to Your Audience

This is one of the most important reasons to use social media: connecting with your audience.

Social platforms like Instagram or TikTok are effective marketing tools because they bring you closer to your audience than ever. You can learn more about your ideal customer and what they’re looking for. This goes beyond just their age or location - you can better identify the problems they need solved, helping you improve your services and your marketing strategy.

Once potential customers end up on your page, you can use your social media the way it was intended. Customers don’t want just to be pitched to 24/7. They want to see brands as people and authentically engage with them.

You can build stronger relationships with your customers and inspire brand loyalty through personalized engagement - like comments, DMs, and reposting customer content.

Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses

Still not convinced? It’s completely normal to have some concerns about jumping into a full-on digital marketing strategy, especially for small businesses that haven’t invested in social media before. There’s a lot to worry about, like budget, time constraints, and knowing the right strategies.

When you’re involved in a smaller organization, you’re responsible for a lot more. For many small business marketing managers, it can feel like you need to do a bit of everything. You play the roles of CEO, marketer, financial analyst, graphic designer, and so much more.

So while it might be tempting to knock social media off your to-do list when you’re low on time, remember: social media is valuable for businesses of any industry. In fact, it can be even more critical for small businesses.

What you do on social media can directly impact your bottom line. Using social media helps you build brand awareness, reach new customers, and connect with current ones. 71% of small to mid-sized businesses use social media for marketing their services - and of those that do, 52% post daily.

But that doesn’t mean social media marketing is the same for large and small businesses. You may face unique challenges or get access to unique opportunities. And it means taking a slightly different approach in your content strategy.

What makes social media marketing different for small businesses? Let’s break it down:

It’s more personal. With a smaller business, you have the advantage of engaging with your audience on a more personal level.
It’s about quality over quantity. You can’t churn out endless amounts of content the way larger companies can. This might mean having a stronger presence on one social media platform, putting the ones that matter most to your business first.
It’s harder to make quality content. Without a huge marketing budget or a team of experienced marketing professionals, you might need to improve your basic photography, videography, or graphic design skills (using simple platforms like Canva or Photoshop) to produce shareable photos, videos, and graphics.
It takes more time. Small businesses don’t have the luxury of having a team on call to work on social media, which means you might need to try tools that can schedule or automate posts.

The Basics of Developing a Social Media Strategy

There’s a lot of success to be had on social media, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to break through the noise. For example, 91% of retail businesses use two or more social media channels. Even if you’re focusing on local audiences, how do you get them to pay attention to your brand instead of your larger competitors?

It all comes down to having a powerful social media strategy.

There might be serious competition out there, but many brands aren’t doing things right. While there’s plenty of content out there, it might not be as hard as you think to stand out from the crowd. With the right strategies, high-quality content, and an authentic approach, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish through social media.

In the following guide, we’ll walk you through the basic steps of developing a strategy, as well as how to refine that strategy to fit the goals of your business.

1. Choose a Platform

The first step is to pick the right platforms. You want something that fits your industry and is home to a large portion of your target audience.

A good starting point for the home services industry is Facebook, with the largest active user base of any platform. It’s also great for businesses, as your page can also host reviews of your services.

If you want to get more creative with your content - especially visual content - Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are thriving platforms right now.

While it can be tempting to sign up for everything, remember that there’s only so much time you can devote to your social media. If you’re struggling to upload consistently on four or five different platforms, it’ll be a lot harder to make a serious impact. Your posts won’t be consistent, and engagement will eventually fall through the cracks.

Instead, hone in on just one or two of the most relevant platforms to start. You’re better off with one well-managed social media channel than four half-abandoned ones.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

To make the strongest impact with your messaging, you’ll need to know your target audience. This means basic demographic information, like:

Age
Gender
Income
Location

But you should also go a bit deeper. When someone needs your services, it means they have a problem that needs to be solved. What are their pain points? What are they looking for in a home services provider?

3. Post Regularly

Social media algorithms are notoriously difficult to figure out. But a few easy posting strategies can help you stay at the top of the algorithm and grow faster.

By posting regularly on each platform, you’ll position your business for new growth each month. Especially for small businesses, this can be a challenge. A social media calendar that maps out each update every week can help you prepare posts ahead of time and keep you on track.

Aim to post consistently, but not so much that you overwhelm your customers. For platforms like Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, you can post anywhere between once a day and several times a week. Platforms like Twitter work well for several updates a day.

You can try out services that help you manage posts across social media platforms so you have a clearer picture of the content you're putting out everywhere. Scorpion, for example, works with you to create a custom social media management plan for your business and includes the tracking, team, and technology to get the results you need.

Experiment with different post frequencies and times until you find the right balance for your work schedule and engagement rates.

4. Get Creative With It

Creating a social media account and quickly posting blurry photos isn’t enough. To make the most of the opportunities for engagement - and to stand out in the crowd of other accounts - you need to get creative.

You need to provide value for your potential customers, from visually stimulating photos and videos to easy-to-read infographics. You can also stay on top of some of the emerging trends online to figure out what content people are looking for from home services companies.

Some engaging and creative post ideas include:

A roundup of some of your best customer reviews and testimonials
Easily shareable infographics offering valuable information from your industry, including FAQs and tutorials
A video showing a day in the life of a contractor, electrician, plumber, or another service you offer
Behind-the-scenes interviews with employees
Share the history or story of your business and how it came to be
Do’s and don’ts for general home maintenance
Interactive content like questions, quizzes, and polls
A funny or creative video that mimics popular trends on Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Customer case studies that show the success of your services

5. Engage, Engage, Engage

Just like the name suggests, social media is meant to be social. Customers don’t see their social channels as marketing machines - they see them as social networks, first and foremost.

Stay grounded in your social media strategy, and don’t forget about engagement. This is what makes social media marketing so unique. It’s an opportunity to get closer to your audience than you ever would with any other marketing method.

Ask questions in your captions, respond to comments you get, and answer all your DMs as quickly as possible with relevant, helpful information. When customers post photos about the services they received from your brand, repost them. You can even respond to reviews, positive or negative.

All of this engagement shows your customers that you care about your relationship with them, which can go a long way towards building your reputation as an authentic and valuable brand.

6. Check Your Analytics

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to a successful social media strategy for any industry. It can sometimes feel like you’re aiming for a moving target.

To refine your strategy, you need to know what you’re working with. Almost all platforms, like Scorpion's, offer some form of engagement statistics. Your analytics will show how many people see your posts and engage with them, including likes, comments, and shares. You can even see how many people have clicked on your profile or followed a link to see more about your services.

These statistics allow you to measure what’s doing well and what isn’t. Maybe your visually interesting posts - like photos of faces or behind-the-scene pictures of your work - are doing better than your text-based posts. Or perhaps you’ll notice that posting at noon gives you better results than when you post earlier in the morning.

Take note of what is doing exceptionally well, and you’ll eventually figure out a pattern of why some posts are working better than others. This lets you reproduce that pattern for even greater success.

7. Be Consistent

A lot of companies will start fast with social media , but fade over time.

Its important to be consistent if you hope to build a community with your social media efforts. It can help if you have social as a part of a larger content marketing play.

For example, if you blog weekly then you can create social media posts about the blog. That can make it easier to come up with content consistently.

Social Media Marketing Tips For Home Services Businesses

Unlike more traditional forms of advertising, like billboards, television, or radio, there isn’t a simple formula to social media. While there are some basic rules you can follow, a lot will depend on the industry you’re in.

With that in mind, it’s time to explore some strategies for home services businesses. These targeted strategies can help you make the most of your social media presence, from electric work to HVAC repair.

1. Focus on Local Audiences

Some larger companies may work with national audiences. This means they can cast a broader net to find new customers.

You’ll get the most success for home services businesses if you hone in on local audiences. Mobile searches for local home services are growing each year. According to Google, some of the fastest-growing terms are “HVAC repair near me,” “landscaping near me,” and “plumbers near me.”

Most local searchers have a high purchasing intent. This means they need services ASAP - and they’re ready to book whichever company catches their eye and makes the best first impression.

To attract a local audience, make sure your address and service area is defined on your profile. Additionally, take advantage of posting portfolio photos and using hashtags of your location, so the post shows up in searches.

2. Be Prepared to Invest

On average, the costs per click (CPC) on Google Ads are higher for certain home services keywords. In some cases, they can exceed $40. With home services on the rise, you can expect to be paying more for each lead.

If you’re using social media advertising, be prepared to invest more of your budget to acquire new customers.

It can also help to bring in professional help, when needed, to manage the complex task of handling your social media channels. Some platforms, like Scorpion's, can equip you with tools, technology, and expertise to help you get the most out of your social media without a marketing team at your disposal.

3. Highlight Your Reviews

While your website likely already showcases your testimonials, you can also use social media to shine a spotlight on some of your best reviews. 86% of customers read reviews for local businesses. Customers will also read an average of 10 online reviews before they feel they can trust a local business, let alone call them to make a booking.

Start looking beyond the generic review sites like Yelp or Google and start boosting your reputation on all platforms. This can look like this:

Reposting some of your best reviews
Sharing customer testimonials or case studies
Responding to reviews - good and bad - on social media platforms

4. Channel Your Audience into Live Calls

People who are online looking for home services may make a phone call after they search for a company. Since many of the services you provide are considered more urgent, they’re more likely to want to speak to a live agent.

Once they do make that call, the conversion rate is impressive. 40% of home services consumers who call from a Google search make a purchase.

This means that you should focus on channeling your social media views and engagement into live interactions with your brand. Include a call to action that encourages interested consumers to give you a call in your captions and graphics. You can also put your phone number or a link to your contact form in your social media bios, so they can reach out directly from the platform they're on.

5. Provide Quick Customer Service

One of the top benefits of social media is that it gives you instant access to your audience. They can communicate with you - and vice versa - with the click of a button.

Use this to your advantage by offering quick customer responses.

Expectations for customer service are rising to an all-time high. When customers have a question, they expect to solve it right away. One study found that customers want responses from companies within four hours, yet the average company response time is 10 hours.

An active presence on social media will help keep your target audience happy. They can get answers to all their questions quickly, making them more likely to convert to loyal customers.

Trust Your Home Services Marketing Strategy to the Experts

Social media isn’t going anywhere any time soon. It’s not just a place where people build social relationships but also where people turn to find solutions to the problems they’re facing in their homes.

There’s a whole pool of people who need your services. The right social media strategy can help you tap into that opportunity.

Instead of worrying about your online marketing strategy, and all of its complex moving parts, you need a marketing company that does it all. With social media off your plate, you can focus on what matters - providing a stellar experience for your customers.

We can take your social media marketing efforts to new heights at Scorpion. Our social media management team has years of experience creating custom strategies for clients in the home services industry, and we can do the same for you. Contact us today to learn more about where we can take you.