Contractor Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing for Contractors?

Digital marketing for contractors is simply advertising products or services through online channels like websites, search engines, social media, email, and mobile apps.

Most contractors think of digital marketing as another phrase for search engine optimization or paid advertising. Even though both services are used for internet marketing, neither fully describes the depth of complete online marketing plans for contractors.

Modern digital marketing campaigns include dozens of online marketing strategies, all working together to help increase visibility and conversions for your contractor.

For example, the best contractor digital marketing services will include tactics to:

• Use SEO, social media advertising, affiliate marketing, and paid advertising to drive traffic to your contractor digital assets (websites, apps, sales funnels, etc).
• Increase revenue for your contractor through landing page creation, sales funnel development, and conversion rate optimization.
• See what visitors do with your digital assets to find out where you can improve, retargeting opportunities, or conversion rates.
• Show the expertise, authority, and trust of your contractors through content marketing, video production, link building, review collection, social proof, and website improvements.
• Build and nurture relationships through email marketing, SMS marketing, and social media management.

Our Contractor Digital Marketing Services

Our team of digital marketing experts know the latest internet marketing trends for contractors. Take advantage of our past experience in more than 100 business industries, including contractors, to help drive traffic and improve conversions across your digital assets.

Contractor SEO Strategies

To bring your website into the first page of search results for competitive phrases you have to take a holistic approach to SEO within your contractor digital marketing campaign. This means reviewing your technical, on-page, and off-page search engine optimization since all three aspects of SEO work together to show value to search engines.

When we take on new contractor digital marketing clients, we often find page speed, content quality, and backlink profile issues. Each of these SEO problems can be resolved through technical, on-page, and off-page search optimization. Let's explore more about each of these contractor SEO services:

• Technical SEO includes factors such as page speed, site security, XML sitemaps, site architecture, structured data, Open Graph tags, and broken pages. These impact how Google reads and traverses your content, and how visitors interact with your contractor website. You typically need the assistance of a web developer to improve technical SEO issues since they are often related to the platform or theme used on your contractor website. We have an internal team of web developers skilled in common platforms like WordPress and Shopify.
• On-Page SEO includes factors such as content silos, content writing, internal linking, keyword research, competitive analysis, frequently asked questions, page titles, meta tags, images, and videos. Improving these areas of the on-page SEO will allow search engines to better understand the value of your content and recognize your contractor as an authority on the subject matter. In addition, it will help increase important metrics like "time on site" for your visitors, which shows search engines you provided something of value to the search user. Never underestimate the value and importance of content creation within your contractor online marketing strategy.
• Off-Page SEO is essentially the state of your backlink profile, which is the number of backlinks and referring domains pointing to your contractor, the naturalness of your anchor text and link velocity, the authority and relevance of your backlinks, signals from social media channels, and many other factors. It is important to build natural backlinks to your website and interior pages to help search engines understand your website and content is deemed worthy of third-party recognition.

The important takeaway is to understand you can't focus on just one or two areas of search engine optimization in the digital marketing strategy of your contractor. If you build an incredibly fast website without useful content or quality backlinks you will likely never see the first page of search results, except in unique circumstances. The same is true for other scenarios where two areas of SEO have been optimized, but one was neglected. You have to evenly distribute your attention to ensure competitors can't bypass your contractor by simply completing all the required SEO checklist items.

Contractor Link Building Campaigns

We've already briefly discussed the importance of building authoritative links in off-page SEO, but it's worth mentioning again since contractors often don't understand this area of search engine optimization.

When you look at the first page of search results for competitive keywords and long-tail phrases, you will almost always find large retailers in product-specific search results and long-standing service providers in local search results. If you further review the exact pages of these search results you will often find the number of backlinks to those pages is far greater than those to your relevant contractor web pages. That is because search engines use backlinks to determine how authoritative your contractor website and content are on a particular subject.

To improve your own web pages, you have to build quality backlinks to your homepage and interior pages using white-hat SEO link building services. It is critical to see this as a long-term endeavor for the digital marketing strategy of your contractor. Don't get excited about this for a few weeks and build dozens of backlinks, then move on to something else for several months or years. That lack of commitment will only serve to keep your contractor off the first page of search results. You need to establish a link-building strategy that will provide consistent and steady growth of quality backlinks from relevant websites and social media platforms. Most of all, you need to keep your backlink profile natural by not overdoing exact-match phrases, buying numerous backlinks from private block networks (PBNs), or participating in any black-hat link-building methods.

We utilize a number of white-hat contractor link building techniques in our digital marketing services, including:

• Utilizing the “Skyscraper Technique” to build a bigger, better version of a ranked content article from a competitive contractor.
• Writing in-depth articles to have featured on third-party websites as a guest post, which includes a link back to your contractor website.
• Reaching out to high-authority websites related to contractors to suggest content improvements to existing articles that may have become outdated, or didn't cover a specific topic relevant to you.
• Adding your website to industry-specific directories by scanning competitors to see their most valuable business listings and NAP citations (Name, Address, Phone).

Online Reputation Management Services (ORM) for Contractors

Your online reputation is an important trust factor search engines use to determine rank positions, and your target audience uses it to make purchasing decisions. This is true for all types of purchases and decision-making, ranging from the selection of a local service provider, the purchase of a product on an ecommerce store, and even the selection of a contractor. People love reading about the positive experiences, and sometimes even more about negative experiences, that others had with your contractor.

For local service companies, we can help you develop a review generation program within your digital marketing to increase the rate at which past contractors leave reviews for your contractor. This often involves collecting reviews on Google My Business, UpCity, Yellow Pages, Angie's List, Yelp, and other online review collection websites.

If you run an ecommerce-focused contractor, we can help with the collection of product reviews and company reviews. For an ecommerce business, it is important to collect reviews for both the quality of your products and the customer service experience of your contractor. Online shoppers want to know the product they are purchasing is of sufficient quality or utility, but they also need to know you will be there to fulfill the order and answer questions after the sale.

For the reputation of professional service providers, such as doctors or attorneys, we can help establish protocols within your online marketing campaign for the collection of testimonials to ensure prospects always see a positive image of your contractors. This includes review generation, reputation monitoring, online reputation repair, survey campaigns, and social media growth. In some cases, even SEO can be used to help curate the best possible first-page results for the online reputation of your contractor.

The risk of ignoring your online reputation is the loss of long-term business, which often isn't noticed until significant damage has been accumulated. Take control of your online reputation today to ensure you always put forth a better image than your competition.

Content Marketing Strategies for Contractors

Most contractors use content marketing as a means of attracting, engaging, and retaining a high-interest audience by creating and sharing relevant blog articles, instructional videos, case studies, white papers, and other digital media. This digital marketing approach helps establish your contractor as an industry thought leader, while also helping you dominate organic search results and the attention span of your target audience.

When your target contractors begin to identify your contractor as the source of valuable advice or guidance you will find it is easier to guide them through your sales funnel. We help contractor digital marketing clients put together the right content marketing plan for their contractor.

It is important to identify your target audience before starting a content marketing plan. This will help you understand the best media format for the content, whether that be informative blog posts, detailed case studies, informal whitepapers, best-in-class listicles, or drip email campaigns. It will also help you determine the best delivery method, which can be from social media, search results, or some other medium.

We often help implement content marketing strategies for contractors that involve blog content, infographics, podcasts, videos, email campaigns, whitepapers, case studies, surveys, webinars, checklists, listicles, and lead magnets. We particularly like using the case study method because it is a powerful tool for showing expertise as a digital marketing service provider. These are all effective ways to market content if you implement them correctly for your contractor.

Social Media Advertising Services for Contractors

The use of social media ads in digital marketing involves paid ads being run on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram. These social media channels offer a quick and effective method for connecting to your target audience by allowing you to select interests, behaviors, and demographics. However, the downside can be the added cost of setting up the campaigns, creating landing pages, building out sales funnels, and performing conversion rate optimization to ensure the paid ads function as a proper lead generation or sales generation tool for your contractor.

By leveraging the data sources of social media platforms, contractors are able to hyper-target their audiences to deliver personalized content based on demographics, behaviors, interests, and other factors. While this is an enormous opportunity for most established contractors, it can be an expensive lesson for businesses that aren't ready to take full advantage of social media advertising.

We help contractors build out the necessary sales funnels and lead generation tools to make the most of their social media ads. We also recommend putting in place plans for conversion optimization and retargeting within these digital marketing services, both of which will help improve the return on ad spend you see within your campaigns. Let's not forget to mention the freshness of your ad creatives. When running contractor social media advertising campaigns, you have to be mindful of ad decay and ad fatigue to prevent your campaigns from becoming stagnant and suffering from degraded performance.

Search Engine Marketing Services for Contractors

The use of search engine marketing in digital marketing involves paid ads being run on search engines like Google and Bing. You will find that Google Ads and Bing Ads offer a quick and effective method for connecting your contractor to an engaged audience that is actively looking for your products or services. The downside is the cost of setting up an effective and scalable paid advertising campaign for your contractor, which often involves the creation of landing pages or sales funnels that are optimized for conversion opportunities.

We help contractors of all sizes build out the necessary landing pages and funnels to generate leads and grow revenue, which makes paid advertising a cost-effective digital marketing strategy. For any search engine marketing campaign, we recommend creating a plan for retargeting and conversion rate optimization to improve your return on investment.

Sales Funnel Development for Contractors

A sales funnel, or purchase funnel, is the visual representation of your customer's journey with your contractor. The illustration of a sales funnel, which is often referred to as a marketing funnel or revenue funnel, looks just like a physical funnel you'd use to pour a liquid into a container. The top of the funnel is always larger because it illustrates the large number of potential contractors that might interact with your contractor. The funnel narrows at the bottom to represent the various exit points within the sales process. Naturally, the bottom of the funnel is the smallest part because it represents the number of people who actually converted through the generation of a lead or the sale of a product.

The development of a sales funnel for contractors is more difficult than the explanation of its concepts. For example, some of the most successful sales funnels produce millions of dollars of value each day for their owners. To develop a sales funnel that produces value for your contractor, you have to put thought into the goal of the sales funnel and the type of sales funnel you want to implement.

There are numerous types of sales funnels, including self-liquidating funnels, automated webinar funnels, lead magnet funnels, premium client funnels, free plus shipping funnels, affiliate sales funnels, and dozens of others to consider for your contractor. When you work with one of our contractor-focused digital marketing specialists, you will have an experienced digital marketer to bounce ideas off to help you determine the best type of revenue funnel for your contractor. Alternatively, if you don't have an interest in being involved in the process, we can research more about your contractor to determine the best funnels to explore and test within your digital marketing campaign.

Conversion Rate Optimization for Contractors

There is almost no reason to neglect conversion rate optimization within contractor digital marketing campaigns. This is a critical aspect of any type of online marketing for contractors since it directly impacts the ability of the marketing service to provide value for the contractor paying for the marketing service.

Boosting conversion rates can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Before you pursue a CRO strategy for your contractor, it is important to understand what it is, how it works, and how to evaluate the service. This is a time-intensive process that involves plenty of iterative research and testing. What makes it most difficult is the CRO strategies that work for one contractor might not work for another contractor.

The most common contractor CRO strategies include reducing form fields on contact forms, testing different call-to-action phrases, creating attractive headlines, implementing a sense of urgency, fixing mobile website issues, improving page speed, adding exit-intent popups, defining value for the visitor, and adding trust and social proof signals.

True conversion rate optimization for contractors can become much more complex. To really dive into CRO, we have to fully understand your business offer, your competitors, the strengths and weaknesses of your value proposition, how visitors are currently interacting with your digital assets, the online reputation of your contractors, and many other factors.

Email Marketing Services for Contractors

You can use email marketing within a digital strategy to increase brand awareness, generate website traffic, drive sales and revenue, bring awareness to your social media profiles, engage past contractors, and gain valuable information about your target audience.

We help our digital marketing contractor clients use Mail Chimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact for their email marketing campaigns. These are robust email marketing tools to create subscriber lists, segment your audience, and even develop email marketing drip campaigns.

The most important part of email marketing is developing a plan to increase your subscribers. We help email marketing contractor clients build and nurture their email marketing lists by implementing email collection opportunities within lead magnets, exit-intent popups, checkout processes, squeeze pages, referral programs, affiliate programs, and numerous other methods.

Lead Generation Strategies for Contractors

For local service providers, the most important part of an inbound marketing program is lead generation. Not everything can be sold on the internet. For a lot of products and services, a phone conversation or in-person conversation is needed to close the sale. For these types of business industries, lead generation strategies are going to be critical.

There are many types of lead generation strategies to consider, all of which have been tried and implemented by our digital marketing team, for contractors and other professionals, at some point in the past. The most common lead gen strategies for contractors include the creation of helpful content, retargeting past website visitors, nurturing past contacts with email marketing, engaging visitors with live chat, developing free tools for visitors to use, creating referral programs and affiliate programs, creating video content that can be shared online, setting up free webinars for visitors to attend, or offering helpful downloadable content in a lead magnet.

For most contractor digital marketing campaigns where lead generation is a primary goal, our team will develop and implement one or more lead gen strategies in your digital assets to test what works best for your contractor.

Video Marketing for Contractors

As a full-service digital marketing firm for contractors, we have our own in-house video production and video marketing department. This has been extremely helpful for contractor content marketing strategies that required creative video assets. More importantly, we've used our video production department for the creation of video ads on YouTube and video marketing within Facebook Ads campaigns. There are many great applications for video production within a digital marketing strategy for your contractor. You can use videos to demonstrate unique products, teach new concepts, and improve visitor duration. You can also implement videos within digital advertising campaigns to bring life to paid campaigns.

Why You Should Invest in Digital Marketing for Your Contractor

If you manage a contractor that relies on selling a product or service you will eventually consider some form of marketing to improve revenue. There are many reasons to consider digital marketing over other, more traditional, marketing strategies for your contractor. Let's go over some of the great reasons to implement a digital marketing strategy within your contractor:

• Digital marketing for contractors is often more affordable than other forms of marketing because it can be started at a low amount and scaled as success is measured.
• With the use of valuable reporting tools like Google Analytics, you can get better insights into how many visitors interacted with your brand, how long your marketing efforts kept their attention, and if you were able to bring them back to your website in the days, weeks, or months after their first interaction.
• Everyone is constantly on their phones, tablets, and desktop computers. Why not choose a marketing format and medium that is able to follow your target audience anywhere they go in life?
• The flexibility of digital advertising is far greater than print marketing, billboard ads, television ads, or radio commercials that can't be updated as easily.
• Online marketing for contractors provides the best capacity for user engagement. Good luck getting people to comment, like, or share any non-digital advertisements you run for your contractors.

How to Develop a Digital Marketing Program for Contractors

Before starting a digital marketing campaign for your contractor it is important to create a plan with measurable business goals. You want to ensure everyone involved understands the ultimate goal of the digital marketing service to prevent spending time on ideas that won't positively impact your contractor.

With a clear set of business goals in place for your contractors, you can move on to identifying a target audience. It is important to understand who you are targeting. This helps you tailor your contractor digital marketing efforts to platforms your audience engages in and that you use messaging that resonates with your target audience.

Now that you understand your business goals and your target customer, you can make an informed decision regarding the needs and search intent of your audience. This will help ensure your contractors focus on the right keywords for your digital marketing and you align your content marketing strategies with the needs of your audience.

If you plan to incorporate search engine optimization in the digital strategy of your contractor, make that your first priority. The slowest moving digital marketing tactic for contractors, and even other industries, is search engine optimization. The improvements you make to your website, your content, and your backlinks can take weeks or months for search engines to fully recognize and have an impact on your rankings.

This is a great time to consider paid advertising for your contractor website, or other digital assets. However, before sending paid traffic to your homepage, product page, or service page, you should consider the creation of a landing page or sales funnel. Most paid advertising campaigns for contractors that have high bounce rates and low conversion rates make the mistake of sending traffic to a page that isn't optimized to convert a cold audience. The best lead generation strategies for contractors employ the use of splash pages and sales funnels to lead people to the desired marketing outcome.

Now that plans are in place for bringing traffic to your contractor, you should consider how to best interact with those visitors after they leave your website. Not everyone who visits your website, landing page, or sales funnel will convert on the first visit. You should consider options to build an email marketing list, offer SMS alerts for new offers, or set up tracking pixels to retarget recent visitors to your website.

When all of these digital marketing strategies are in place for your contractor you are ready to enter the testing and optimization phase. This involves constantly measuring the success of your contractor-focused campaigns, looking for areas of improvement, and even trying new ideas that you read about in case studies or white papers. You should always be in a state of conversion rate optimization throughout all aspects of the digital marketing campaign of your contractor.

Why Choose WebCitz for Your Contractor Internet Marketing

We want to be the digital marketing partner of your contractor! There are many factors to consider when researching digital marketing agencies for contractors. With more than 18 years of experience, you know you can trust the internet marketing strategies and tactics we suggest for your contractor. These are often the same digital marketing tactics we use for our own lead generation and conversion rate optimization services. In fact, you are likely visiting our website because of the effective implementation of our own digital marketing campaign.

Most importantly though, you should choose our digital marketing agency because you feel confident we are the right team for your contractor. Here are a few reasons we suggest considering our digital marketers for your contractor:

• We have been in business since 2004, which means we have more than 18 years of experience.
• Our primary source for leads from contractors is our own digital marketing strategies.
• You likely found our website after performing an online search for a service we offer, such as "top contractor digital marketing".
• We do not outsource contractor digital marketing services since we have our own marketing team.
• If you call us during normal business hours, your contractors will likely get an answer from one of our teammates within a few rings.
• We have extensive experience in WordPress and Shopify for any online marketing strategies that involve website changes.

When it comes time for your contractor to start the search for a digital marketing agency, we hope you keep our internet marketers in mind for the task. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to send an email or give us a call to start a discussion with the helpful staff at our internet marketing firm.

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