Every home services company wants to know: How can a contractor increase sales? What are the best ways to find new leads for contractors in the HVAC, home performance, and solar industries? While there are many approaches, from paid search advertising to email, content marketing remains a key cornerstone to successful online marketing.
For many companies, “content marketing” is just a fancy way of saying “writing a couple of paragraphs every month or so and clicking publish.” But while a consistent stream of informative blog posts can generate leads for your business, digital marketing practices are evolving and you should, too.
Following up on a recent Energy Circle webinar, “Is Your Content Still Cutting It?”, we’re going to highlight how you can improve your content game and transition from “pretty good” to “best in your service area” when it comes to creating content that helps grow your insulation, solar, or HVAC business.
Why Content Marketing Still Matters
In the age of Google Ads and social media marketing, it can be easy to overlook the importance of creating organic content:
1. Content marketing is the most cost-effective marketing strategy available—if you’re motivated to write and publish yourself, you can even do it for free!
Content marketing pays off in the long run! (Chart credit: Kapost)
2. Success with content marketing can compound over time, with older content continuing to generate leads, improve your company’s search engine rankings, and introduce you to new customers. With paid search, on the other hand, you’re only as good as your current campaigns.
3. Content marketing can improve the success of your paid search advertising and reduce ad spend, so if you’re committed to both types of marketing, you can double dip!
Content Marketing Then vs Content Marketing in 2022
Not so long ago, you were likely doing pretty well if your business had a website with a few landing pages highlighting general services and a blog that posted new articles fairly regularly throughout the year. In many service areas, that might have given you a solid leg up on the local competition.
Is your blog in here? This is the “sea of sameness” many potential customers face while comparing contractor websites—it’s time to do something new to stand out!
Today, digital marketing is the default for basically any home services contractor, and everyone’s got their own blog. What might have worked a few years ago isn’t providing the same returns anymore—the contractors who stand out today are creating more advanced content and publishing a variety of content types.
What Are the Different Content Types Available for Your Business?
There are many different formats you can use to share relevant, educational information about your services and your company—not just blogs. Different content types include:
-
Blogs
-
Landing pages
-
Case studies
-
City pages
-
Infographics
-
Checklists
-
Video
-
Email
-
Organic social media posts
Contractors attract new customers online by showing them the information they’re looking for in their preferred format. Some of them like to read. Others like a visual explanation. And still others are visiting your website hoping to find a helpful video. Offering a variety of content is a great way to capture a wide range of customers.
And, you don’t have to choose just one content type per topic…
Advanced Content Strategy Incorporates Multiple Content Types
The best converting landing pages on your website explain the services you offer (and their benefits) and showcase your company’s expertise. So why not use more than one content type to accomplish this?
Let’s see how this works in practice: Here are a few examples of how expanding a single service or topic into multiple content types is one of the best ways to advertise your contracting business:
-
Heat pump technology is still new for many homeowners, so HVAC companies can go the extra mile to sell this upgrade. Create a videographic explaining the benefits of heat pump installation and add it to your existing heat pump landing page. You can take that same video (or perhaps an edited-down snippet) and promote it across your social media channels, too. (This handy infographic outlines the key components of an advanced heat pump landing page.)
-
Homeowners often ask home performance contractors how they can prepare for a home energy audit. Create a checklist (or turn it into an infographic with some visual flair) and write up a blog post explaining how homeowners will benefit. Link to that blog post from your audit services landing page, and use a shortened bulleted list version for an email campaign.
-
Case studies show homeowners what solar installation would look like on their homes and remind people that you’re a local business with local experience (city pages come in handy for this, too!). Many successful solar companies have a growing library of case study pages with images and video footage of both the installation process and the final result. (Watch our webinar, “Using Case Studies to Tell Your Story: Showing the Value of Your Work,” for more on case study pages.)
BONUS: The average Google search result page (SERP) reserves a big chunk of real estate for video and image results. If all you’re publishing is written text, then you’re already conceding that space to competing companies. So multimedia posts not only better serve potential customers, but also help maximize your odds of ranking organically.
Check Out These Real-World Results of a Good Content Strategy
We’ve outlined how to think bigger when it comes to creating new content, and we’ve given examples of how you can apply this concept to your own marketing efforts. Let’s close out by showing what happened when one of our own HVAC clients adopted this strategy to break into the heat pump market in 2018.
The company was on the smaller side, and without the resources to pay upfront for expensive paid search campaigns that could give them quick momentum. But they did have patience, and our approach for them was a targeted content marketing strategy and search engine optimization (SEO) plan.
The results speak for themselves:
-
More than 100 leads per month
-
Enormous growth in organic traffic and leads
-
Significant reduction in average cost-per-conversion
The cornerstone of our strategy was high-quality content—and different types of it. Their heat pump landing pages use videos, infographics, images, and plenty of easy-to-read bulleted lists.
We also kept the blog machine rolling (because yes, blog posts still generate leads), publishing more than 55 separate articles to date exploring heat pump capabilities, benefits, education, and more (yes, you definitely can come up with 50+ different ways to talk about heat pumps!).
With more options in the digital marketing arsenal than ever before, it can be easy to lose focus on the importance of a solid content foundation and strategy. But the numbers speak for themselves: from blogs and infographics to multimedia approaches, there’s no losing with a strong content strategy.