Home Service Providers: Where To Spend Your 2024 Marketing Budget

The challenge for many businesses within the home service industry will be figuring out how to optimize a smaller budget at a time when digital marketing is more important than ever. Consumer behavior has changed drastically in the past few months. According to new data from IBM’s U.S. Retail Index, the pandemic accelerated the shift away from physical stores to e-commerce by nearly five years. Consumers are online and looking to make purchases from the safety of their own homes.

The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends that small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8 percent of their revenues to marketing.

There are many other factors to consider when determining a budget such as the company size, industry, target market, and growth stage. According to Wordstream, younger companies under five years old should spend 12-20% of gross revenue on marketing. Older companies that have established some level of market share should commit 6-12%.

Unlike traditional advertising efforts, digital marketing is easy to measure but difficult to plan. There are tons of digital marketing tactics that your company could be using, but the trick is to craft a strategy that utilizes the tools that will best benefit your business.

How you allocate your budget can be determined by measuring the return on investment (ROI) for each tactic in order to prioritize your investments.

Optimize your return on investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) is a measure of how effective your investments are at generating income. This measurement can help you determine how successful your marketing campaigns are. To calculate ROI, first subtract the cost from the revenue and then divide this number by the cost of the investment.

However, determining one overall marketing ROI benchmark is challenging because all marketing tactics are different. What's considered a "good ROI" can vary based on the type of marketing strategy, your distribution channels, and your industry.

Here is a formula created by Hubspot to measure marketing ROI:

[((number of leads x lead-to-customer rate x average sales price) - cost) ÷ cost] x 100.

• Number of leads: How many people converted to a lead?
• Lead-to-customer rate: What percentage of leads became a customer?
• Average sales price: The average price of your product or service.
• Cost: How much you spent on creating and promoting the campaign, including ad spend, hourly wages, and producing the content.

Drive organic traffic with search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website so that search engines will recognize it as authoritative and relevant to users. SEO consists of on-page and off-page SEO, which includes optimizing elements such as page titles, headers, and meta descriptions, writing guest blogs, and link earning.

Following good SEO practices not only helps the search experience but also helps improve the user experience and performance of your site. The goal is to keep users engaged and on your site longer to help search engines and visitors see your site as authoritative, useful, and user-friendly.

The most important thing to remember about SEO is that it’s an ongoing effort, so you must continuously take the time to optimize your site.

Earn valuable leads with paid ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are an excellent way for you to drive valuable leads for your business. PPC is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. According to Unbounce, users who arrive at a retailer's site from paid ads are 50% more likely to convert than organic traffic.

Thanks to platforms like Google Ads and Google Analytics, determining the ROI of your paid search campaigns is simple. These platforms allow you to set campaign objectives and set up conversion tracking for accurate reporting.

Improve your ranking with content marketing

An important step to ranking on Google is to create relevant, useful content. Content doesn’t only include written articles. Content marketing encompasses many tactics including video, podcasts, infographics, downloadable guides, and email.

According to an infographic by DemandMetric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing but generates three times as many leads.

Email marketing typically produces the highest ROI of any content marketing tactic and 59% of marketers cite email as their top source of ROI. According to Oberlo, for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42.

Video marketing produces some of the highest engagement rates. According to HubSpot, 72% of consumers prefer to watch a video about a product than read a product description and more than 50% of consumers want to see videos from brands more than any other type of content.

Overall, a successful content marketing strategy will establish your brand as authoritative and credible, increase traffic to your site, and convert visitors into leads.

Market smart

After determining your budget, allocate it toward the tactics that you believe will deliver the biggest return on investment (ROI) for your business.