Article By Bogdan Krstic
Fact-checked and written by a human ✔️
With all the noise on the internet, digital marketing can seem like a difficult and complex thing to do.
If you own a restoration business and would like to learn how to start marketing your services online in a simple, structured way, keep reading.
In this article, you’ll learn everything you need about digital marketing for restoration companies and how to generate more phone calls using the internet!
Why Even Focus on Digital Marketing
Okay, so first of all, why even focus on digital marketing for your restoration company? Why invest your valuable time and hard-earned money into it?
Let’s cover some key benefits.
First, you can make it really, really targeted. You can reach a very specific group of people very easily and efficiently.
Let’s say that you want to reach people that make $100,000 per year. That’s your goal, and you want to make offers to them only. You can do that with digital marketing very efficiently.
You can go even deeper, let’s say that you want to reach people who make over $100,000 per year, but they’re only males, who are married and have children and are over the age of 40.
You can do that with digital marketing.
Next, it’s cost-effective.
Every dollar you spend on online marketing is very valuable.
You can easily get feedback on your ads and see what works what doesn’t very, very quickly. This will help you to quickly optimize and get the results you want.
Personalization is also a factor. What I mean by this is, when you target a specific group of people, you can speak their language, you can talk to them, and they will respond better because the offer is personalized towards them.
We’ll show you how to do this, of course.
And lastly, it’s very measurable, can easily measure growth, you can easily measure whether you have achieved your goals or not. Let’s say that you’ve wanted to reach 1,000 people. Well, you can easily see this inside your analytics dashboard. More about that later on.
Like what you see? Book a free 30-minute consultation call!
Terms You Need to Know
Here are some digital marketing terms you need to know
Now, you don’t need to memorize them. But you need to understand what they mean.
A/B Testing
The first term is A/B testing. A/B testing also called split testing, is a process of testing multiple advertisements to see which one performs the best.
You can test anything from images, videos, ad copy, audiences you’re targeting, etc. A/B testing is essential in any marketing campaign if you want to reduce your ad spend and increase your margins over time.
Analytics
Analytics will allow you to see how our campaigns perform, what things can be proved, what causes certain problems, optimization opportunities, and all of your stats, everything from clicks, views, the number of leads you got, etc.
Conversion Rate
Conversion is the desired action from a marketing campaign. In shopping campaigns, a purchase is considered a conversion. In call campaigns, a phone call is a conversion.
Conversions are what you want to get out out of a campaign, the end goal.
Now, a conversion rate is a percentage of people who have completed the desired action of yours from a total number of people who have engaged with your ad.
Let’s say that 100 people clicked on your ad, and out of those 100, 10 people have called you. That is a 10% conversion rate.
Cost Per Acquisition
Cost per acquisition, or CPA for short, is an average cost of conversion in your marketing campaigns.
For example, you have spent $1,000 on your ads and got 10 conversions, your CPA would be $100.
Click-through Rate
Click-through rate, or CTR for short, is a percentage of people who have clicked on your ad out of all people who had seen it.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value, or CLTV. This one is really important as it shows the total value of a person to a business during the entire relationship.
So all purchases they have made with a business, not just one individual purchase.
This is a very valuable metric as it is used to calculate the desired CPA and other metrics.
Email List
An email list is a list of your prospects’ emails.
It’s built by offering an incentive to your audience and ask for their email in exchange for that incentive.
An incentive can be anything from a small product, discount, free trial, etc.
For a restoration company, a good incentive would be an email in exchange for a free estimate.
An email list is a very valuable asset. It’s a list of prospects interested in your product or service, and you can market to that list whenever and however you want.
Lead
Lead is a qualified prospect. Anyone who has shown interest in your service – members of your email list, people who call you on the phone, etc.
Generally, a lead is easier to convert to a sale than a cold visitor because you’ve already helped them out for free, you’ve given them that free incentive.
Most of your marketing campaigns will be focused on generating leads.
Organic and Paid Traffic
Lastly, we have organic and paid traffic.
The term traffic stands for all people who visit your business and online, it’s usually associated with your website visitors.
Organic traffic is traffic to get from free sources like social media posts, search results, referrals, direct traffic, links to your website, etc.
Paid traffic is all traffic you get from paid sources like sponsored posts, search ads, video ads, etc.
Organic traffic is increased by building a following on different platforms like YouTube and Facebook, ranking in search results for keywords related to your business, getting links from other websites to your website, etc.
Paid traffic is increased by creating better ads with bigger ad spend.
Should you focus on organic or paid traffic in your business?
We suggest that you do both.
Organic traffic is free, but it takes a lot of time to build up. For example, it can take up to six months for your website to rank Google for a specific keyword.
Paid traffic is usually expensive, but you can get results almost instantly. Don’t be afraid of spending money on ads. With paid advertising, you can get almost immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
Calculating CLTV
Before you start running any marketing campaigns, you need to know who your customers are and then calculate CLTV.
What do I mean by this? You need to know who are you going to target. We mentioned that you can make your campaigns very targeted, but who are you specifically going to target?
Ask yourself these questions:
- Who are your customers?
You don’t want to just go with an attitude: “I will just, you know, remove molds and repair water damage”.
Instead, go deeper into the matter of who do you want to serve.
Do these people make a lot of money? Do they have families?
- Where are they?
This one is self-explanatory. When you run marketing campaigns, you need to set the location you’re going to target.
- Why should they pick you over your competitors?
You have competitors. And some of them might even have cheaper prices than you.
And while there are people who look only for the cheapest price, a lot of people will be willing to pay a bigger price, just to have the job done in the best way possible.
Let’s say that a certain company removes mold from people’s homes for a very cheap price.
And the bulk of that mold comes back after two or three weeks. These people haven’t done a good job. The people who have ordered a service from this company have paid the cheaper price, but they haven’t gotten the best service.
They haven’t solved their problem.
If you have a more expensive price in the market, you need to come up with a way to hook people into your business and get them to order from you.
Think about these questions. And once you have answers to them, it will make everything 100 times easier.
With CLTV, you also need to understand:
- Average Order Value
How much do you make per client?
- Order Frequency
How many times does a client buy your services?
Is it once per year? Two years?
- Profit
How much do you profit per client?
Note that there isn’t an official formula for CLTV. It all depends on your specific business.
However, having an idea of how much each client is worth to you, in the long run, will help you realize how much you should spend on ads to get a client.
This will give you an advantage over competitors who don’t know what they’re doing.
Creating a Website
In case you already have a website, you should at least consider implementing the following site structure we’ll layout, in case you haven’t done so already.
Google usually ranks these kinds of sites on page one.
Build a website with a home page and a special page for each of your services.
You shouldn’t just list all of your services on your homepage. Instead, you should create an individual page for each of your services and go in-depth.
Also add an about page, contact page, and legal pages like privacy policy, and terms of service.
You can find templates for legal pages online if you don’t know how to create them.
It’s important to point out that your website doesn’t have to look special. Focus on the most important factors listed below while having a decent design and you’re good to go:
- Mobile-friendly design
- Fast loading time
- In-depth content
- Optimized for generating leads
Picking a Platform to Market on
Different platforms are used by different people. Top marketing platforms include:
- YouTube
Which one should you market on?
Instagram is used by a younger audience. So it might not be the best fit for your business.
LinkedIn is great for B2B services. But for restoration, which is an emergency service, it might not be the best pick.
It’s better for businesses like, for example, consulting.
Our Pick - Google!
This brings us to our pick, which is Google.
Google is a great platform for businesses that sell products or services that people need in a very specific moment: restoration service, car insurance, apartments for rent, etc.
Why?
Because of strong intent.
Think about it. When people type in water damage repair in a certain city or area, you know that they need it right at that moment. Not a week after.
So if your ads show up once users type their query in Google, there’s a high chance they will call you.
It’s an emergency service. They need it right now.
That’s why Google is a great platform for businesses selling emergency services to market on.
And here are some interesting Google Ads statistics to show you why Google Ads work.
That sums it up! Hope this post was helpful to you. Let us know in the comments what you think.
If you need more help, make sure to book a free consultation call with us by clicking the button below. Have a great day!
Bogdan is a restoration SEO expert with over 3 years of experience helping businesses grow. He is passionate about the restoration niche because of how underserved it is, and RepairSprout is the business he started and works on with joy every day. When he is not helping restoration companies grow, he works out, takes long walks, and watches Suits, which is completely ironic given how rarely he dresses up in a suit himself.