Question for y’all. Why do some businesses get incredible results with digital marketing while others fail miserably?
What kind of strategies do winners follow that losers don’t?
Well, a lot goes into answering this and you should check out our other posts to learn more about different strategies that work but here’s the thing. The best way to learn what works is to look at businesses that are already killing it.
We’re talking about other restoration companies, either in your local area or outside, that are getting all the clicks, leads and sales.
Today, we’ll show you how to do some competitor analysis and learn what works and what doesn’t. “Funnel hacking” is the fancy nickname for this process.
After that, we’ll go over 3 restoration marketing examples that you should model or at least take a look at.
Let’s jump right in!
Why "Hack" Competitors' Conversion Funnels
Funnel hacking is a process of going through and analyzing competitors’ funnels. For those who don’t know, a conversion funnel is the entire conversion process a person goes through – from seeing an ad and clicking on it to landing on your website and calling your business.
The reason you want to do this is to see why someone is winning and others are losing. This way, you can avoid making mistakes losers are making and focus on what produces results.
We’ll show you how to find competitors’ best-performing ads, website pages from which they’re getting most of their traffic, etc.
SEO and PPC
First way we’re going to funnel-hack a competitor is through Google.
By manually typing keywords relevant to your business and area, you can see who is running ads and whose sites and GMB listings are ranking on the first page.
This is a great way to kick things off but you may not get the full picture by only doing a manual search.
You may not see all ads your competitors are running if you’re, for example, not using some of the keywords they’re targeting. They also may be targeting a very specific audience.
Google ads impression share
In case you have run Google ads before, you can see who you’re competing against in the Auction Insights tool inside your Google Ads account.
Inside Auction Insights, you can find which competitor is getting the most amount of impressions, how high do their ads rank, etc.
Note that impression share is not something you should focus on a lot if your goal is conversions.
The only time you could target a very high impression share is when your goal is visibility only and you don’t mind losing some money to achieve that goal.
Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool
This is another tool you can use for funnel hacking.
It allows you to check which ads are showing up for a certain keyword in an area and on the device you select.
Just log into your Google Ads account and you’ll be able to use this tool. Here’s how it looks like:
This tool is great for people who are just starting out in PPC.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a great tool for analyzing competitors’ SEO. It helps you see how much traffic are they getting, their most visited pages, keywords they are ranking for, etc.
It’s free and easy to use. Just enter a domain into Ubersuggest and you’ll get their traffic estimates quickly.
Note that if your area is small, there might not be enough data for Ubersuggest to show you the most accurate results.
SEMRush and Ahrefs
SEMRush and Ahrefs are premium tools used for in-depth competitor analysis and finding great keywords to target.
SEMRush helps you find competitors’ ads and see how much traffic they’re getting from those ads.
Ahrefs is an SEO tool and you can use it to analyze competitors’ websites, same as with Ubersuggest, but Ahrefs gives you much more in-depth data.
Note that both tools are very expensive and that, as a small business owner, you probably don’t need them anyway.
However, if you’re up against the tougher competition and want premium software to help you with your SEO and PPC efforts, get these tools.
To analyze competitors’ Facebook marketing, specifically the ads they’re running, you can leverage the Facebook Ad Library.
Most Facebook pages will have the Page Transparency setting which you can use to see if a competitor is running ads or not. If they do, you can go to their Ad Library and take a look at their ads. More about this in just a bit.
Website
Manually go through competitors’ websites. Once you go through a couple of top-performing websites, you’ll notice some patterns.
Usually, websites that rank high and get a lot of traffic through paid ads are very well optimized for conversions. Otherwise, they wouldn’t yield their owners enough results to keep spending money on ads.
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3 Restoration Marketing Examples that Rock!
Alright, now that we have equipped you with the knowledge necessary to perform competitor analysis, it’s time to look at some companies that are doing great with digital marketing.
The first two you’ve probably heard of. These will be big brands that operate across the entire US. The last one is a more localized and lesser-known brand.
It’s important to keep in mind that the things we’ll take a look at are something ANYBODY can do, regardless of the company size.
We know that things like paid sponsorships and franchisees are out of many small businesses’ reach and that’s why we won’t even mention those. Instead, we’ll go over simple things like social media, SEO, and PPC.
Those are things that YOU can – and should – do, my friend. Let’s dive right in.
SERVPRO
These guys are giants. They seem to be everywhere, both physically and digitally. Let’s take a look at their Facebook page.
Over 90,000 followers. We both can agree that that’s a lot. But why do they have so many followers?
Well, if you take a look at their page and analyze their content, you’ll see that what they post is actually interesting (in most cases).
They’re constantly up with trends and they put a lot of focus on visuals (images, videos). If we scroll down to the Page Transparency option, we can see that they are running ads.
Let’s take a look at some of their ads. Just click on Go to Ad Library.
Voila! Now we can see all of their ads.
You can do this for almost any page by the way.
A good tip you can use is to bump up your advertising on Facebook after events like floods and storms because a lot more people would need your service in those situations.
But I am not SERVPRO. They have unlimited money to spend on ads. I can’t do that!
And neither you should.
The goal with this is just for you to learn how to spot what your closest competitors are doing, take what works, and model after that.
SERVPRO can undoubtedly run these kinds of ads forever, but perhaps there’s a particular ad that you could recreate (not copy but model)?
If an ad has been running for a long time, it’s likely producing some results, whether that’s new followers, email subscribers, website visitors, or even leads and sales. Take that kind of an ad and test that for your own business.
When it comes to their website, it’s very good. It looks amazing, the content “depth” is on point, and all of their pages are optimized for search.
Also, if we take a look at their tags, we can see that they’re running remarketing ads to their website visitors.
To be able to view the certain website’s tags, you’ll need a free Chrome extension called Tag Assistant Legacy. It allows you to see all Google tags a website is using.
Here’s the thing – everybody should be having conversion tracking installed and remarketing campaigns up and running. However, most small, or even bigger businesses still don’t.
Paul Davis
Another big name in the restoration industry. However, their Facebook page has fewer likes than SERVPRO at around 9,000.
They’re also running Facebook ads and have an amazing website.
If you take a look at their site, it’s optimized very well. They also focus a lot on content and email marketing.
Email marketing can be incredibly helpful with lead generation. However, a ton of businesses, especially smaller ones, are still not utilizing it.
These things are not hard, nor time-demanding to implement. With new AI tools, you can post blogs at a bigger scale and also write emails for your subscribers.
Of course, it goes without saying that you should personalize the content to your audience.
Learn why YOU should implement email marketing in your overall marketing strategy. Do yourself a favor and check that article out.
BioClean CT
These guys are a smaller company but they’re stilling killing it online.
Let’s start from social. If you take a look at their Facebook page, you’ll see a few things:
- Visually appealing, interesting content (1)
- An autoresponder that automatically replies to certain messages (2)
- Option to book an appointment with available hours on their end (3)
Their Facebook page produces great results. For a local business, over 700 likes is great. They’re not running any ads so let’s jump to their website.
What we like about their site, besides being very user-friendly and optimized for conversions, is that they focus a lot on content.
In fact, a lot of their articles rank on Google for specific questions. What ends up happening is that people who discover them through their blog end up calling them and buying their services.
Learn more about content marketing for restoration companies.
And that sums it up! Hope you got some valuable takeaways from this post. If you did, share it with others who might benefit from this article.
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