Whether you want homeowners to find your home service business or you want home service companies to find out about your new product or software, it’s important to maximize your social media visibility and have high search engine rankings.

Do you want more service calls for your plumbing or HVAC business? Do you want more leads to sell the latest app your company has developed to make life easier for home service technicians? If so, content marketing is the key to being seen.

Content marketing has a simple premise: By providing compelling and useful information to potential customers, you can create a positive cycle of engagement and visibility that will allow more people to find your business.

With that in mind, here are some examples of good, useful content that can be used to strengthen your company’s brand and SEO:

• Blogs

• Videos

• White papers

• Webinars

• Earned media coverage

We’ll talk about these types of content in detail, but first let’s discuss:

Social media

Once you’ve created the blogs, press releases, videos or white papers, it’s important to promote them using social media. You have to go where the eyes are to get your company’s message out. In 2018, those eyes are found on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Using social media to its full advantage takes more than indiscriminately posting tweets, though. Making the most of social media channels means knowing what platforms reach what segments of the audience you’re after.  Increased social media visibility for your company is one of the factors that feeds into good search engine rankings.

Blogs

Creating blogs is one of the basic building blocks of a good content marketing strategy. Blogging is an excellent medium for offering real-world examples of why customers should call your home service business instead of a competitor. It can allow your B2B company to illustrate how its products can solve the pain points of home service companies and position you as a true expert in the industry.

By becoming a genuine and useful source of knowledge, you’ll gain the trust of your audience. Earning a reputation as a subject matter expert means they will be more likely to become customers.

Be sure to offer real-world examples of how customers can benefit from your services in the blogs. Offer advice on solutions to common problems and pain points. Answer questions about recurring issues and obstacles that individuals and companies encounter.

To increase visibility, keep in mind best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) when writing blogs. Identify the best keywords to attract your target audience by analyzing your business. These keywords can be carefully incorporated into the blogs to optimize it for the criteria that search engines use to rank the importance of content; however, there can also be too much of a good thing. Cramming as many keywords as possible into a blog will get it penalized by Google or other search engines, making it less likely for people to find.

Consistently posting blogs will mean increased visibility over time. It will become easier for people to find as it becomes more popular and more people visit it. Pay attention to the wants and needs of potential customers. Tailoring the content to their interests will, in turn, help attract a larger audience.

Examples:

ServiceTitan, a provider of business management software for residential HVAC, plumbing, and electrical businesses, regularly posts informative blogs at https://blog.servicetitan.com/.

Videos

Content marketing involves more than just the written word. Online videos are an integral part of promoting your business. Using a video on a landing page can increase conversation rates by 80 percent, according to some studies. Companies that regularly use video content can boost their revenues 49 percent faster than those that don’t.

Remember, though. Videos don’t have to be high-budget productions, but keep these best practices in mind:

• Shorter is better. Most viewers only spend 10 seconds or less watching a video. Catch their attention early and make every second matter.

• Remember to smile. It’s best to levy content with a bit of humor now and then. It will keep viewers engaged.

• SEO matters. Utilizing video requires the same attention to best SEO practices as any other aspect of content marketing. Include proper keywords in the title and description.

Examples:

• The New Flat Rate, which offers a menu price system for service experts, makes good use of videos on YouTube.

• Gold Star Service, based in Hicksville, New York, uses videos to engage its Facebook fans.

White papers and webinars

There are types of content that can especially benefit B2B companies in marketing to home service businesses: white papers and webinars.

White papers are used to present complex subjects in a clear, convincing manner. They are targeted at being easily understood by the people responsible for buying products and services and being technical enough to interest decision-makers.

After a white paper is completed, it can be used as a source to generate even more content such as infographics, blog posts or social media posts.

Webinars, which are live videos that focus on solving a problem or teach the audience how to use a product, can be used to increase sales and generate leads. If they are recorded, they can be used to continue generating visibility through social media promotion.

Media coverage and press releases

You don’t have to produce all the content needed to promote your company. One of the secrets to marketing success is getting online and traditional media outlets to write about your business — for free — instead of paying for advertisements.

Earning free coverage takes discipline and consistency. You can begin by sending press releases out that position you and your company as subject matter experts. It takes time, but, as they become familiar with your name and expertise, trade media and the press will begin to view you as a source for industry information and quotes.

Press releases not only get your name out in front of the media and trade publications, but they can provide an SEO benefit. Press releases have the potential to be posted to sites across the nation, creating hundreds of links back your website. This factors into improved ranking on major search engines.

Mobile-friendly website

Content marketing is useless if you don’t have a well-designed website, which is the main face that your business presents to the world. It’s an important resource for customers wanting to learn about your business. It provides the basis for internet search engines to collect the information that’s summarized for potential customers.

A website provides a home for all the content produced for your business. It’s where you post your blogs, press releases and videos.

An important note: when looking for home service businesses to help with a problem, customers are using their smartphones to google or use voice search. They can find your competitors just as well as you. Your website must be designed to provide a mobile friendly browsing experience, or your visibility will suffer.

If you need help

Content marketing for home service business and the companies that serve them can require a substantial investment in time. It also requires expertise to manage. If content marketing is not a natural fit for your staff or if the time to invest is in it just not there, partnering with an experienced home service and B2B public relations agency might be the solution you need.