Ads Guide

As we approach the summer months, homeowners are busy making plans to improve their homes and property. And with more people working from home than ever this year, a lot of homeowners are very eager to make their homes as comfortable and beautiful as possible. If you own a home improvement company, you're making plans to target homeowners with digital marketing so they choose YOU for all of their home improvement needs. With that in mind, here's how home improvement companies can use paid search ads to find customers.

Why should home improvement companies use paid search ads to find customers?

Paid search is an effective marketing strategy for a variety of businesses hoping to target potential customers. For home remodelers and other home improvement companies, it can be difficult to stand out from a crowded field. With paid search, you help increase the chances of showing up at the top of a potential customers' search results and growing your business. But your paid search ad campaign needs to be done right in order to be effective.

What are paid search ads?

With paid search ad campaigns, you're specifically targeting internet users who are searching for something related to your business. Let's say someone searches "roof remodel." Roof remodeling companies would use paid search ads to display an ad for their business when someone enters related search terms and keywords. This varies from other forms of ad campaigns. For example, display ads show up on other websites while someone is browsing unrelated content. They're often used as a remarketing or retargeting effort. They can increase brand awareness and visibility, but they don't serve quite the same purpose as a paid search campaign. Another great thing about paid search ads is that they can be done in a pay-per-click fashion. That means home improvement companies can bid for ad placement in a search engine's sponsored links for keywords related to your home improvement. Then, your business pays the search engine (often through Google Ads) a small fee for each click. Now, here's how to put these ad campaigns to work for you.

How home improvement companies can use paid search to target potential customers

  Define your target market

Optimize your website for user experience and SEO

Create your ad campaigns

Identify your target market

The first thing your home improvement company needs to do is define your target market. This involves getting really specific about the potential customers you have the highest chance of converting into paying customers. Here are a few ways to do this:

Consider your current customers and their demographics. Chances are, those same demographics will be useful in targeting new customers. Some of the demographics to look at include age, stage of life, spending patterns, location, and interests.

Check out your competition. Look at their current customer base and see how it differs from yours and what they're doing to build their business.

Utilize social media analytics. Take a look at your social media followers. This is another way to learn about your customer demographics, as well as identifying people who MIGHT be interested in your services.

Create a target market report. This report will include all of the information you've compiled in one neat and tidy place. That way, you'll have all of the information in one place when you need it to create paid search ads. Reports can assess where your traffic and leads are coming from, what content they interacted with, if and when they converted, and how long it took for them to become a customer, essentially each step of the marketing funnel. We break down how to build a marketing report in this post.

Optimize your website

Is optimizing your website for SEO and user experience REALLY that important? Take a look at some of these surprising statistics about consumers and websites, and you'll see why the answer is a big YES:

It takes about 50 milliseconds (that's 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site and if they'll stay.

An estimated 87% of shoppers begin product/service searches online

57% of internet users say they wouldn't recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile

88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience

98% of shoppers have been dissuaded from completing a purchase because of incomplete or incorrect content on a company's site

Each of these statistics underscores the importance of having a website that is, a) aesthetically pleasing, b) optimized for user experience (including making it mobile friendly), and, c) SEO optimized, so consumers are more likely to find your page in the first place. Now that you know how important it is to optimize your website for SEO and user experience, here are some resources for doing just that:

7 Fundamentals That Every Link Building Strategy Needs

2020 SEO Trends That Will Influence Your Business

Using Long-Tail Keywords to Rank on Google

Of course, the team at Blue Water Marketing is here to help every step of the way. Our company has designed a search engine optimization service that is both ethical and result-driven. We use the latest tools, strategies, and trends to help you move up in the search engines for the right keywords to get noticed by the right audience. Learn more here.

Create ad campaigns

Now it's time to create paid search ad campaigns! First, you'll choose your keywords. This information can come from the marketing report and research you've done while you identified your target market. You'll want to include a mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords. For example, "roof repair" and "roof repair Stuart Florida." (For more on using long-tail keywords to rank on Google, click here) Now you'll want to structure your account by creating ad groups. These groups contain one or multiple ads meant to target similar markets. You can organize ad groups under categories based on their theme, or the product/service it's related to, for example. Google also shares plenty of information for creating and managing ad groups. Consider the timing of your ads. If your business doesn't operate in the winter, you won't want to use as much of your budget on ad spend as you would in the summer. In addition to targeting peak times of the year, you can also optimize your ads to show during peak times of the day or days of the week when your target market is likely to be searching. Finally, it's time to write, modify, and test your ad copy. You need to create effective calls to action (CTAs) that encourage internet users to click on your ad. We've put together six pieces of our favorite advice for making landing pages/paid search ads that convert so you can get your products or services to more people. Find them here.

Digital marketing help