The 3 Essential Investments to Build an Unstoppable Home Service Company
Picking a “most important” piece of marketing or advertising feels a lot like having to pick a favorite child. Everything in your advertising arsenal, both large and small, has its own role to play and offers something that another medium doesn’t.
But most home service companies and small businesses don’t have the luxury of being able to get every single type of print product made, amazing branding, commercials, a massive digital marketing push, wrapping an entire fleet of vehicles, etc. Or at a minimum, most companies don’t have the luxury of doing all of these things in a short span of time.
It can be stressful to figure out how to best allocate the precious marketing dollars that you have, especially with the breadth of options to pick from. But as a home service company, really there are 3 investments that I believe offer a massively disproportionate benefit over the other options. That’s not to say the other options aren’t important, but we’re playing hypotheticals here. If you can only invest in 3, these are the ones I would move heaven and earth to see are done and done right.
A Brand Worth Remembering
Even though this really is step 1 of getting anything for your company made, getting a powerful brand designed is so often one of the most overlooked investments. A brand isn’t just a logo, a name, and a collection of visuals. It’s what shapes every single interaction someone ever has with your company, for the entirety of its existence.
Deciding to get business cards, truck wraps, brochures, flyers, etc. is great, but the branding that powers all of these different materials is debatably even more important. I always like to compare branding to a battery. If your branding has a “weak charge” then all the different materials it needs to power will not work properly. The strength of your branding determines the ceiling of effectiveness of the materials.
Since good branding makes your materials work better, it means that you don’t need to spend as much on advertising as weaker brands will to achieve the same result. It improves recruiting and retaining talent. It allows you to more easily charge what your services are worth. Branding can’t fix a faulty operation, but it sharpens every tool in your kit—delivering long-term savings in surprising ways.
You need to be careful who you hire for such a service though. It is important to avoid using budget services like Fiverr, crowd-sourcing design services, or, heaven forbid, designing your brand with AI. Ideally, look for a company that specializes in brand design and already works with home service brands.
A Head-Turning Fleet of Vehicles
The vehicle wrap company is saying you should throw money at vehicle wraps. Who would have guessed? Yes, I’m aware of the optics here, but this really is a medium that is uniquely important for home service companies and those in the trades.
Unlike other industries, if you are a roofer, a plumber, an electrician, an HVAC company, etc. the vast majority of the way people in your community see and interact with your brand is through the truck wraps on the road. This makes them the most important physical piece of advertising you have for building brand awareness. You simply can’t afford to get these wrong.
Commit to full wraps. The majority of contractors you see driving around your town usually have white vans with basic lettering on them that all start to blend together. These types of vehicles aren’t going to whip someone's head around when someone sees them driving on the road and are not going to be easily remembered.
Being in the trades also involves a level of intimacy with your customers that other industries don’t have. Homeowners are inviting strangers into their home, and contractors have various negative assumptions about them before they’ve even walked through the door. Having a well-branded, fully-wrapped vehicle helps to dissipate some of those biases and makes your customers feel more at ease about who is showing up on their property.
A Web Presence That Drives People to Action
An effective website is going to be the final core piece of the puzzle you need for success. We are in a digital age. This means that most of the time people aren’t calling you for more information, not at first anyways.
Usually people are looking up companies in your industry on Google. If they want to learn more about your company, specifically, they are checking out your website, reading your Google reviews, or possibly even looking at some of your social media. While your vehicle wraps are your most important tool for building brand awareness, your website is your most important tool for customer education and making a sales conversion.
I would even argue that a poorly designed website does more harm than a poorly designed truck wrap. At least with a truck wrap, all of your competitors aren’t lined up next to each other for your customers to pick from. With a website, very often after someone is finished with one company’s page they will immediately click the next Google search result. When that happens, even if they aren’t consciously thinking about it, they can instantly feel if this new site they’ve landed on is better or worse.
Branding and visuals, of course, are an element here. Your website needs to look great, but functionality is just as important. Your website should be driving people to action. It needs to help people pick up the phone or fill out a contact form, and not everyone you can ask to make a website for you knows how to do this. Budget-shopping or having an intern make this for you to save on costs will, ironically, cost you substantially more in conversions than it ever will save you in the short-term.
Synergizing as a Powerful Sales Funnel
The reason I’m so bullish about home service companies committing to making these three investments is because they act as a perfect sales funnel. People see your trucks on the road day after day driving to and from work, picking up their kids, etc. The branding on them should be compelling and memorable enough for people to think of your brand for when they actually need to look up a company in your industry. And finally, your website is where these potential customers go once they are ready to do so, hopefully converting into a sale.
If you commit to getting these three things right, you are already on your way to becoming an unstoppable home service company.
Again, this isn’t to diminish the importance of other materials, like print collateral or other forms of digital marketing. They also have a role to play in helping supplement what these bigger investments are doing. But these three — branding, vehicle wraps, and a website, will do so much of the heavy lifting on their own.
Drive Your Brand Forward
If you want to become an unstoppable home service business, you found the right team for the job. You can give either of our offices a call, or send us an email to start a conversation about your project.
Murrells Inlet Office: 843.651.6003
Charleston Office: 843.823.9274
Email: sales@wrapsink.com
