Do you want to grow your pest control company’s revenue but are unsure where to invest your time and money?
We’ve done the research for you and selected 5 marketing strategies that will transform your pest control business.
1. Turn your website into a lead generating machine
If you want to dominate your local pest control market, your first step is to take a serious look at your website. If your site’s infrastructure is not designed to attract quality prospects and walk them through the buying cycle, then it’s time for an overhaul.
Your website should be your top performing salesperson. For that to happen, people have to be able to easily find your site when they’re searching for pest control solutions. You need highly targeted keyword content on each of your pages as well as optimized site pages for all of your services, all of your locations served and all of your targeted pests by location.
Once you’ve gotten a prospective customer onto your site, you have to keep them engaged. This is where excellent visual design, high quality content and easy navigation is extremely important. Make sure you have a call to action and can easily capture customer information. To take efficiency a step further, integrate your website with your CRM (customer relationship manager), so your leads automatically load and you can track conversion progress.
You also want to be tracking your website traffic in general, so you know exactly what people are doing on your site. You should be looking at your overall number of visitors, top traffic sources, average page views per session, average time per page, and bounce rates to name a few. Staying on top of these analytics will allow you to understand what’s working well and what needs some tweaking.
2. Implement an effective local SEO strategy
Your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy is the most important step in your pest control marketing campaign. It determines whether or not people will find your website or one of your site pages and where they will discover your business. The better your SEO is, the more people will find you when they’re searching online.
To select the best keywords, you need to know what popular phrases your target customers are searching for online. Google Ads has a Keyword Planner where you can compare which keyphrases get the most monthly searches and cross-compare those to your competition.
Once you determine which high-value keywords and key phrases best match your business and location, use them throughout your website in your URLs, page titles, body copy, meta descriptions, alt tags and H1 & H2 tags. Each step you take to produce quality content on your site and code it properly will help Google and other search engines find your website and serve it to interested users.
Don’t forget the importance of making your SEO local! Local SEO means optimizing your content for a location-specific search. Search engines cross reference your keywords with the user’s location to determine what to show the user. Targeting only pest control specific keywords will make it hard to improve your ranking, but if you use local SEO, you have a better chance of appearing first in the search results.
3. Create a business blog
Want more website traffic? Start a blog! It’s one of the best ways to share your expertise on pest control and establish trust with your target audience by offering solutions to their pest problems.
By connecting your blog to your website and optimizing its pages for the search engines, it will help improve your rankings and drive additional traffic, which leads to more customers.
Still wondering how it works?
Think about the number of pages on your website today and how often you update them. Probably not a lot for either category. Blogging can help out with both scenarios.
Every time you create and publish a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which means another opportunity for your business to show up in the organic SERP (search engine results page). Publishing new quality content frequently cues Google’s algorithms to check on your site for new relevant content and in turn, boosts your business’ profile.
Blogs also give you the opportunity to capture leads when you generate a call-to-action. Whether you want to offer a free e-book, fact sheet, promotional trial–basically anything you want in exchange for customer contact information. The key is to add value for your reader and then you generate a lead for your business.
4. Generate Online Reviews
Let’s face it. We all feel better about making a decision when other people have already made it and tell us it’s a good idea. That’s why 90% of consumers read through online reviews before making a purchase.
Online reviews are a powerful tool to promote your pest control company’s brand. Therefore, generating positive online reviews should be an essential part of your marketing strategy.
First and foremost, you need to make it easy for your customers to leave a review for your business. You can add a “leave a review” button to your website. Another idea is to place a QR code linking to your review page on your customer invoices.
Another way to increase the amount of reviews your pest control company receives is to train your employees on collecting reviews. Make sure they ask for one after completing a job while they’re still in front of the customer. Encourage them to let their customers know how helpful it is for the business. Also, make sure you incentivize and celebrate your employees who bring in the most online reviews. You can run a contest with your staff and make it fun.
It’s always a good idea to send follow up emails or text messages to customers after a completed service asking for reviews. Make it easy on yourself by having a template ready to go with a link to your review site. Then, it’s fast for you to send to customers and easy for them to leave feedback.
Finally, make sure you respond to all online reviews. Thank customers for their feedback whether it’s positive or negative. If you do get a negative review, don’t freak out. Be professional and do your best to fix the issue. Once they’re taken care of, you can ask the customer to update their review.
5. Unlock the power of email
Email marketing is an extremely effective tool to turn leads into recurring customers. The caveat is you have to send emails your customers want to read.
And how do you know what they want to see in their inbox? You need to understand your customer’s buyer persona to know exactly what kind of pest control content will interest them. Then, you can tailor your email campaigns to match their specific needs.
The next step in getting started is knowing the best times to send emails. According to HubSpot research, Tuesday is the most effective day of the week to send an email. The average open rate for Tuesdays is 20% more than other days. Mondays and Wednesdays are tied for 18%, Thursdays are 15% and Fridays are the least successful day at only 8%.
Now you need to give people a good reason to want to click “open” on your email. This requires a catchy subject line that speaks to the customer you’re targeting. If your email campaign is geared toward women with children, you might use the subject “Mosquitoes Can Transmit Disease.” It’s much more effective than your run-of-the-mill subject line.
Now that you’ve gotten your prospective customer to open your email, you have to keep them engaged. The best way to do that is with personalized content. Include their first name and the target pest so they understand you can provide them with a solution before you list out your seasonal promotions.
Customers appreciate regular high-quality content that is relevant to their needs and interests. The more you meet their expectations, the more they will trust your brand and seek out services from your pest control company.
