Whether you’re looking for new marketing ideas for your pest control company or simply need help getting started, we’ll cover the basics you need to know to start filling your sales funnel with more leads today.
Despite the turbulent economy we’ve faced the past few years, the pest control industry has grown 5.5% per year on average between 2017 and 2022. Between COVID, inflation and everything else going on in the world today, it’s great to see the pest control industry has continued to experience market growth–however, that growth also means more competition.
Having a solid marketing strategy in place is more essential than ever for your pest control company to stand out from competitors and bring on new customers.
So where should you start? Your website is the first thing you should assess. Your pest control site is your online representative. It’s the first impression a potential customer has of your company when they’re searching the internet and establishes credibility for your business. Your site should be easy to navigate, offer helpful information and be optimized for mobile phones. Because consumers are so reliant on mobile devices, optimizing your online presence for mobile can make 6 in 10 internet users more inclined to reach out to you.
Keep in mind that simply having a web presence is not enough. Your website should be generating leads and revenue. You need a site that is not only functional but also incorporates highly optimized site pages detailing all of the services you provide by both location and pest type. Your pest control website should also include content with highly targeted keywords so you’re attracting quality prospects.
Your website is the backbone of your online presence–every type of communication, piece of content, social media post or online ad should be driving leads back to your website. Therefore, you want to make sure you have a site that will give prospective customers a clear idea of what your company is all about and help lead them through the sales process.
Whether your website is good to go or has some room for improvement, now you’re probably wondering, how do I drive more traffic to my website? A key strategy to increase your site traffic is content creation, and one of the best ways to create content is through blogging. By implementing an inbound marketing strategy with blog articles, you can focus on attracting the right people to your company with content and experiences tailored to them.
Get to know your customers. Who are they and what’s important to them? These are questions you need to answer to make sure your content appeals to your audience. If you don’t understand who your ideal customers are, then you could be completely missing the mark on reaching them.
Creating buyer personas is an easy exercise you can do to better understand the needs and wants of your customers. Start by separating your residential customers from your commercial customers. Next, you’ll give your buyer persona a name. Then fill in demographic details–this might include gender, age, ethnicity, income, employment status, home ownership, etc.. Finally, cover interests and behavioral traits. By detailing out this information, it will help you understand their goals, pain points and buying patterns.
If you understand what motivates your customers, you can do a more efficient job of appealing to each group’s specific needs and expectations. Once you know your audience, you can create content that will naturally attract them to your website.
One of the goals with inbound marketing is to act like you’re not selling anything at all. Customers want their pest problems solved, and your products and services are simply a means to an end. What you’re “selling” to readers of your content is your knowledge and expertise in the pest control industry. If you can help potential customers overcome their challenges, then you build trust, and they view you as an industry expert.
Your next step is to make sure customers searching for information on pest control services in their market can find you online. You want to rank in the top spots of an organic Google search, and it’s your content that is going to help you improve your SERP (search engine results page) rankings. If you focus on building a sufficient amount of topic-based content tagged geographically, then you will rank for it. The volume and quality of your content are the two factors that will make the biggest difference in your ranking.
So how do you make sure your website and content all work together to reach customers and increase traffic? Stay laser focused on not only your content but your topic clusters as well. Let’s look at this using cockroaches as an example. First you would build a professionally optimized page specific to cockroaches on your website. Then you would build out pages on specific cockroach species with each page targeted to a single market area your company serves. Finally you would create companion cockroach related blog articles all linking back to the original cockroach website page.
It may take some time for Google to reward you in the rankings, but over time, this strategy WILL pay off. Higher rankings also means more website traffic. And more traffic to a great website produces more leads coming in that you can convert to customers.
