Many local service businesses tend to focus their marketing efforts either on SEO, email marketing or Google AdWords, many overlook the vital importance of the message and branding power of their Facebook business page and Messenger marketing. Remember there are over 3 billion people worldwide on Facebook, many of them in your own backyard. Ask yourself, if your customers are there, and if your there, are you taking advantage of the communication and promotion on your Facebook business page?
Social Media Marketing starts with a great custom designed Facebook Business Page. This can be turned into a complete micro-site to place on Facebook for your business to target your audience by geographic and demographic statistics. The first step is to think about the first impression you make on your audience. The cover image you select for your page is the first thing people see. You want to avoid just putting up a picture of your logo, or a generic photo there. This is your opportunity to either design yourself or hire a graphic designer to create a create and engaging image that portrays a professional look and feel for your home improvement business. In the same vein as your cover image is the profile picture for your page. You want to shy away from just uploading your company logo. People who will hire you to work on their house, want to know who is doing the work. To that end, make sure to upload a professional looking headshot. Something with the owner of the business or whom ever is the face of the business smiling. You can always wear your company shirt which has your logo on it to keep the branding moving forward.
The next step in becoming a social media magnet is to have engaging content. It is best to write creative and informative text about how you have helped others and stay away from promoting your own business. You may also want to include infographics, images and short videos that entice your users to link and share your content, with the goal of spreading your name on your customer’s news feeds.
Perhaps the most important thing you can do to optimize your Facebook page is to ensure you have great 5-star reviews from your current and past customers. It is important to always ask someone to review your services, because the thing that a new customer will want to know more then anything, even more then how much you charge is whether your past customers were happy with t he results of their new kitchen or bathroom. In addition to sourcing reviews, you also want to reorder the tabs on the side of your page so that the reviews button comes up second, only after about us. You may even want it to come first, depending on how many great reviews you have. One thing to keep in mind is that on mobile, only the first 4 tabs show up without clicking on the show me more. You want to make it as easy as possible for a potential client to read reviews about your home renovation services.
The next step is circling back to your photos. It is important to post as many photos for completed projects as you can and tag your happy customers in those. They will likely then share those photos to their friends and followers thereby organically increasing your presence on Facebook and Instagram among other social media photo sharing sites.
Gaining likes and shares is very important to get your name out there, and another great way to do his is by providing consistent and fresh content. Every time you write a blog post for your website, share it and the link on your Facebook page. You also might want to share information about the local area you service, just to keep people coming back and sharing that. For example, is there a clam chowder festival coming up in a town you service. Talk about that and how cool it would be to cook your own chowder in a brand-new kitchen. Is there a flower show coming up? Ask people to post pictures of the flowers they buy in their home, ang tag your page. I think you get the idea of how you can target a local audience in this way.
