Let’s face it, the emergency restoration service industry is highly competitive. From mom and pop businesses to global franchises, every emergency restoration business owner is struggling to find work.

In light of the industry’s increasing competitiveness, an effective and robust marketing plan is vital. Once you establish your business, utilizing smart marketing tactics becomes necessary for getting new business.

Marketing, much like the storm damage itself, is constantly changing course. It requires an on-going effort. The general rule of thumb says that in the absence of marketing, no restoration company can build its business and customer base, in a scalable and predictable way. New business comes from community relations, and referrals need a customer following. Thus marketing is crucial to achieving success and growth of your home or commercial restoration business. With the market being competitive as it is, out selling your competitors, especially those threatening your existing market share or territory, is vital.

As you know, more-and-more people are looking for emergency restoration services online as all it takes is a simple Google Search from a smartphone. So ask yourself, is your restoration company taking advantage of all the opportunities to secure new business online?

So what components should your online marketing campaign include? Let’s build out the core outline of your 2017 Emergency Restoration Company Marketing Plan.

Personal Selling

Apart from the high-profile and popular marketing techniques, a conventional marketing tool of personal selling will never go out of fashion. Personal selling is beneficial for restoration business since it builds product awareness, creates interest, provides information, stimulates demand, and reinforces your brand among existing and potential customers through face-to-face communication. An active sales force can educate customers on restoration business and its new product offerings. Sales persons can create interest in the very first encounter with a client making them aware of safety precautions and ways to keep their lives safe in emergency situations. They should also provide them sales support stuff like brochures, emergency numbers, memberships and subscriptions, discounted coupons and may be a gift.

Using Social Media for personal selling is being applied by sales teams across multiple industries, including Restoration Companies. All it takes is connecting with Insurance Adjusters, Public Adjusters, Insurance Agents and Building Managers on a platform like LinkedIn. But a simple friend request won’t cut it. You must provide VALUE, through either content, personality, information or genuine personal interest. It could be as simple as acknowledging their interest in a local sports team. The key to personal selling is BEING PERSONAL.

Website Optimization & SEO

Your Website is your new storefront. In an increasingly online market, buyers prefer shopping online, searching for the best brands, products, and services. Above all, they need fast service and immediate gratification. Your website is the place where they learn who you are and what you have to offer.

Your Emergency Restoration company website is the first point of contact with your potential customers. Make sure it’s optimized with great design, easy navigation, layout, and content. SEO and Web Design experts can help you to create a search engine friendly website that captures visitors and drives traffic to your site by featuring valuable content that attracts users like a magnet.

Search Engine Optimized content revolves around most-searched and updated keywords, which is one of the important criteria for a search engine to rank websites. Higher search engine ranking means greater online visibility of your brand. Furthermore, it’s more important that ever you’re your website to be compatible with smartphones. In the event of an emergency, people are more likely to search for help on their phone as opposed to a desktop CPU, especially after a fire.

Google My Business – Local SEO

A quick and easy SEO tactic that you can perform right now is to register your restoration business at Google My Business. For instance, If anyone directly searches “restoration company”, your business should show as a result of their search query within proximity of their GPS location or if they are searching for your particular business from another location.

This is crucial for local SEO. If any client is searching services, he or she is searching for a local business. It is important that local search can easily find your business.

Google Adwords

Adwords campaigns are highly beneficial for restoration companies. When anyone faced with an emergency situation like water leakage or home fire, they need a quick solution. To capture these customers, many restoration businesses use “Pay Per Click” ads.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a paid advertising tool that is efficient and fast enough to place your business website in the top results of the search query. People looking for restoration services online represent high buying intent. These searches usually lead to more clicks on the ad than an organic search listing.
While your website and content strategy put you in the search results, the PPC campaign helps to target highly specific audiences and interests. They also promote sales events and time-sensitive offers that may otherwise consume weeks to be visible in organic (unpaid) search results.

Using a combination of organic search results and PPC with a strong content plan, your restoration business has higher chances to experience incremental growth in sales.

Social Media

Social Media not only offers an opportunity to build and engage with your local community, friends, family and colleagues, but it can also be used to improve your organic search results. You want to generate as much traffic to your site as possible to improve SEO. Social Media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + and Twitter can have a dramatic impact on your website’s page rank and search results.

You should post every day and link to content on your website – this alone will help your search engine rank results.

Most importantly, by acquiring all social media real estate as it relates to your specific business name, you are preventing competitors from showing up in search results related to your business.