When starting with digital marketing, or at the very least exploring new facets of it, your pest control marketing team is bound to make a few mistakes here and there.
While this is all part of the learning process and allows you and your team to make more informed decisions, it can’t hurt to minimize the risk. Below, we’ve put together the top 8 most common digital marketing mistakes that pest control companies make and how you can avoid them.
Anyone in need of local pest control services would first check their options online. Because of this, it is essential to have an updated, user-friendly, and informative website ready.
Having a good website on hand allows your pest control company to stand out among your competition and makes it easier for your customers to reach out to you.
Moreover, it doesn’t only boost brand awareness, but it can also greatly help nurture leads, strengthen your credibility, and provide convenience to existing and potential clients.
Without having a website, you can and will lose many potential customers. This can also be said for websites that are hard to navigate, poorly designed, out of date, or are not properly optimized for SEO.
Creating a website and not optimizing it for SEO is one of the biggest and most common mistakes pest control companies can make today. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is a part of digital marketing that helps increase your website’s organic visibility on search engines.
When a customer types in a search query online, looks through the links that appear high on the results page and selects one of them, that is SEO working its magic.
There are little tweaks and practices to apply to your site that can help get it higher in search result pages. This includes keyword research, making it mobile-friendly, content marketing, improving your site’s load time, and the like.
It is crucial to monitor these practices and sustain a good ranking on the search results page. The main goal of SEO is to be within the top 3 results because let’s face it, customers barely check past the third link let alone the next page.
Without SEO, your website will barely get noticed, not garner enough organic traffic, and fail to reach valuable leads.
Social media makes a huge impact on your pest control company’s brand awareness, it can increase customer loyalty, it definitely can boost customer engagement, and it also helps drive more leads and conversions to your website.
That being said, there are many social media platforms available today that can help you digitally market your pest control services. This does not mean to say you have to be on ALL of them - we only suggest investing your resources on social media platforms that your target audience is already on. This way, you can meet them where they already virtually hang out and make it easier for them to find you.
Without social media, you lose a huge opportunity to engage with your potential customers and get on relevant users’ newsfeeds.
A target audience is a group of people who are most likely to be interested in purchasing your products or availing of your pest control services. They often share common traits, which include their demographics, location, set of interests, level of purchase intent, and the like.
To be able to maximize your marketing budget and efforts, it is essential to target the right audience. If you opt to target very broad and general groups, you end up spending your advertising budget on a lot of people who are not looking for what you have to offer. Similarly, if you target too small a group, you miss out on a lot of potential customers.
Ideally, you can get a better picture of who your target market is by:
All of these can significantly help in narrowing down a target market packed with quality and potential.
Once you know who your target audience is, it is important to analyze how much they can bring to your pest control business. This way, you can better understand how much and where you should be spending your marketing budget.
First, determine what is your average value per customer. Second, track how much you currently spend to acquire customers, and third, compare the two values. This can give you better insight on where you can improve, where you need to tweak variables, and other considerations such as:
Without understanding this, your team will not be able to properly measure and maintain the profitability of your acquisition efforts.
Conversion tracking is monitoring activities such as making purchases, adding to cart, opening emails, clicking links, making calls, filling out forms, signing up for newsletters, registering for an appointment, and other types of actions that are important to your pest control company.
By tracking these activities, you can better determine how well (or poorly) your marketing efforts are performing. Tracking conversions essentially converts these metrics into numbers that you can analyze, compare, and easily monitor in terms of growth. Having valuable conversion data can help in:
Email has been around for decades and it has only gotten more efficient with time.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to boost customer loyalty, encourage returning customers, and offer your clients a more personalized experience. It is also a great way to keep in contact and send your customers important information, depending on what level of the marketing funnel they are currently on.
For instance, new leads who have just signed up for your newsletter can be sent valuable facts about the different kinds of services and what kind of pest problems they resolve. This can be done through an engaging infographic or a visually stimulating introduction that links to your website’s blog article.
For existing clients, however, you can offer them an exclusive discount the next time they book your pest control services.
These emails can also be used to remind them of anything left in the cart, to send receipts and project updates, or to simply update them on the latest promos, new services, and other brand-related information.
Without email marketing, you miss a huge gap in lead generation and building customer loyalty.
Content marketing has proven to be one of the most effective ways to increase audience engagement, strengthen your brand’s online and offline presence, garner in more sales, and help in SEO.
This part of digital marketing focuses on the type of content your brand creates, publishes, shares, and uses to build credibility.
Your content not only needs to be entertaining enough to have your readers stick around but also informative enough to be of value to them. It should answer your potential customer’s questions, help establish trust, improve conversions, and efficiently utilize the keywords you want linked to your brand.
The different formats you can create and publish content include blog articles on your website, social media posts, videos, email newsletters, paid ads, infographics, images, and more.
Without content marketing, your pest control company misses the opportunity to properly engage with your audience and fails to establish authority online.
Being able to determine the most common digital marketing mistakes can help you avoid them. By making more informed decisions when it comes to your pest control company’s digital marketing strategy, you can better navigate the online world, efficiently build your presence on a variety of platforms, and keep your brand relevant throughout the years.
Gary is awesome, we’ve worked with so many companies but never got the personal attention and care like we did him and his team.
Thanks Gary for your wonderful work. It’s not first time I hired him for a digital marketing campaign. On my 2nd SEO campaign with him for my second pest control business, Gary has again showed he can deliver on what he promises. Would recommend!
I highly recommend Pest Control SEOs for anyone looking for good results. Gary took the time to review my website and give suggestions without a guarantee we will even sign with them, he just wanted to genuinely help it looked like and that’s what drew me to working with his team.
