As we discussed in the previous post in our Weathering the Storm series, home inspection volume on a national level continues to be soft.
Adapting & Pivoting
Workflow often reflects the seasons. When winter is around the corner, combined with sustained challenges in the housing market and an uncertain economy, you may be concerned about the future of your home inspection business.
Your actions during down times will impact your ability to thrive and adapt. The ability to pivot increases your chances of success, opening doors to seize opportunities and broaden your influence.
Marketing & Customer Experience 101
When incoming leads become scarcer, as a home inspection business owner you should focus on:
- Driving more new business leads by refining and dialing up your marketing efforts.
- Closing more leads and delight more customers by having a comprehensive lead management process in place.
There is little dispute that effective marketing endeavors and a strategic approach to enhance the customer experience are actions every inspection business owner should take. This holds true whether economic times are challenging or prosperous.
Upping Your marketing game
Effective marketing is crucial for promoting your brand and generating more leads that can be converted. While numerous methods exist for reaching your audience, budget constraints call for a focused approach on channels that yield the highest return on investment (ROI). Here are some key areas worth prioritizing your investments in:
SEO
At its core, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a long-term strategy. So, it’s our hope that you’ve already been investing in this acquisition process. If you haven’t, it’s time! When there are fewer people actively searching for information related to your inspection services, your website and content have to be showing up online sooner and more often than your competitors.
You may decide to kick off your SEO efforts yourself, as there are many free and low cost resources available. Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs are just a few. Or, you may consider hiring someone specifically to focus on these efforts.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) is a tremendous way to connect with your audience and differentiate your brand from the competition. The key is to create engaging content that’ll resonate with your customers. Focus on personalization to build loyalty. You can go with purely organic content (unpaid) or test paid efforts and look at the results and return on investment (ROI).
There are a lot of resources available online around social media marketing for small businesses. Hubspot is a good place to start.
Email Marketing
It’s crucial to maintain connections with past customers and agents during this period. Regularly sending emails with valuable content, noteworthy updates about your brand, or even a simple holiday greeting helps you stay at the forefront of their minds when they need inspection services.
There’s a lot of information on the internet about best practices around email marketing. This article on Buffer, for example, discusses email marketing for small businesses in six steps.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an effective strategy designed to draw in potential customers by offering them informative and valuable content. Each of the three preceding items mentioned in this list contributes to the overall success of content marketing. Additional content marketing media examples to consider creating for your inspection business include:
- Blogs
- Newsletters
- Videos
- Infographics
Again, there are a lot of great guides and tips on the internet focused on content marketing for small businesses. This Nerdwallet article has a great overview.
Branding
As you promote your business and services in the market, it’s crucial to maintain a clear, consistent, and branded approach. Whether your audience encounters your brand on a website, social media, a marketing flyer, or an email, it’s essential to present it in a manner that reflects your brand’s voice, appearance, and identity. This ensures that the perceptions you aim to convey are effectively communicated to your audience.
Managing Leads: A Comprehensive Approach
Having effectively promoted your brand within your target audience, increasing awareness and generating interest, the next crucial step is to ensure that every lead entering your brand territory is not only closed but also delighted.
Incoming Leads
These days, prospective customers anticipate seamless and quick access to your business through various channels – be it phone, email, text, business and referral websites, social media, and more.
- It’s been estimated that as much as 85% of callers who can’t reach an inspection company on the first try will not call back.
- According to Consumer Reports, 75% of those same callers will not leave a voicemail.
- Companies who contacted leads within an hour were seven times more likely to qualify a lead than the companies who decided to contact a lead just an hour later and sixty times more than the companies who waited 24 hours or longer.
The bottom line is…if you don’t respond immediately (or quickly) to an incoming lead, the odds of you converting that lead decrease dramatically. If you haven’t already, make the investment in establishing a thorough process for managing incoming leads so you can be as responsive as quickly as possible.
Closing – With a Human Touch
Many inspectors may believe that, as owners, they are the best representatives to discuss their services with potential customers. However, in most instances, this belief may not hold true.
The reality is, you shouldn’t wear multiple hats as the inspection business owner, the inspector, AND the sales manager. With a quarter-century of experience assisting inspectors, we’ve meticulously examined the trajectory of small- to medium-sized inspection businesses. Our findings consistently highlight that the most prosperous ones thrive when owners prioritize conducting inspections and nurturing the brand, rather than getting bogged down with lead management.
An inspection business can (and should) automate certain aspects of its lead management process. Consumers have embraced these technological advancements in communication and are willing to complete simple steps in the transaction process. However, according to a survey performed by research firm Clutch, nearly 90% of your customers will still prefer to talk to a real human being at some point.
Follow Up
Ensure your lead management process is intricately woven together by a strategic thread—a straightforward concept that steers every step and activity across the entire lead management process and even through the inspection process lifecycle. The ultimate goal? To delight the customer.
The good news is, if you’ve established a comprehensive and thoughtful lead management process, you’re most of the way there. But it’s important to listen, learn, modify, and continually enhance your process over time.
While the bulk of what we covered here has revolved around active leads and transforming them into inspections, it’s equally crucial to have a well-defined process for leads that don’t convert immediately. Some simple follow-up communication strategies include:
- Email to see if they might still be interested in your services or if you can answer any questions
- Email with content about your process and what makes you unique
- Call or text to see if they still need an inspection or if you can answer any questions
- Email about promotions you’re having or new services you provide
America’s Call Center – Services and Solutions
Speaking of lead management, that’s precisely where ACC excels. As a comprehensive customer service and communication-handling solution exclusively tailored for home inspectors, ACC caters to both sole proprietors and multi-inspector firms by integrating and customizing services to mirror your company’s brand.
When budgets are tight, it’s good to have a partner with a history of producing an increase of 15% – 30% in revenue after inspectors begin services while only paying an average of $2-$5 an hour for those services. That’s a huge boost for a small investment.
Count on ACC to handle your lead management and customer service needs, so you can focus on your business goals. What could be more important than that?
Ready to accelerate your home inspection business? Request a free quote today.
Note: While marketing and lead management are the focus of this blog, we do recommend that you delve into the other methods and approaches discussed in this series designed to assist home inspectors during slower times.
