Social media marketing is a highly-effective and proven way to connect with customers and grow your high-end home services business. However, taking the time to cultivate your brand on social media is only half the battle.
To help you get the most out of social media and achieve your goal of reaching high-end homeowners, we suggest following these five best practices:
1. Know your customer - down to where they get their botox.
I know… this probably sounds a bit extreme (if not creepy but hang with me for a minute so I can explain…) Knowing your customer is the foundation of any successful marketing strategy. Truly understanding your customer so you can reach them AND resonate with them in a way that achieves your marketing goals requires you to go beyond knowing just their demographics.
In order for your social media efforts to achieve your goals of resonating and building trust with your customers so they buy from YOU, you have to understand your customer’s wants, needs, pain points, and challenges. What drives them to make purchasing decisions? What are their emotional triggers? What are their goals and aspirations? How can you build trust and lead them to buy if you don’t know what it is they need and why? The goal is for your ideal customer to read your content and think, “They get me. They know exactly what I need and want and they have the skills and expertise to deliver.”
Effective content marketing to reach high-net-worth homeowners means you need to dig deep into your target customer’s psychology. And yes, even knowing where they get their botox done, as well as their morning coffee, date night spot, and where they take their kiddos to swim lessons will come in handy in one way or on one platform or another. We discuss this a bit more later in the blog. Knowing your ideal customer and business success go hand in hand.
2. Plan your social media content.
We don’t recommend you throw together an Instagram post when inspiration strikes. Rather, I highly recommend you use your time efficiently and plan out your content. Planning your social media content helps you achieve consistency and that consistency benefits you in several ways:
Time efficiency
You’re a business owner, you wear many hats. You may actually wear ALL the hats, so it’s vital to consider efficiency at every angle. Dedicating time weekly for content creation and planning out your content with a content calendar allows you to be efficient with a process (that we all know) can be extremely time-consuming. Believe it or not, dedicating time to plan out and create your social media free’s up your time later for other aspects of your business.
Higher Quality Content
Dedicated time allows your creativity to go wild without distraction, which more times than not, will result in higher quality content - content that’s balanced and encourages people to follow, trust, share, and buy.
Algorithm Preferential Treatment
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, we all know that business pages continue to get less and less visibility due to the platform's algorithms limiting page and post reach significantly. A key to outsmarting the algorithm is high-quality, customer-centric content that provokes engagement, likes, saves, and shares as well as consistently posting to your platforms. Dedicating time weekly to plan your content achieves both which gets you on better terms with the algorithm, so why wouldn’t you approach social media in a way that affords you the most reward for your effort?
3. Create High-Quality Content.
High-quality content attracts high-quality customers. Technology has created a highly accessible and transparent world. People want, need, and expect a deeper and more authentic experience. Your audience craves engaging content that educates, entertains, and inspires them. They want substance. They need answers to their most pressing questions. To stand out, you need to publish informative, entertaining, and relevant content for them. This means you need to know your customer, plan content that is balanced and addresses their wants, needs, pain points, and challenges, as well as explain how your services address their needs and wants.
We’re in a visual content-intensive world. A high-net-worth customer likely reads high-end magazines with beautiful imagery. Their entire life is likely similar to a lovely boutique hotel - so stop posting the half-done pool that looks like it may be a mosquito breeding ground within a couple of hours. If you’re going after a high-net-worth female homeowner, your goal should be for her to STOP the scroll. They expect high-quality content from brands that they trust (or want to trust) and it’s our job as marketers to provide that if we want to reach our marketing and business goals.
4. Engage!
Social media by design is a two-way conversation. It’s really a massive virtual/digital networking event or gathering. And no shock here, NO ONE likes a one-sided conversation, including the social media platform algorithms.
Engaging with your audience on social media has the following benefits:
Algorithm preferential treatment
Here we are again with that darn algorithm… but yet it’s true and applies here as well. They say, “Fortune Favors the Bold,” well the social media algorithms favor the ACTIVE! Along with consistency in your posting, the algorithm will reward your account with better reach and visibility when you engage authentically (emphasis on “authentically” - no bots allowed!).
Account growth
Account growth is another benefit of engaging consistently with your audience. The more you engage, the more your audience grows. Especially on a platform like Instagram which allows for so much accessibility into your audience. Showing interest in what others are saying will help you gain trust among your followers and build relationships with them. Liking, commenting, and following your ideal customer is a powerful way to build your brand awareness in a way that other marketing avenues do not allow for.
Remember when we mentioned, “knowing your customer down to where they get their botox?” Knowing this level of information about your customer helps you seek and find them on social media, engage authentically, and build your brand awareness in direct alignment with your ideal customers.
Engaging on social media is your opportunity to pop in your ideal customer’s world authentically so take advantage of it (and of course, don’t abuse it). Be genuine, be you, and embrace the two-way conversation that social media allows for to achieve your brand awareness goals on social media.
5. Balance brand awareness with direct response marketing.
Conversions are awesome and obviously necessary, but unfortunately, your audience isn’t always ready to take that leap. Most of them will have to go through multiple phases before purchases (i.e., the buyer’s journey). They’ll move from awareness through consideration to decision before they're ready to buy. This is important for every marketer to consider.
This is why we use both direct-response (DR) marketing and brand awareness marketing strategies at the same time. We play the long game AND the short game. We do not rely on one. Use both, especially if you have the resources to do so. Here’s why:
The Algorithm
That’s right, we’re bringing it up again - third time’s the charm. But if it's important enough to be mentioned three times, it's worth paying attention to, right? The algorithm significantly impacts organic (non-paid) reach and visibility for business pages on both Facebook and Instagram, so in 2022, you need to consider paying to get more eyes on your content and get the most reward for your effort (think boosted posts and social media ads).
The Call-to-Action
At the end of the day, it's important to lead your customer to the next step, to call them to action - within reason. People are used to ads provoking them to buy. We believe in building in targeted, paid spending on social media to drive direct response efforts. At the same time, in your organic social media, we recommend using call to action posts about 20% of the time to serve regular news feeds most effectively, still driving the point home but sparingly.
Conclusion
Social media is a powerful tool that every high-end home service business should be leveraging to reach its marketing goals. Together, these five practices make the perfect social media cocktail. And the best part is that none of these components are too complicated. Yes, they take time and effort, but the end game is well worth it!
When implementing these five best practices into your social media marketing, you can feel confident that you’re optimizing your efforts in a way that will result in an increase in brand awareness, website traffic, and ultimately sales and profits. But, hey, if you’re still not feeling like this is something you have the capacity to take on efficiently and effectively, we’ve got your back! Social media isn’t everyone’s jam, but it is ours.
If you’re curious about leveraging the power of content marketing to reach high-quality clients and utilizing social media to reach and resonate with your ideal customers, we'd be happy to chat through ideas and see if we’re the best team to help.
SLW Media is an award-winning social media and content marketing agency led by Sara Wright. Sara and her talented team of word wizards partner with company owners in the design+build, trades, and luxury home services industries to completely remove the burden of social media and content marketing from their task list with quantifiable results – freeing up their time and resources to focus on other key profitable areas of the business.
