We in the local social media marketing industry know that your marketing resources are probably limited. Before you begin devoting your contractor business’s valuable resources to an up-and-coming social network, it’s wise to consider whether or not it will add value to your local internet marketing strategy.

One of the most popular social networks, Google Plus, comes with outstanding features that may be useful to your business. Its most popular feature, Google Hangouts, is unrivaled. People can use Google Hangouts for live video conferences and collaborative activities. The best part is that up to 15 people can use Google Hangouts at once, so you could use it for a business conference or for interacting with several of your company’s clients. After you finish your chat, the video can be saved on YouTube, which is owned by Google, for future viewing.

The Advantages of Google Hangouts

The price of Google Hangouts (free!) is hard for small businesses to beat. For this reason, many small businesses are turning away from social media sites like Facebook in favor of Google Plus, where they don’t need to compete with paid advertisements.

The software is simple use, and it’s open to anyone with a basic Google account. If your contractor company does a lot of teleconferencing, Google Hangouts could help you cut costs and make it more convenient for your employees. Many small businesses are using Google Hangouts for their internal business needs. In many cases, streamlining your business operations ultimately benefits your customers, who may appreciate more efficient service and lower prices.

How Can You Use Google Hangouts for Your Business?

Some companies have found success with Google Hangouts by hosting tutorials that relate to their business. When customers see the faces of your company’s representatives, you become more personal in their eyes, and they might be more likely to trust you for their next project. After the Hangout, you can save the video to your company’s YouTube channel.

One distinct benefit of Google Hangouts is that your customers don’t expect perfection. Hangouts are inherently casual and spontaneous, so you won’t need to spend a lot of time and resources on your content. Videos for YouTube or your website, on the other hand, can be expensive and might require the help of a multimedia professional. Because Hangouts are so easy to execute, it won’t take long to build a library of short Hangout videos.

Keep in mind that what’s best for one company may not be best for your contractor business. As the marketing expert at your contractor business, you make the ultimate decision about which social media networks work best for your company.

You may have noticed that lots of retailers now offer mobile transactions, and it may be in the works for your contractor business. But mobile commerce may be growing at a faster rate than you think. eMarketer researchers project that just five years from now, 25 percent of online transactions, excluding air fares and event ticket purchases, will be on mobile devices. In 2017, mobile transactions will account for $108 billion in retail sales in the United States alone.

According to the study, the growth in mobile commerce is expected to be steady over the next several years. In 2012, 11 percent of online retail transactions took place on a mobile device, so in five years the figure will likely double. Mobile commerce is expected to grow to 15 percent of all online retail transactions in 2013, and to 18 percent in 2014.

Unfortunately, local marketing experts don’t always agree. For some, the eMarketer research may be an overestimation of the growth of mobile technology. A study completed by Forrester is less confident about the growth of mobile commerce. According to its research, mobile sales will only account for about 10 percent of all retail sales in 2017. Either way, mobile commerce is growing, and your contractor business needs to prepare for it.

Tablet Transactions Increasing

The eMarketer research also found that more and more consumers are using their tablets, rather than their smart phones, to conduct retail transactions. About 60 percent of mobile transactions take place on a tablet, and five years from now, that figure is expected to increase to 70 percent. If your company is considering mobile transactions, it may be wise to invest in tablet technology rather than smart phones. However, smart phones are still widely used for mobile transactions.

What the Growth of Mobile Commerce Means for Your Business

The growth of mobile commerce means that consumers everywhere will come to expect the ability to make purchases on their mobile devices. Your contractor business may have to consider mobile commerce sooner than you had planned. Even if mobile commerce does not fit your business needs, it may be worthwhile for your business to consider it as a way to improve your local internet marketing.

Mobile transactions could set your contractor business apart from your competition. A number of contractor businesses have already implemented mobile transactions, and many customers appreciate the ease of paying with a tablet or smart phone. Although it is sometimes costly for businesses to adopt new technology, it could prove profitable for your business. Many contractors travel frequently, and it could be more efficient for them to carry an iPad with them, for instance, to organize their jobs and keep track of billing.

Despite the growth of social media in the last few years, email marketing still remains a powerful tool that can work well in combination with your local social media marketing efforts. When you consider that most people check their email inboxes daily, and often several times a day, email marketing can be a powerful component of your marketing strategy. Unfortunately, many contractor businesses have email addresses for less than 30 percent of their customers.

Choose Quality over Quantity

Although you can purchase or rent email lists, this strategy can backfire. Your emails will be more likely to end up in your recipients’ junk mail folders, where they’re likely to go unread. The best email addresses belong to customers who are interested in your services and want to know more about your company.

Take Advantage of Your Website

First, make it easy for people to sign up for email updates on your website. For best results, make sure an email opt-in field is prominently displayed on your homepage. Even better, provide some sort of an incentive to your customers for signing up for email updates. If your customers redeem their special email offers, you’ll also be able to test the effectiveness of your email marketing.

Once an email opt-in field is on your website homepage, don’t stop there. Add more throughout your site and make sure it’s in a place that’s easy to find. Some of your customers may skip your homepage altogether and go straight to the web page they need. If your website allows people to set up appointments, be sure to include a way for customers to sign up for email updates on the “thank you” page.

Collect Email Addresses through Mobile Devices

Your customers are using their mobile devices more than ever, and it’s also a great way to capture their email addresses. An opt-in form on your mobile site is another opportunity to capture email addresses. Use the form to enable people to opt in to text messages from your company as well. Remember that the form should be simple enough for users to opt-in on small devices. They might be turned away by long, complicated forms.

Use Your Social Media Sites

Don’t forget about the local internet marketing strategy that’s already working for your company. You can build a simple opt-in form right on your Facebook page. The advantage of using social media networks to capture email addresses is that those users have already opted-in to your company’s marketing, so they’re likely to opt in to your email marketing, too. Make sure that you tell your followers how email communications will be different from their social media interactions with your company; otherwise, they might not bother to sign up for email. 

Mobile users continue to spend more and more of their time on their phones. More often than not, they’re checking Facebook on their mobile phones rather than at a desktop computer. Facebook’s mobile app now attracts more than 600 million users. Chances are good that a significant portion of your contractor business’s Facebook base is following you from a mobile phone. Although Facebook users receive the same content on mobile phones, tablets, and desktop computers, the format is slightly different and you’ll need to adjust your marketing.

Follow Your Company on Mobile

It can be tremendously helpful for you to view your company’s Facebook posts on a mobile device if you can. That way, you’ll get a better idea of what your followers are seeing. Tailoring your posts for mobile devices will also produce better posts for desktop users as well.

Communicate with Visual Elements

Imagine a person scrolling through their Facebook news feed on their phone. To make the person stop at a particular post, they’ll need to see compelling visual content along with a short message. If the post is too wordy, they’ll move on. On the mobile app, users only see the news feed, not the information on the left and right columns, which means it’s even more important that your images capture users’ attention. Local marketing experts agree that large, eye-catching photos with short captions work best. You have less than a second to grab your users’ attention before they keep scrolling, so your visual content needs to be colorful and stand out from other posts.

Consider Your Goals

Once you’ve created engaging Facebook posts, remember to evaluate the web content that users will find when they click on your post or ad. The goal of local social media marketing is to drive your company’s customers and potential customers to your website or blog where they can either schedule an appointment with a contractor or find out more about your business. Make sure that people who click on your ad have easy access to the information they need.

Optimize Your Facebook Ads

Because there is no right side bar on the Facebook mobile app, all of your ads appear in people’s news feeds as Promoted Posts or Sponsored Stories. Thankfully, Facebook makes it easy to set up ads for mobile devices. When you’re in the ad creation platform, create a promoted post ad. After that you can make your ad visible to your audience on their mobile devices. Just click on “Devices” and you’ll be able to choose which mobile devices your ads will appear on.

Several social media sites are providing more opportunities for advertisers to reach a narrower target audience, which improves your local social media marketing results. Following the trend, Twitter recently introduced keyword targeting. Now, instead of targeting Twitter users based on their age and location, you can provide content about their interests, which will likely result in greater engagement with your brand. Similar to Facebook’s Promoted Posts, Promoted Tweets are delivered to people who have tweeted words that are related to your business. However, according to Twitter, users won’t be inundated with several Promoted Tweets as a result of the new advertising model.

How Promoted Tweets Work

Your Promoted Tweet will look similar to any other tweet; the only difference is that Promoted Tweets include the words “Promoted by X Company” in small text at the bottom of the tweet. If your followers like your Promoted Tweet, they’ll still be able to retweet or favorite it just as they would with a standard tweet. Targeted Promoted Tweets are available for mobile, tablet, and desktop users.

How Targeted Keywords Can Help Your Contractor Business

Targeted tweets can help you promote your contractor business. Rather than buy ads based on location and age, you can focus on people who have mentioned buying a new home. Then you can tell those Twitter users that you have a spring special for new homeowners.

You can also target your ads by gender. Although both men and women hire contractors, they might hire them for different purposes, and you can use this distinction to your advantage with the new targeted ads.

Set an Appropriate Budget

Like Facebook ads, you only pay when someone retweets, favorites, or clicks on the link in your tweet. Otherwise, you’d be paying for every single Twitter who saw your Promoted Tweet, which could add up fast. You can also stop running your ad at any time, so if you aren’t seeing the results you’d like, you can always click on the Pause button. However, when you set up your first targeted Promoted Tweet, run it long enough to see its effects before calling it quits. If you cancel your ad after only a day or two, you could be missing a lot of potential customers who might be active on Twitter on a different day of the week.

Track Your Results

According to local marketing experts, spending money on any type of advertising is useless unless you’re able to measure your results. Twitter provides up-to-the-minute ad tracking, so you can literally watch as people retweet and click on your ad.

Part of managing your contractor business’s web presence includes measuring and analyzing its progress over time. You undoubtedly spend a lot of your company’s resources on your website and social media, and Google Analytics can help you see how your efforts have paid off. With Google Analytics, you can find out how people find your website, and you’ll see what type of content they’re interested in as well as what might be turning them away.

Although Google Analytics is free, it does come with a bit of a learning curve. The complexity of the data can be overwhelming to someone who’s just starting to use it. However, it offers valuable insights for anyone managing a website, and it’s worth learning. Another great thing about Google Analytics is that it works well for companies of all sizes that are interested in improving their local internet marketing strategy.

Get Set Up with Google Analytics

To get started with Google Analytics, you’ll need to verify your site with Google. This requires that you have access to edit your website’s HTML code. If you use some sort of web content management system that does not enable you to make changes to the code, you will most likely need to contact the person or company that hosts your website. If your site is on a platform such as WordPress, you can add the code to your template.

To input the code into the <head> tag on your website homepage, simply set up a Google Analytics account and follow the step-by-step guide for verifying your site.

What to Measure with Google Analytics

You’re ready to begin exploring Google Analytics as soon as Google has verified your site. Although there are several metrics you can track using Analytics, most companies benefit from tracking the number of total visitors to their site. You can also learn about the types of people who visit your site, such as where they live, how often they visit your site, and what browser they use to view your site.

Find Out How People Get to Your Website

Another key metric is your site’s traffic sources, which shows how people arrived at your website. Was it from one of your social media networks? A guest blog post? You’ll also see the keywords people used to find your website through Google or any other search engine which can really help you revamp your keyword strategy.

Share Your Knowledge

Once you’ve created your individualized Google Analytics reports, make sure to share them with your colleagues on a recurring basis. You can set up a system where your colleagues receive an e-mail message with an attachment in PDF, CSV, or XML format that explains the metrics for the past month. This way, everyone involved in your company can keep up with what’s working and what’s not working on the website. Check out the Google guide for more information about how to use Google’s other services to benefit your business.

Houzz, a popular online platform for home remodeling and design, recently released survey results that will likely be encouraging to contractors. The results signal that as the overall economy recovers, homeowners will be looking to start and complete home remodeling and renovation projects. Compared to this time last year, more homeowners will start home remodeling and renovation projects this year, and the majority of these homeowners will seek the help of professional contractors.

Rather than cutting back on or delaying home improvement, consumers are opting to forego their vacations and other big-ticket purchases. As home values begin to rise, homeowners are looking to boost their home’s value even more with renovations.

Because Houzz has more than 14 million users, it was able to collect responses from more than 100,000 of its users. Of the survey respondents, 53 percent said they think now is a great time to remodel their homes. Also, more Americans are buying homes again, which is another indicator that your contractor business will have more opportunities for growth. Those who waited to buy during the recession are now jumping back into the housing market, and they’ll need your help to fix up their new houses.

The most commonly remodeled rooms are kitchens and bathrooms. Because kitchens are often one of the most utilized rooms in the house, customers who have remodeled their kitchens report great satisfaction, and they spend more on kitchen renovations on average than on any other room in the house. High-end kitchen renovations cost up to $54,000, but homeowners can remodel their kitchens for as little as $7,000. Survey data shows that U.S. homeowners will continue to spend a large percentage of their home remodeling budgets on their kitchens.

Reach Out to Your Customers

Reach out to your customers through local social media marketing. Spring is a great time to connect with homeowners who have been envisioning their home renovations all winter and are now ready to move forward with their home projects. Post photos of your company’s completed home renovations to get them thinking about how they can improve their homes. Homeowners may not be aware of all of the possibilities for home remodeling projects, but through local internet marketing, you can make sure your company is at the front of their minds.

Make Sure You’re Ready

Before the busy spring remodeling season hits, check over your website and social media pages to make sure all of your information is accurate and up-to-date. You want to make it easy for customers to reach you to talk about a new project. It’s also important to communicate your brand effectively and make sure that you tell potential customers that you’re easy to work with. Survey results showed that the majority of homeowners ranked a contractor with “a personality I can work with” as a 5 on a 5-point scale.

Many contractor businesses like yours use Twitter, but they might not be tapping all of its marketing potential. To help businesses learn more about integrating Twitter with their local social media marketing efforts, Twitter for Business launched a new, upgraded site. The new Twitter for Business includes online lessons that will teach your contractor business’s marketing team everything you need to know about marketing on Twitter. Although this information had previously been available for businesses, it is now arranged in a way that makes it easy for marketers to navigate.

Free Online Courses

The new site offers courses on everything from making the right impression with your company’s profile to using Twitter buttons and embedded tweets on your company website. Business owners and marketers might also find value in perusing examples of how other businesses have used Twitter to market their brands and connect with their customers.

Connect with Your Customers

If your company doesn’t use Twitter yet, it’s easy to get started. However, before you jump in, Twitter recommends that you first spend some time listening to the conversation on Twitter and following leaders in your industry. That way, when you set up your Twitter profile, you’ll be ready to use it to help your customers and to connect with them. It’s important for your company to be engaged with your audience. With Vine, the new 6-second video app, you can give customers a quick behind-the-scenes look at your business or post short how-to videos.

If you’re an experienced Tweeter, the new site offers valuable information as well. It will give you ideas for promotions that will help you reach new customers, and you can find out how to use Twitter’s marketing analytics to measure your success.

Follow Your Instincts

No matter which platform you’re using—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or something else—it’s important to remember the basic keys to effective communication. Although some companies automatically copy their Facebook posts to their Twitter feeds, it’s best to tailor your message for each audience. The most effective messages are relevant for their customers and align with the company’s business goals. Also, your business will be more credible if you check your tweets for misspelled words and broken hyperlinks.

Interact with Your Followers

Contractor companies should remember that Twitter, like all social media platforms, is meant to be interactive. Check your Twitter feed regularly for any direct tweets that you need to respond to quickly. Twitter is not just another marketing channel for you to broadcast your message. It’s a conversation that will help your company to slowly develop loyal customers.

The new Twitter for Business site is worth checking out. No matter how well you know Twitter, you’ll probably learn something new about local internet marketing.

LinkedIn is a great tool for anyone in almost any industry, including contracting, and now there are even more reasons for businesses to use LinkedIn. Following in Facebook’s footsteps, LinkedIn recently announced improvements for its search that your company’s local marketing experts will probably appreciate. The competition for ad dollars is really ramping up. LinkedIn, like most other social media sites, will use this advanced search to provide better targeting for its advertisers, who are always looking to deliver relevant ads to a specific type of user. Their ultimate goal is to provide users with a search option that rivals Google’s search. See the Google guide to learn more about leveraging search engines to help build your business.

Streamlined Searches

Some contractors might have been frustrated by the separate search boxes for companies, people, and jobs, but with the new search, all of the categories have been streamlined into one search box. Even better, the new auto-complete feature will help you find what you’re looking for. The more you search, the better your results will be. LinkedIn is employing improved algorithms to find content that is likely to interest you.

New Advanced Search Options

When people search for contractors, they’ll see both people and jobs related to contractors. This new function is designed to help people find what they’re looking for with just one click. Also, users will be able to use advanced search filters such as location and company.

Automated Alerts

With LinkedIn’s new automated alerts, users can save their searches and receive an e-mail when the results have changed. The upgrade is an attempt to encourage LinkedIn users to spend more time on the site. Before the upgrade, LinkedIn was similar to Facebook in its original form, with users jumping from profile to profile. With the advanced search features, users can more easily find information, and maybe stumble upon interesting articles or posts. In essence, its goal is to become more of a social network than it was before. The new search is another element in a long line of improvements aimed at getting users to connect to one another.

For contractor businesses like yours, LinkedIn can also be a great opportunity to connect with customers, who are likely LinkedIn users as well. If customers can find your employees’ profiles and posts more easily, they might become more engaged with your company. LinkedIn is also using the new features to reach out to users who might be good candidates for premium subscriptions, another driver of the company’s profits.

If you haven’t seen the new search yet, don’t worry. LinkedIn is rolling out the changes slowly. However, mobile users will remain limited to the basic people search for now.

Most contractors have already established a Facebook presence, and whether or not you’re active on Twitter, one of its signature features will soon make its way to Facebook. According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook is scheduled to adopt the hashtag. Although the hashtag is most commonly associated with Twitter, several other social media sites, including Intragram and Pinterest, have already adopted the hashtag. Some Facebook users already use hashtags in their posts out of habit.

When Facebook formally adopts the hashtag, users will be able to click on a hashtag to see other conversations about that topic, similar to the way they work on Twitter. Contractor businesses like yours can use hashtags to join relevant conversations, which will give your company more visibility.

Improved Graph Search Results

The move is likely driven by Facebook’s new graph search, which organizes users based on what they “like.” The problem with likes is that they aren’t a good indicator of whether a person is engaged in a company. Users sometimes click on the “like” button but lose interest quickly, and sometimes contests require people to “like” a page. A hashtag, however, could show that the user is interested in your company. When the hashtag is integrated into the graph search, it will be easier to identify people who might be engaged with your company.

Personalized Content

The hashtag helps to fulfill Facebook’s goal of creating personalized stories, news, and friend updates. The recent launch of a new Facebook news feed, which featured customized news feed, shows that Facebook is focusing on providing information to each user based on his or her preferences.

In most cases, Facebook users are drawn to the companies that their friends are talking about, and local marketing experts agree that it’s now more important than ever for contractor businesses like yours to build a loyal Facebook fan base.

Better Ad Targeting

For this reason, it will be easier than ever for contractors to target ads to users who might be posting about events as they unfold. Particularly during major sporting events and popular TV programs, the hashtag creates a buzz. However, Facebook’s privacy settings are different from Twitter’s. People who click on a hashtag on Facebook might not be able to view that person’s private posts. In general, business posts like yours would be seen by the entire Facebook audience.

Facebook is hoping that advertisers will be drawn to this new feature. Although there are some skeptics, the hashtags will probably bring more visibility to companies who use them to build their local social media marketing. Although Facebook has assured The Wall Street Journal that it will integrate hashtags sometime, it will likely be some time before they make their appearance.