Grow Your Electrical Contracting Business In 2021

As your fiscal year comes to an end and the holiday season approaches, now is the time to set the stage for next year. Presenters at business planning seminars and marketing workshops, and even your digital marketing partner all have valuable input into how to make 2021 the best year yet for your electrical company.

To help you along, our electrician marketing experts have compiled a list of 6 electrician marketing ideas for 2021. These strategies are proven to help electricians:

• Increase leads and sales
• Optimize their marketing costs next year
• Differentiate their brands online from their top competitors

Let’s dive in!

1. Build and Maintain a Strong Brand

A strong brand will influence all of your electrician digital marketing campaigns by creating awareness, building credibility and reputation, and customer satisfaction. In order to create and maintain a well-recognized brand, you should first define who your ideal customer is:

Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

• Think about your service from the customers’ perspective – What problems are you solving for them? How does their life improve because of your services? Of all the services you offer, which ones are the most important to your customers? Why might these customers choose the competition instead of your company?
• Define their demographics – What is the age, education level, and occupations of your ideal customers? What are their annual income levels?
• Narrow down their location – Where do your ideal customers live and work? Where are they when they search for your services?
• Map their buying strategy – How do ideal customers work with you? Do they do a lot of research first? Do they prefer to call your company or email? Is your business subject to consumer seasonality or changing weather patterns?

Where to Find This Information

For electrical contractors, your CRM (customer relationship management) and field management software is your best bet to find the answers to the questions above and will help you define your ideal customer profile. No matter if you chose ServiceTitan, FieldPulse, or another CRM, leverage the power of your software to identify your ICP.

• Identify the most profitable service areas – Run a report that shows close revenue by the city to identify the most profitable service areas to your business.
• Classify the types of customers you have – Run a report that shows you the types of jobs you ran in 2020. Where specific service lines more profitable than others? Did you generate more revenue from previous customers or new customers?
• Identify where you excelled and where you fell short – Did you start 2020 with new growth initiatives? Did you meet them?
• Identify any leaks in your sales process – Did your marketing team generate the number of leads you needed last year, but you still fell short of your revenue goals? Revisit your sales team’s conversion rates … you may be leaking revenue without even knowing it.

Know Your Competitive Differentiators

Competitive differentiators are what make your business better than your competition’s. These should be easily recalled by all the members of your team as well as being crystal clear on your website.

Examples include:

• The best prices
• The best quality
• Fastest response
• Best for emergency situations

Less is more. While you might have lots of things you are proud that your company does, the secret here will be to focus on one particular aspect that you can consistently push. This not only differentiates you externally from your competition, but it will drive your internal dialogue around marketing.

2. Audit Your Marketing Strategy

Do you have a clearly defined marketing strategy for 2021? Even if you do, you will need to audit it periodically. Sometimes, events like the COVID-19 pandemic will force a marketing audit on you: what do you need to change right away in order to keep serving your clients in conformity with local and state laws?

3. Build a Great Electrician Website

A visit to your website is the first (and possibly only) time that a potential customer is going to form an impression of your brand. Key tenets of website design for electricians include:

• Being user-friendly – Again, consider things from your customers’ perspective. Can they find what they need quickly and easily?
• Being easy to navigate – Are your menus easy to navigate and can customers find what they need intuitively?
• Being mobile-friendly – More and more searches happen on mobile every day, a trend that is growing by the year. Your website has to be mobile-friendly not just for the customers’ experience, but for how well you’ll rank with the search engines.

• Being secure – Having an SSL certificate installed on your website’s hosting environment means your website is HTTPS, not HTTP. This tells website visitors their information is safe with you and builds confidence when browsing your site. You’ll also receive a slight ranking boost from Google and Bing by making your website secure.
• Having fast load times – We’ve come to expect fast load times from websites. 53% of mobile users who don’t get to a website within three seconds will hit the back button.

4. Focus on Local Search Engine Optimization

Your website is not an online brochure. It’s one of the most valuable marketing tools available to you. It works 24/7/365 to generate leads and sales, never sleeps, and never takes days off.

But, what good is a website if nobody can find it online? Local search engine optimization (local SEO for electricians) is the process of making your company visible for geographically related searches, specifically within Google’s local pack (or “maps listings”).

To improve your local SEO, here’s a few tips:

Install Schema Markup

Schema was founded by Google, Yahoo, and Bing in 2011 and it established a universal language all search engines can read and understand. This means search engines don’t have to make assumptions about who you are, what you do, and where you do it.

Installing schema markup on your website increases your chances of ranking on page one of search engine results pages (SERPs), thereby generating more traffic and potential new customers to your website.

Optimize Your Google My Business Profile

This is a key component of any electrician’s local SEO strategy. A business that wants to have local search presence must optimize their Google My Business profile for maximum online visibility. This includes (but is not limited to):

• Making sure that your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are accurate and up to date
• Generating new customer reviews and responding to the reviews left on your Google My Business profile
• Answering searchers’ questions in the Q&A section of Google My Business
• Selecting the correct primary business categories
• Establishing your business as a service area business

Consistent NAP information (which we will talk about more in a moment) and quality and quantity of customer reviews are key drivers of local SEO—focus your efforts here first.

Claim & Verify Your Listings On All Online Directories

Outside of Google My Business, you’ll also want NAP consistency on every directory in your local area. Apart from the big ones that you might already know about, like Nextdoor, Yelp, and Facebook, you can find relevant directories by looking at the SERPs for electricians in your area.

Make sure your NAP is correctly and consistently displayed in every single directory, as any inconsistencies will harm your local SEO presence.

5. Create a Blog (And Publish Regularly)

One of the electrician marketing tips for 2021 that perhaps doesn’t get mentioned enough is creating a blog. This might be because it is a fair amount of work, but the return on that time and investment is significant, especially if you can score a featured snippet.

What is a Featured Snippet?

Remember that Google’s primary goal is to provide the most relevant answer to your customers’ questions, rather than send you to a bunch of other websites that don’t provide any value to the user. If you take the time to answer frequently asked questions to electricians in your blog, Google might highlight your site at the very top (what is called “position zero”).

Creating great content on your website, including blogs, can help you earn better SERP rankings and possibly a position zero ranking within the featured snippets. Google also loves featured snippets for voice search, which is also an ever-increasing type of search that those looking for electricians are utilizing.

6. Invest In Paid Advertising On Search Engines

Of course one of the most important parts of how to market yourself as an electrician is through paid advertising on search engines. These include:

• Local services ads – Google local services ads for electricians are an inexpensive way to get in front of those doing local searches for electricians. Not only that, you’ll secure a spot on Google’s most coveted real estate … at the top of the page!
• Pay Per Click (PPC) – PPC for electricians is an indispensable way to get more qualified leads for your business. It provides your team with qualified leads in the short-term, and is a scalable, efficient way to drive business long into 2021 and beyond.
• Social media marketing – Your clients are on Facebook, Nextdoor, Twitter, and other social media platforms, talking about home services and asking for recommendations, like “Does anyone know a good electrician?” You need to establish a presence on these platforms, but you should also be utilizing paid advertising opportunities where you can:Nextdoor features some great opportunities for advertising, including community sponsorships, which put your company into the news feed and the email newsletter, as well as Nextdoor local deals, which are time-limited deals offered in specific zip codes and neighborhoods that you target.
• Remarketing – Remarketing reminds those who’ve visited your site but didn’t end up contacting you that you are still available for their electrical needs. Like Local Services ads, this type of electrician advertising is relatively inexpensive and offers good results.
• Email marketing – This, of course, assumes that you have an email list that you have been adding to, which includes past customers and (potential) future customers. Email marketing for electricians is a reliable marketing strategy to stay top of mind with everyone who you send it to.

Offline Advertising

Another type of advertising that people don’t often think about is outstanding customer service. This creates repeat customers but also is an integral part of word of mouth marketing. Along with great customer service, you can consider developing customer rewards/referral programs.

Vehicle wraps are also an inexpensive type of electrician marketing and is a smart way to advertise and build brand awareness for your company.

You might also want to consider partnering with other local electricians who offer services that you don’t. If there’s a good reciprocal fit, you can offer referrals to each other and satisfy customers who you can’t help by sending them to someone who can.

Finally, a unique service we offer at Blue Corona is call intelligence reporting. A major upgrade from basic call tracking, which is useful insofar as it helps you see where your most effective advertising comes from, call intelligence reporting goes above and beyond to analyze your calls to find out why qualified leads aren’t closing. It’s an exciting and industry-leading way to grow an electrical business.

Build Your 2021 Electrician Marketing Plan with Blue Corona

2020 had its challenges, for sure. But that’s even more reason why you should take these electrician marketing ideas for 2021 and make it your best year ever.

If you need help building and executing your 2021 marketing strategy, contact us online. Our home services marketing experts are ready and waiting!