Top 8 Mistakes Home Services Businesses Make with Paid Social Media

In a competitive vertical like home services (including home improvement), a robust digital marketing strategy is essential for any company that strives for growth and efficiency. With its advanced targeting capabilities, paid social media offers a powerful way to engage with potential customers, and can be a great complement to existing SEM, SEO, and email marketing efforts when properly managed and measured. In this blog post, we’ll explore the top 8 mistakes home services make with paid social media and how Socius can help you avoid them, ensuring your campaigns are effective and profitable.

Not Using Paid Social Media at All

The Mistake: Many home services businesses rely solely on traditional marketing (e.g. word of mouth and referrals), organic social media efforts, and SEO/SEM, and email, missing out on the benefits of paid social media advertising.

The Solution: Embrace paid social media to enhance your reach, lift your brand awareness, target specific demographics and achieve measurable results that organic efforts alone cannot provide.

Focusing Only on Website Traffic and Conversions 

The Mistake: Prioritizing website traffic and conversions without exploring native advertising options can limit your campaign’s effectiveness. Trying to push users (especially scrolling on a mobile device) from their social feed onto your website is a big ask, especially when the same information can be obtained through native solutions without needing to leave the app at all.

The Solution: Prioritize native ad formats like Facebook lead ads to engage users directly on social media platforms. This is often the best way to maximize volume and efficiency from paid social media.

Only Advertising on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) 

The Mistake: Limiting your paid social media efforts to Meta platforms restricts your reach and misses out on potential customers using other social media channels. While Facebook & Instagram remain at the top of the active users list, Tiktok, for example, is growing rapidly and isn’t just a Gen Z platform anymore.

The Solution: Consider diversifying your advertising efforts across multiple platforms such Tiktok, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn, depending on your specific product offering and target customer. NextDoor is also emerging as an extremely relevant “in-feed” advertising option for home services companies.

Using Over-Produced Creative 

The Mistake: Overly polished and professional ads can sometimes come across as inauthentic, failing to connect with your audience, especially in social media feeds where users are conditioned to consume user-generated content and move quickly past anything that feels like an advertisement.

The Solution: Balance high-quality visuals with authentic, relatable content that resonates with your target audience. Use real images, testimonials, behind-the-scenes content and time-lapse videos to drive more views and engagement.

Not Including Promotions or Offers

The Mistake: Ads that don’t feature special promotions or offers may fail to capture the attention of potential customers. In social media, although effective audience targeting can capture users interested in your services, these users aren’t actively searching for them as they would on search engines like Google or Bing, so they often require additional incentives to take action. 

The Solution: Incorporate time-sensitive promotions, discounts, or special offers in your ads to incentivize action and drive conversions. 

Not Measuring Impact Through to Sales and Marketing Costs

The Mistake: Focusing solely on metrics like clicks and impressions, and even leads without measuring the impact on actual sales and marketing costs lends to an incomplete understanding of your campaign’s effectiveness.

The Solution: Track and analyze the full customer journey from ad engagement to sale, including the cost of acquisition and overall ROI. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can further enhance these efforts by organizing customer data, tracking interactions, and enabling more personalized and efficient marketing strategies.

Not Integrating Paid Social with Other Digital Media Efforts 

The Mistake: Treating paid social media as an isolated effort rather than integrating it into a multi-channel digital marketing strategy can reduce the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.

The Solution: Combine paid social media with other digital marketing channels like SEO, email marketing, and PPC to create a cohesive and powerful marketing strategy. Leveraging analytics tools, such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4), can provide crucial insights into your campaigns’ performance and cross-campaign interaction, helping you optimize your strategies and achieve better results.

Poor Organic Social Media and Page Maintenance 

The Mistake: Neglecting your organic social media presence and failing to maintain your social media pages can undermine your paid advertising efforts.

The Solution: Regularly update your social media pages with valuable content, engage with your audience, and maintain a strong organic presence to support your paid campaigns. This will help your paid efforts feel more authentic and an extension of your overall social media engagement strategy.

Conclusion

In conclusion, avoiding these common mistakes can significantly improve the effectiveness of your paid social media campaigns and overall digital marketing strategy. At Socius, we understand the unique challenges faced by home services businesses and offer comprehensive paid media management services, ensuring your paid and owned marketing channels all work together to maximize performance and minimize inefficiency.

If you’re ready to incorporate these solutions into your home services business marketing strategy, schedule your demo with Socius today.