First impressions are meaningless  - said no one ever! Your first impression of basically anything is the foundation to your relationship with that entity - whether it be a person, a business, a place, or thing. Sure, first impressions are sometimes (almost never) editable - with serious hard work. Or you can just make it right (or do everything you can to make it right!).

How does your website do with landing the best first impression with visitors? Does it push people away or make them stay? And those that stick around, are they the right people to be enticing? Or are they the ones that waste yours and their time because they misunderstood your approach and design and/or build services offered? 

Most websites average a 30-60% bounce rate (read more about how Google defines bounce rate here). That's the percentage of people who leave your website right after viewing the only page that brought them to your site. So imagine that - all that hard work on improving your search ranking results

Inbound marketing using marketing automation software like HubSpot or SharpSpring isn't cheap. Because of this, many home services companies that we speak with form the conclusion that HubSpot is only for large businesses with bigger budgets, not small business with revenues below $2.5M/year. This is an incorrect assumption due mainly to the fact that digital marketing using great content and inbound tactics is different than any other type of marketing. You see, marketing that is tracked directly to leads and revenue, with a clearly defined and transparent ROI, can never be too expensive. 

You've likely been seeing blogs for many years now. Sure, they've been set up in different ways - some that take you to what looked like a new page and some with the usual Blog tab in the menu bar. From those initial days, several years ago, you heard all the rage with this phenomenon and likely for many reasons. A way to break down the details of one or a specific group of projects, self promote a special, recap an event - to name a few of those reasons. But maybe you never heard anyone getting more leads from it - just brand recognition. So you stuffed this trend under the rug as a time sucker useless activity.

As a home services contracting business owner or a marketing executive, you don't really exist in a state of "okay, I'm not at work right now." You're always on, in someway or another (especially true if you're a small business owner!). There are times however that you really are away, or times you wish you could be away. Perhaps dinner with family, hiking, traveling, and the obvious- sleeping. During these times, what is your business doing for revenue generation? The answer is easy: its either preventing it or helping it.

The home services industry is going through an interesting time. GCs, landscape contractors, roofing and siding contractors, kitchen design firms, architects, and interior designers are all facing stiff competition and ever decreasing margins.

With the target market for these businesses doing all their research and decision making online, effective marketing for contractors and the sales process have both completely changed. Today's buyer is extremely educated and now has all the power in the sales process. That's right—ALL the power. 

So what exactly are home services professionals to do?