14 Contractor Marketing Strategies To Get More Leads In 2025
Let's talk about contractor marketing strategies - what things contractors and home service pros need to do to up their game, improve their business, and earn more leads.
Launch A Website That Sells Your Services
Your website is the backbone of your online marketing presence. Directly referred customers and Google searchers will visit your website as the first step in engaging with your business. So, your website needs to achieve a few things to ensure it works well as your 24/7 digital storefront.
Flaunt A Great Looking Design
Your contractor website design must look great and work well for mobile, tablet, and desktop users. It's important that it should look great from the standpoint of your website visitors, not necessarily your personal preferences.
Be A Good Storyteller
Your website shouldn't be a place where you bore your visitors with technical information. Sway your customers with your story - your journey of how your company came to be and tales of how you help homeowners solve their problems.
Answer A Homeowner's Questions
When visitors land on your website, they have an objective in mind. They are seeking an answer, and your website needs to guide them to the answer. Your website's layout, navigation, and content need to help escort your visitor through the appropriate pathways to answer those questions, assure that visitors are in the right place, and gather their contact information once that prospect is satisfied with their visit.
Show Off Your Good Work
Your image galleries and project pages are there to sell your business. From a search engine optimization and visitor conversion standpoint, showing off examples of your work helps new customers find you and better understand your expertise.
Claim Your Google Business Profile To Show Up Locally
Your Google Business Profile (previously called Google My Business and Google Listings) can potentially transform your lead generation for home service companies and contractors.
Proper GBP Set Up Is Vital
Properly setting up your GBP is hugely important. When you first create your Google Business Profile, you need to make sure that you have correctly set up your vital details.
- Business Name
- Category
- Attributes
- Services
- Address and Phone Number
- Service Areas
An accurate Google Business Profile setup ensures that Google best understands the context of your business and properly informs any potential customers who are vetting home service company candidates.
The Importance of NAP
When it comes to NAP (Name, Address, Phone), it is vitally important that your business information is consistent across the internet, not just on your website. That includes all other citations - basically any places online that feature your contact information, like BBB, Yelp, or any other listings.
Even if you don't actually have a brick-and-mortar location (as is the case with most contractors who work in people's homes), Google still needs to have an understanding of your NAP as part of the prominence component of your local optimization. This is a key component of your company's local optimization marketing plans to rank better with searchers near you.
This isn't the type of thing you just set up once and leave alone. A Google Business Profile only performs at its best when actively used.
Relevance, Distance, and Prominence: How Your Google Business Profile Will Rank
How well your Google Business Profile ranks is based on relevance, distance, and prominence. Your actions can directly and indirectly impact your Google Business Profile visibility and effectiveness.
Some tactics, like gaining more Google Reviews, can directly influence your prominence. That will give you an edge in visibility over your local competitors.
Other tactics, like Google Business Profile posts and pictures, can influence the look of your GBP and entice users to interact further. You can use Google Posts to feature special deals, show off projects, and target seasonal promotional content.
Pull Traffic To Your Site with Search Engine Optimization & AI Search Optimization
Search engine optimization is all about making sure your website is seen as the right answer for a searcher’s query.
What used to be a relatively straightforward process has grown to an increasingly complex system of potential ways to get your business information in front of a searcher.
With AI Search services like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Microsoft Copilot gaining popularity in recent months and generative search in Google, the contractor SEO world is very different from what is was even just 2 years ago.
You now have to worry about more than just the “ten blue links” when we’re talking about ranking. You now have to consider whether your content will show up in Google Local search, as a rich snippet text, part of a Google AI Overview response, as a “People also ask” response, in a short-form video carousel, in “Videos” result, or whatever else Google thinks may be relevant for your specific query.
Organic Search Engine Optimization Factors To Consider
How well your content ranks is ultimately about if you’re the right answer.
What makes the right answer is content that appears to know what it is talking about and delivers itself in a way that is easy for a user to consume and understand. There are different ways marketers have helped demonstrate a website's value.
The Right Keywords - Long-Tail & Short Phrases
What you talk about on a page matters. While Google is better about understanding the context of content, you still need to add the right combinations of words on the page.
If it a phrase that someone might type into their search bar to find a company like you, chances are you should have a page for it.
What Are Short-Tail Keyphrases?
There are keywords and “short-tail” key phrases like “drain cleaning” or “electrician” that are the short, more commonly search terms. Savvy contractors know that many potential customers are entering these types of search queries, so there will be higher competition for this terms.
What Are Long-Tail Keyphrases?
There are also “long-tail” key phrases that often combine the service and the location where you complete that work; phrases like “Chicago window washing” or “San Francisco roof repair.” The more specific these phrases get, the less likely people will be using those search queries. While that means less potential for traffic, it also means less potential for competition.
Backlinks & Recognition From Other Respected Websites
If other people vouch for your website (as done through links from other respected, high-authority websites), that can help search engines to better understand your quality. Earning such backlinks can be tedious but is definitely a worthwhile endeavor.
Technical SEO Load Quickly To Retain Visitors
When we start to talk about "technical optimization" for websites, we know you start to fall asleep. We get it - technical website improvements are one of the least sexy parts of your marketing efforts. But that doesn't mean you get a pass on having to care about it. If your website is slow, people aren't going to stick around. They will leave your website and head to a competitor instead.
AI Search Optimization Factors To Consider
There is certainly some overlap in AI search and organic search engine best practices
Conversational Content That Engages Users
For both mediums, you need to create conversational content that answers a user’s query. Just as if a customer asked you a question in-person, your content on your website should feel like a conversation that meets the person asking the question at their level. Some contractors have a harder time taking their everyday industry speak and distilling it down, but simple to understand content is key.
Answer The Question Promptly & Deeply
It should answer the question immediately at the top of the content, and then go into more detail about the finer points of answering that question more deeply as the content continues.
Show Your Authority As An Expert
Demonstrating that your content and that you as a content creator have authority in your field is important for search engines, people, and AI search optimization. Just like the E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trustworthiness) framework from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, your content should demonstrate your expertise, highlight your industry experience, and ultimately provide good, useful information to your audience.
"THE ROI IS IMMEDIATE - I wish I had started sooner with Footbridge"
- Jeff Brooks, Owner of AMW Housewashing
Capture More Lead Information With An AI Chat Assistant
Whether through paid advertising or earned organic traffic, getting people to visit your website is just half the battle.
From there, you need to convince your customer that you can be trusted with their contact information to start the next step of the process.
If your website is supposed to be your 24/7 digital storefront, then having an AI Chatbot on your website is your always-on salesperson.
Using an AI Chatbot helps you to interact more directly with each and every website visitor to attract them into engagement. A online home services chatbot pops up a notification on relevance pages to start the conversation, vets your prospect to ensure their physical location and service needs are a good fit for your business, and then confirms their key contact information.
An AI-powered chat assistant on your website will capture leads better than traditional forms alone.
Cultivate Your Leads With Email Newsletters
Once you have contact information for leads, you aren’t done after a single phone call, text, or email message.
Especially for those contractors with a longer purchasing process, like remodelers, roofers, or service upgrades compared to “urgent need” type calls - you need to continually communicate with your past and potential customers.
For those potential customers who have started outreach with you but that haven’t committing, email marketing is a great way to keep your business engaged without being overbearing or overly strenuous.
For those past customers who have happily used your services, a recurring email newsletter is effective for maintaining top-of-mind awareness to help with repeat business or generating referrals.
Don’t Just Email From Your Work Email: The Importance Of The Right Email Services
While one-to-one email communication is absolutely fine when completed your usual email sending habits, you cannot do the same and email large lists of addresses.
When sending marketing emails en masse as a business, there are specific legal concerns to safely and effectively messaging your email lists.
At best, you risk your email address reputation suffering and having email deliverability problems for your company in general – meaning that even your normal business email correspondence may get stuck in spam filters. That means emails to customers, like invoices, estimates, or service confirmations, won’t make it to their inbox.
At worst, you risk legal penalties or fines for failing to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act in the US, CASL - Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, or any other local spam laws that apply to your business.
The Right Email Content To Engage and Entertain Your Homeowners
When you create your email newsletter content, it should never be 100% sales pitch content.
Being too focused on promotion will not encourage recipients to continue to open your messages.
By providing informative and entertaining content - like home care tips and seasonally-appropriate content that is tangential to your area of expertise - you can keep readers coming back for more.
Each newsletter should be mostly informative, with one or two dedicated calls to action.
Entertain And Inform Potential Customers Via Social Media
Homeowners have more choices now than ever when it comes to a home service company or contractor. Especially for non-emergency related services, your socially savvy prospective customers will check for your company on popular social media platforms - to try to better understand you and make sure you’re a good fit for them and their needs.
Social media is no longer optional for small businesses.
Having a core presence on at least Facebook - the largest social media platform by user count at over 3 billion Facebook users worldwide - is an absolute must.
Your content on social media should never be about 100% selling. While adding promotional content is important for a business on social media, you also have to be engaging and informative to keep people interacting with your social media presence.
Take the opportunity to humanize your business a bit and add some face to the name of your business.
Taking pictures of yourself or your employees on the job site, shaking hands with customers, hanging out with the client’s dog, sharing your recent project photos and details - all of this is great content to add personality and life to your business beyond a good review count.
Get New Leads Fast With Google Ads (PPC)
There are plenty of options for directly spending money on advertising to gain leads.
Based on our interactions with clients, we have - for years - tended not to recommend those popular contractor-lead purchasing sites. Recently, the FTC has taken action against popular providers that have "used misleading tactics to sell home improvement project leads to many small businesses" - to the tune of a $7.2 million settlement.
Instead, we recommend running your own advertising campaigns to capture those leads exclusively for yourself instead of a pool of contractors.
Google Ads And Capturing Prospects That Need A Contractor Now
Google Ads (banner ads, links at the top and bottom of search engine results pages, etc) are targeted based on what a searcher is looking for.
Chances are if someone is doing a Google search for "roof repair," - they may have a leak that needs some immediate repair.
Using Google Ads will help you find those currently motivated potential clients so you can get prominent placement in front of them during their time of need.
When properly executed, Google Ads provides a high return on investment.
Unlike TV and radio advertisements that get you in front of a wide range of people, Google Ads can be geographically restricted as well as restricted to activity related to your target keyphrases.
That means you can focus on the counties, towns, and zip codes that make sense for finding new customers for your business reach and costs.
Discover Your Ideal Customers with Facebook Ads For Contractors & Geofencing
Facebook advertising is much more effective at finding the right people who are a good fit for your offerings. That will help you to find and repeatedly expose your company and offerings to a prospective customer.
The most popular Facebook ad types include the following.
- Single Image Ads — Using a single video or image and some basic copy, it usually looks like a traditional Facebook post at first. These types of ads can link to a specific page on your website to drive traffic.
- Carousel Ads — Instead of a single image, you can add multiple images that can be cycled through. You could feature multiple services or show off multiple images of a single service you offer.
- Lead Ads — These are ads that allow you to capture form information directly from within the ad. Pre-populated Facebook data makes it easier for the user to provide you with their contact information.
Facebook Ads Target Ideal Customers
While it may not comprehend the immediate needs of a user as well as Google can, Facebook ads can help you find the right people who can benefit from your services.
Audience targeting can be difficult, but finding the right potential customers who fit your ideal customer persona is important - and it’s a strength of Facebook ad campaigns over Google ads.
Geotargeting And Your Social Media Ads
For home service pros, putting rails on your ad spend is important.
A smart way to have your Facebook ad dollars provide the best return on investment is to use geotargeting.
Restricting your Facebook ad placement to those potential customers in your ideal service areas helps to avoid waste in your advertising spend, target good potential customers, and hyperfocus your marketing efforts.
Demonstrate Your Expertise With Content Marketing, Case Studies, & Project Posts
At a bare minimum, your website should have individual page of content that focus on each of the major services that you provide and each of the major areas you service.
Your website content will make or break your online marketing success.
From there, you create a variety of multimedia content - including photos, videos, reviews, case studies, recently completed work - to attract new visitors to your website and keep them engaged.
Why “Content Is King” Still Rings True
There are some basic truths about the right type of content you should make and how you should optimize it - whether it is for generative AI or traditional search results.
At a most basic level, your content should answer your customer’s questions. When a user enters a search query, they need something.
Understanding the intent of a user is important - your content should meet the searcher where they are and answer their question.
Whether it is your service pages, blogs, city pages, project content, or anything in between - the quality of your content and the completeness of your answer is key.
Generating Marketing Content On Every Job Site
Every job you complete presents you with the opportunity to advance multiple components of your marketing efforts.
- Document your projects, before and after, with pictures and video.
- Get reviews for every single job you complete
- Promote your referral programs at the end of every job
- Using yard signs or doorhangers to canvass the general area around your job
Individual Project Pages and Case Studies
People are visual. They also want to be reassured that they are making the right decisions when they spend their money and provide access to their homes.
Creating individual project pages - small size case studies - is a great way to put a customer at ease and help convince them they’re making the right choice by selecting you and your business.
You’re basically asking the question “What did you do on this job?” and turning that into a dedicated page on your website.
A good quality project page includes great visuals (photos and videos) and social proof (reviews and testimonials). It should also feature any unique equipment, materials, or vendors used that may catch the attention of a potential customer. Your project page should also include basic location details about the neighborhood or city where the work was completed.
Creating single pages of content on your website gives you the opportunity to convert potential customers who have similar needs or need service in that same physical market.
It is also an opportunity to further demonstrate your experience and expertise to search engines, while giving you more potential pages to rank for long-tail keywords.
"Footbridge Media is the answer to our small business online presence. You can't go wrong. They know what they are doing."
- Stephanie Andrews, Co-Owner of 32 Below Inc
Speak Directly To Your Potential Customers With Video Marketing
Long gone are the days when video marketing required tons of expensive equipment and specialized video skills. With smartphones and apps, you can produce solid-quality videos without too much technical hassle.
Of course, as you improve your video skills and output, you can upgrade your equipment – but the threshold to enter into the video marketing space has never been lower.
From long-form videos for YouTube and short-form video formats for TikTok, there are many ways to try out a little bit of video marketing content for your business.
Live videos may have their own unique jitters, but "Going Live" is a good way to get started without needing to focus too much on polish and production.
Your video content can show you at work, answer commonly asked customer questions, reveal the behind-the-scenes of your business, and demonstrate your industry expertise in your community.
Pay Happy Customers To Refer You To A New Audience
Referral marketing is an amazing way to take full advantage of your base of happy customers.
Instead of just sitting and hoping for word-of-mouth to go to work for you, formalize your efforts into a programmatic, incentivized referral marketing program.
That is just a fancy way of saying that you should make sure you have a system in place and give people rewards for referring business to you.
A referral program tracks where referral leads come from, and it gives a reward to the person who gave you the referral while also rewarding your new customers.
The incentive is up to you. You can use cold, hard cash or a gift card for referrers and a discount on services for your new customer. It's important to remember these two details about how incentivized referral programs work.
- 1. The reward has to be good enough to get people excited to use the referral
- 2. You only need to pay out your referral costs when you 100% have completed a job!
When done right, you can expand your effective sales team for a very low cost (and you won't have to worry about paying for benefits or PTO time!)
Earn More Reviews To Deliver The Social Proof Your Customers Look For
With information easy to find via the smartphones in everyone’s pocket, it makes sense that 91% of homeowners rely on online reviews before they choose their home services company.
Your Google Business Profile is one of the first things that will pop up if someone does a Google search of your business name.
The Google “Map Pack” is one of the first things that show up when someone does a Google search for many popular terms that home service companies target for organic optimization, like “electrician,” “plumber,” “remodeler,” and virtually every contractor type.
Getting More Reviews By Being Active, Not Passive
Getting more reviews doesn’t happen by accident. You have to earn those reviews by actively asking for the review and then following up with easy-to-use review links.
You should start asking for the review before you even leave the job site. Once you finish up and confirm your customer is satisfied with your services, you should start the review conversation.
From there, follow up with them via email and text message to provide them with a website link to more easily leave you a review.
Even when homeowners mean well and intend to leave you a good review, they are also busy. By following up and giving them a quick link to click, you reduce those hurdles and make it easier for them to follow through.
While you can certainly do that manually, using an automated review management system will help you to get more reviews without spending all of your time emailing and texting people.
Where You Should Focus On Getting Reviews
For most contractors and home service pros, Google is the #1 place where you should get more reviews.
Depending on your customer base and your reputation management needs elsewhere online, you can have more targetted campaigns to address offsetting bad reviews on BBB, Angi, or the link - but that should be handled on a case-by-case basis.
"The best part of the program is the ease of everything. I can sit back and not worry about this part of the business."
- Eric Uhlig, Owner of Anytime Electric
Interact With Customers Offline With Direct Mail & Print Marketing
Print marketing can still be very effective for contractors. It allows you to target specific, highly-sought after physical locations in an economical way. Direct mail and print marketing for contractors work great in tandem with a comprehensive online and offline marketing plan.
Using Every Door Direct Mail Postcards (EDDM) To Canvass
You don’t need to buy mailing lists anymore to reach the right target audience.
Every Door Direct Mail is a service by the United States Postal Service. It allows you to select very specific mailing routes and get postcards into every single mailbox in a area.
The highly targetted capabilities of EDDM campaigns make them great for focusing on well-to-do areas or areas that you know were impacted by specific weather. It also allows you to target areas where homes were constructed in phases, so you can anticipate the potential for your business to repair or replace roofs, HVAC equipment, etc.
EDDM mailing is less expensive than traditional postcard postage, allows for complete mailing without needing to know addresses, and is an effective way to canvass without needing to physically walk through neighborhoods.
Using Print Marketing When You’re On The Job
While you're on a job site anyway, whether it is a pressure washing job or a total HVAC overhaul, you have boots on the ground in a new area with neighbors who could also possibly benefit from your services.
You can use a variety of print marketing materials to canvas the neighborhood and place yourself in front of this new audience of potential customers.
Before you complete the job and leave, take a few minutes to invest in the area you're currently serving in hopes of future expansion of your service area.
You can use a variety of contractor print marketing and direct mail materials to gain some new customers.
Professionally Printed Flyers
Go old-school and low-tech – Knock on a few doors in each direction up and down the street from your location just to "Let neighbors know you're in the area" and pass out some flyers along the way. These flyers can include a "friends and neighbors discount" since you're already working in the neighborhood to sweeten the pot a little bit.
Yard Signs
When the job is done, and you drive away, a yard sign can be a great way to have your marketing efforts linger for a little longer. Remember to keep your yard signs simple, with a direct and simple explanation of your services, your name, and your phone number, and web address.
Door Hangers
The classic "Please pardon our dust and work vehicles" angle is a great way to start the conversation here. It establishes that you're there doing a specific service and identifying yourself as easily accessible for any needs. Door hangers are also cheap to print and have a very low barrier for use, so you can hit up a whole city block quickly and easily.
Truck Magnets
If you don't have full vehicle wraps for your work van and truck, a truck magnet is still a good way to demonstrate you are a professional home services provider while being much lower cost than a full vehicle wrap.
Start Today With Proactive Steps To Build Your Business
Whether you do one thing or everything on our 2025 contractor marketing trend list, the important thing is to move forward and work to actively build your business efforts.
Take the time to grow your business. A partnership with Footbridge Media - including our core online marketing program, review management, GBP assistance, and overall marketing assistance, just to name a few things - can help make building your business success a little easier.
"Contractor Marketing Tips And Tricks" - The Footbridge Media Podcast
About Chris Lonergan
Chris Lonergan has over 12 years of contractor marketing experience with Footbridge Media. With a background in web design, print design, content creation, and online marketing, Chris is focused on providing quality marketing and business solutions in the construction and service industries - helping small business owners to more efficiently manage their companies and grow their operations.
Chris Lonergan has previously contributed to and/or been featured in PM Magazine (Plumbing & Mechanical | Contractors x Engineers), theNEWS (ACHR - Air Conditioning | Heating | Refrigeration), Service Roundtable's blog, inPAINT Magazine, the SMB Marketing Agency Show, and the Green Industry Podcast. Chris is also a past SGI/CertainPath breakout session presenter.
