How To Market To Homeowners Proactively

If you want to learn how to market to homeowners, then you need to remember this: in business and in life, the early bird gets the worm. Contractors, landscapers, roofers, and solar installers who form solid relationships with local homeowners will always win. Being first to connect with a homeowner isn’t the only deciding factor, but it certainly helps.

If another service provider meets an interested homeowner first, you’ll probably lose their business.

So why is everyone waiting around for homeowners to find them when time is of the essence?

Waiting to be found is dangerous advice

Have you heard some version of the following advice?

‍Homeowners today want to be in control of their buying experience. They prefer to search for services online and read reviews extensively. You must build your online presence so homeowners can find you.

‍Business owners today are taught that they need to wait to be found.

It’s madness. The world’s top companies don’t wait for customers to find them. I can guarantee you that. What they do instead is optimize their ability to be found, but they don’t treat search engines and social media as the only way to get customers.

Big brands aside, this advice is especially detrimental to small business owners, who can’t afford to wait around. You’ve got business expenses and personal bills to pay. You need to grow your business now.

Why you should create an online presence (but don’t rely on it)

You absolutely should create an online presence that includes the following:

• Search engine optimization - Target relevant, hyperlocal keyphrases with web pages and blog posts. Do on-site SEO tasks like UX and load time improvements.
• Accurate citations - Make sure that your business information is accurate on Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook, and everywhere else.
• Online reviews - Ask your customers to leave you reviews, especially on Google, so you increase your chances of showing up in the map result.

These are proven ways to affordably bring in customers and clients using digital marketing. But these methods are all passive.

Let’s learn more about the weaknesses of digital marketing when it comes to local home and property services.

Why you shouldn’t rely on your online presence to bring in customers

Showing up in Google is great. But it’s not the end-all, be-all of marketing your business to homeowners, and there are so many reasons why.

Here are a few of the main reasons:

• Your competitors might reach your potential clients before they have a chance to go looking for you
• Your potential customers might need your service and be willing to pay for it, but they’re not yet actively searching
• Your potential customers may not be educated in why they need your service or the value it can provide

Getting found online is a great source of free leads, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to grow your business. In fact, waiting for customers is a very passive, unreliable way to grow your business. Meanwhile, your competitors might be taking a more active approach.

Follow these 4 steps to market to homeowners proactively

Not every homeowner or property owner is a good potential client for you. You need to be smart with how you spend your time and money. In this process, you’ll learn how to search property owners to target the right local homeowners and commercial property owners.

Step 1) Discover the right local homeowners to market to

So how do you discover the right property owners? Public records data.

Head down to the county office, and peruse through 117,432 files.

Just kidding!

You can use a platform like PropertyRadar to access public records data in minutes. We’ve made legally accessible public records data easy for you to use. We have over 200+ criteria to help you find the right prospects. We’ve combined some of these criteria into ready-made Quick Lists. All you have to do is add your location.

These are the Quick Lists that help home services companies find their ideal customers:

• Pre-movers list
• New homeowners list
• Land buyers list
• Large lots list
• Poolside living list
• Wealthy locals list
• Recent 2nd mortgage list
• New wealthy locals list
• Cash buyers list

Our Quick Lists include different criteria such as home equity percentage, home value, recent mortgage information, lot size, owner demographics, and more.

Using highly specific property and property owner criteria allows you to target who is most likely to become a future customer, instead of wasting direct marketing dollars on any property in your service area.

Step 2) Understand more about the properties you’ve discovered

Once you have a list of leads (built using a Quick List or your own custom criteria), you can look at the individual properties to find any that are high priority for you to market to.

For example, homeowners who took out a recent 2nd mortgage and are located near one of your current projects might be an excellent client who you would want to get in contact with right away.

You can further segment your mailing list, make notes on top-priority properties, go driving for dollars to see different properties and take pictures of the work that needs to get done, learn more about the owners’ age, income, and occupation status...whatever you need to help you market and sell your services more effectively.

To recap, in this step your goals are:

• Prioritize the properties on your lists
• Re-segment your lists, or create new lists to organize them better
• Research the potential needs of the properties on your list

Step 3) Reach out to local homeowners directly

Next up, it’s time to reach out to the homeowner (or commercial property owner).

These are the ways we recommend:

• Direct mail - For everyone on your list who would be a great potential customer
• Phone call - For everyone on your list, or only for the high priority opportunities
• Door knocking - For your high priority opportunities

Remember when we mentioned that having an online presence isn’t a bad thing? If you have great reviews online, and great testimonials on your website, then prospects will likely find them. Some prospects will look you up after you mailed them, called them, or knocked on their door.

They might not have known you existed, or that they needed your service, if you hadn’t reached out first. But now they’re checking out your services and your testimonials, and they’re impressed. This is how the online world and the offline world can work together.

Step 4) Automate your outreach

Any list you make inside of PropertyRadar is automatically kept up to date. When another property meets your criteria, it gets added to your list.

In addition, you can use our upcoming integrations to automate direct mail to your mailing lists. This means that all you have to do is set up a direct mail campaign once, and as soon as another home meets your criteria, they automatically receive direct mail from you in their inbox.

Automating your outreach is the smartest way to ensure that you contact potential customers before your competitors do.

PropertyRadar is the most comprehensive property data and owner information platform. We make it easy for you to discover your next local customer. Sign up today.