How to Hire a Marketing Agency for your Home Services Company

Choosing the right marketing agency for your company can sometimes feel like dating – awkward, uncertain, and really expensive if you have to do it for a long time. It’s also just as important to find the right match, a specialist that not only has the knowledge and expertise you seek but can also implement it seamlessly into your company’s culture.

Both processes are tough. But the nice thing about picking a marketing agency is that you have a little more control of the process. Unfortunately, we run into a lot of home services clients who neglect to exercise that control and end up working with an agency that gives them subpar results.

Whether you want to avoid a broken heart or a wasted marketing budget, it’s important to first know what you need and evaluate potential partnerships from there. Below we’ll offer a rundown of the steps involved in hiring a marketing agency for home services contractors and point out some pitfalls to avoid.

Evaluate where you are and determine home services marketing agency budget

Before you start reaching out to potential marketing partners and setting up meet-and-greets, you need a good sense of what kind of marketing assets or campaigns you already have in place. Spend some time completing an audit of your existing marketing, considering areas like:

• Website
• Social media profiles
• Email newsletters or offers
• Content assets (blog posts, eBooks, guides, videos, etc.)

As you move through this process, you’ll start to gain a better understanding of areas where you may be strong and areas where you may be deficient. And if you’ve barely scratched the surface with all of these things and need help everywhere, that’s okay too: the right marketing agency will meet you where you are.

Setting a budget is a little more complex with a few more factors involved. There are agencies available at many different price points, but the quality of service can vary just as widely. You can typically expect an agency to charge more than an individual freelancer or consultant, but an agency should also come with out-of-the-box processes that can help you get wins immediately.

Set specific goals for your home services company marketing agency

If you partner with the right agency, they should serve as an expert consultant who helps you come up with a plan that best suits your needs as a company and the requirements of your audience. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend some time on your own thinking about the marketing strategies that would work best for your particular organization. No matter how much experience a prospective agency has or how often they assure you of their knowledge in your field, they still don’t have the width and breadth of knowledge you have about your own clients.

In fact, if a company consistently brushes off your input and viewpoints, they’re probably not the best partner for you. Even if you only have a few basic opinions or suggestions on tactics, a skilled agency will use them as a starting point in the exploratory phase where they start to design a strategy tailored for your specific needs. 

Ideally, you can at least point to specific areas where you’d like to grow. For example, you might want to improve your presence on social media, or bring in more leads from email marketing. As broad as these ideas are, a good agency can use them as the foundation for a more fully-developed strategy.

Create standardized interview questions

Now that you’ve spent some time thinking about where you are currently and what kind of marketing achievements you’d like to see, the next step is to create a standard list of questions you’ll use for every meeting you have with a prospective agency. It’s important to standardize your questions so that it’s easier to compare answers from the different agencies you speak with. 

Try to interview at least three different companies before settling on a specific partner, especially if you’re planning to invest a significant amount. Once you’ve completed all your meetings, think about the agency you connected with most. Ideally you can include one or two other senior members of your team so that you have at least one more set of eyes and ears to evaluate a prospective marketing agency.

Final thoughts on hiring an HVAC contractor marketing agency

As mentioned, the steps above are merely the outline of a successful marketing agency search. You may need to tweak each one depending on where you are currently with your digital marketing, including the amount of time and money you have available to devote to your campaigns.

Our last word of advice: once you’ve spent sufficient time searching for an agency and want to move forward with the hiring process, be sure to empower them. Too many clients in the home services industry restrict the effectiveness of their work with marketing agencies by micromanaging or placing unrealistic expectations on their partners. If you approach your search the right way, you can be confident that you’ve selected the right expert advisor and should feel great about letting them lead the engagement and leverage their expertise to help you attain real results from your marketing – not just numbers on a spreadsheet.

If you’re interested in chatting with us about how we could meet your home services contractor marketing needs, click here to schedule a call with one of our experts. Our team has many years of combined experience helping HVAC, plumbing and other home services businesses obtain consistent growth through digital marketing.