Electrician Marketing Guide

As an electrician, your job is essential. You have skills that everyone needs, but until you market your business, your potential customers don’t know you exist.

Just as approaching an electrical challenge requires a game plan and finesse, so does marketing your business. You’ll want to have all of the techniques and tricks possible at your disposal.

You’ve already mastered the hard stuff. Advertising a business is different but not nearly as complex as wiring a home or office.

This marketing guide will walk you through the basics of independent electrician marketing, both online and offline.

You’ll have plenty of options, so you can use whichever methods you’re comfortable with to boost your ROI (return on investment).

1. Control Your Online Presence

The first thing you must know about having a business in the 21st century is that everyone is online. So, whether you choose to market this way or not, you’ll still have an online presence.

The goal is to recognize where your footprint is on the internet and then take steps to control it.

What Makes Up Your Online Presence

In a nutshell, your online presence is the reputation you and your business have with those who see you on the internet.

As we see in movies and high school, you can’t entirely control your reputation with your actions alone, no matter how hard you may try. Gossip and speculation make up a big chunk of it.

So, if you aren’t actively involved in designing yours and doing damage control, it can spiral out of control quickly.

This active participation involves watching and consciously managing:

• Yourself, what you put on the internet (social media, your web page, elsewhere)
• How you adapt to the algorithms that search engines and social media use to determine your reputability
• Others and how they interact with your business and with the general public about you

Public opinions and discussions about their experience with you as an electrician don’t have to be raving. How you respond to them says more to most people than someone’s complaint.

Countering Negativity and Fostering Relationships

Your reputation can improve when you reply to online reviews on Yelp, Google, and other trusted sites. Replying to reviews helps create a positive, strong online presence. As a result, potential new customers see you as legitimate, and previous customers reinforce that you’re a reputable electrician.

Even people who weren’t entirely satisfied with your electrical company for some reason are less disgruntled because you took the time to reply to them and soothe their hurt feelings. This is an integral indirect method of digital marketing.

It’s all related to your online presence. It’s up to you (or your social media marketing person) to control this as much as possible.

Keeping your social media and electrician website updated and interacting with online discussions about your electrical business is part of the job.

Planning on starting your own business? Then follow our guide on How to Become a Self-Employed Electrician to do it right!

2. Develop a Brand

The second essential aspect of your reputation is your brand. This branding is how others see and recognize your business. Over time, as your brand becomes more familiar to them, they’ll associate a kind of good or bad feeling with it.

For example, if you love Starbucks coffee and don’t mind sitting in the drive-thru to get your daily caffeine jolt when you see the Starbucks logo, your brain sees “good.”

On the other hand, if all you associate the company with is unhealthy sugary sweet, addictive beverages, the logo will give you a “bad” feeling.

Choosing a Brand to Represent Your Business

Electrical services don’t typically have those extreme feelings assigned to them. This is where your marketing strategy is essential. As you design your logo and build your brand, it’s crucial to consider how others will see those images.

Avoid using images that could be seen as offensive or “inappropriate”. Yes, it may attract some customers, but it will likely offend more than it brings in, impacting your online and in-person reputation.

Branding is about more than just your physical image. It’s also about the image people associate with your small business when they think of it. That’s where your reputation comes into play.

Your reputation is built over time as you get testimonials from previous customers and show people in your service area that you have the know-how to do the job. You can’t rush your reputation.

3. Start (or Optimize) Your Web Page

Do you have a web page yet? If so, are you actively using it to gain new followers?

Statistics on e-commerce show that businesses with websites attract more customers and, by extension, more sales. Roughly 70-80% of the population heads to the internet to check out the research before they make a purchase or choose a business.

Having an optimized web page makes your site more likely to show up in the results when someone types in keywords like “electricians near me.”

Benefits of Having a Web Page

Starting and optimizing a web page is one of the very first digital marketing strategies suggested by the experts. It’s how you bring traffic to your website, as we mentioned, but it does so much more for you.

When business owners have a high-quality website design that uses search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing tools, they can simplify much of their customer service roles. A well-designed website helps by:

• Providing customers with FAQs like contact information, hours, and rates
• Offering immediate, preset automatic responses via chatboxes
• Giving email scheduling options with interactive calendar systems
• Increasing quick invoice turnaround by offering online payment options
• Answering industry-specific questions through well-written blogs with external and backlinks (otherwise known as content marketing)

In service-based work like yours, you probably don’t need to focus too much on selling and upselling products. But you do need to drive traffic to your site organically.

Building Your Business With Your Site’s Marketing Tools

Just like you need tools to do electrical work, you need tools to do marketing (at least to do it the right way).

For example, your website’s analytics tools keep track of website visitor activity so you can monitor your conversion rates.

The electrician marketing strategy you design should include learning how these tools can help you drive future business decisions.

Where to Start

When you’re comfortable with the opportunities at your disposal, you’ll be able to use them to enhance your online marketing plan. For example, you’ll understand landing pages well enough to bring a Google search result straight to your site and use other marketing ideas to boost lead generation.

Beginner tools are usually free with your website subscription. Then, as you get familiar with what you like and what’s working, you can pay for upgrades that widen your choice of marketing tactics.

When to Bring in the Pros

Don’t get disheartened if you want nothing to do with building your electrician business off search engine results and online marketing efforts. When it comes down to it, you can always hire a marketing agency to do the job for you, freeing you up to do the electrical work you do best.

You may also like: Insurance for Electricians: What You Actually Need

4. Advertise Locally

Digital marketing and SEO aren’t the end-all, be-all for a business, especially when it’s service-based. In your case, local advertising should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. It’s how your brand will get out to the general public and how you can build that reputation even faster.

When you are well-known in your service area, electrical contractors will reach out to you to help with their projects, and homeowners will trust you to come to solve their wiring needs.

Simple, Effective Methods to Advertise in Your Hometown

Take a few seconds to imagine what local advertising looks like to you. Chances are, it includes things like radio ads and billboards. These aren’t wrong, but they’re not all your options.

Here are a few other suggestions to include in your marketing campaign:

Increase Your Local Network

Get with other local businesses to build a network of referrals. When you run into someone who needs a specialist, you send them to someone in your network, and they do the same thing with customers who need electricians.

Give Away Products

You’ve heard the saying, “You have to spend money to make money.” There’s a grain of truth to this. When you invest in branded merchandise products to give away, your business gets more exposure.

An inexpensive example is an electrical contracting business that buys a bulk shipment of pens with its logo and phone number printed on each item. The business owner gives away pens to their child’s teacher, the bank teller, their doctor, and everyone they run into naturally.

Those people use the pen, and others around them see the business’s name and start to recognize it. The electrician’s brand reputation is slowly being cemented in their minds, so when they need electrical services, they recognize a familiar name and are more likely to use that company.

The takeaway? Buy products at wholesale prices, and give them away. You’ll profit from the return on your investment.

Sponsor Locally

When you want to boost your business’s reputation, sponsor local teams, schools, and other community events.

Sponsors receive “free” advertising for whatever event they helped financially, and the audience begins to recognize those businesses as hometown-friendly. In return, they prefer to use those “local” businesses over large corporations whenever possible.

Business cards are still effective advertising tools! Learn how to design the perfect one for your electrician business here.

5. Invest in Direct Mail

Email marketing is essential when your target audience is primarily online. As an electrician, your market is localized to your driving radius, so direct mail is a more optimized solution.

Direct marketing through print mail is still effective, especially for small, local businesses. Check with the United States Postal Service to find addresses in your service area, then mail those residences a flier or postcard letting them know what you do.

This can get expensive if you use high-quality printing. However, as a small business owner, you can get discounts at print retailers with a membership with Selfgood.

As an electrician marketing your company, you can use Selfgood to reduce expenses and boost your profits.

6. Encourage Word of Mouth Referrals

Excellent customer service speaks for itself and results in the best marketing possible: word of mouth referrals.

Word of mouth directly impacts your reputation in the local and online community. When your customers are satisfied with your work, encourage them to talk about you!

Building Referrals Through “Gossip”

This is one of the rare times where gossip works in the favor of the person of interest.

In your line of business, trust is essential. People call a stranger to come into their home and handle their safety. They will ask for recommendations from others who can vouch for your trustworthiness.

When you have a good reputation, you’ll be on the receiving end of that positive “gossip.”

Go ahead and get proactive with this by requesting previous customers to leave feedback and reviews on Homeadvisor, Yelp, and your social media pages. These reviews are part of how Google Local Services makes recommendations to online queries, so they can be very beneficial.

Remember to monitor the feedback and respond to all your reviewers, not just the complaints or the raving comments.

Interaction builds your online presence. Your online presence makes your brand more recognizable; your brand cements your reputation.

It’s all an interconnected part of marketing.

Conclusion

If you can tackle the electrical intricacies of safely connecting wires to power a home, you can master marketing and advertising your business. Start with reining in control of your online presence and build the rest from there.

You have the resources to help you get through any challenges.

Use your website’s optimization tools and analytics to make informed business decisions. Sign up with Selfgood to save money on the essentials, and you’ll start seeing the results of your hard work pay off with increased customers and a better profit margin.