The trend towards building with environmentally sustainable materials makes “showing green” in your marketing an important trend for 2017. 

Now that the new year has arrived, every man and his dog are making predictions about marketing trends you can expect to see taking place. We’ve gathered and analyzed a cross-section of information and opinions, and identified the trends that authoritative people in the inbound marketing field agree on unanimously, which we think are a safe bet to make.

Going Green

Regardless of whatever happens to environmental concerns under the new US presidency, going green appears to be well-established both among businesses and home building clients. Younger buyers, and millennials in particular, are aware of the issues facing the planet, and this makes them increasingly likely to appoint home contractors who use sustainable building materials and practices.

Make sure your marketing emphasizes your commitment to going green, and use it as a drawcard to attract prospective customers to your website.

Video and More (Live) Video

As wireless connectivity improves, people are discovering the benefits of being able to see and hear messages, compared with simply reading them. On websites, social networking platforms and other media, video is gaining popularity hand over foot. Whether it’s pre-recorded or live streamed, the “show and tell” option is a favourite one, and reaching your audience personally has never been easier than it is with video.

Consider options such as live-streaming a walk-through of one of your projects on your Facebook page, or screening a time-lapse of a project at a trade show booth.

Making Personal Connections

In addition to reaching an audience with video, other methods of making personal connections online are rising in the popularity ranks:

• Interactivity is reaching new heights, whether it’s online or on your premises. Services like virtual design centres where homeowners can “test” out their floorplan options and colour palettes are rising in popularity. Online quizzes generate data from interested prospects, as do immersive options like 360 degree images that the user can move around are all over the Internet.
• Chatbots had a really good year in 2016, with many websites adding popup windows offering live chat to users. If you can’t monitor your site 24/7, consider adding a bot to do so.
• “Intelligent” options like Siri and Alexa are getting better at performing basic tasks and extracting information. Make sure your content marketing is searchable and in the correct format to be found by these options.

Remember, marketing home contractor services is all about making personal connections with homeowners and convincing them to entrust you with their largest asset, so the more channels you can use to reach them the better you’ll fare.

Mining Big Data

The availability of data is growing exponentially every year, and has reached the point that doing online marketing without using the information available is not smart. Whether your company personally owns any big data or not, it’s possible to obtain data from external providers that collect and analyze multiple public sources. These include government research, internet searches, social media mentions and institutional archives such as those of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).

The data can tell you:

• what market segments are most likely to use your home contracting services in the coming months,
• where they are most likely to see your brand communications, and
• how they are most likely to connect with you.

Those are all invaluable insights to have.

Measuring and Monitoring

Knowing what works is the most important insight you’ll ever have, and luckily the bad old days of pushing information at the masses without knowing how many see it are well over. Now you can get monitoring tools for just about everything, including knowing the number of people who open and read your emails, visit your website and click to view your project portfolio. Home renovation companies are making use of this information to figure out what’s working and what isn’t, so they know who to target with what messaging and where to reach them.

It’s difficult to separate the real information on 2017 marketing trends from the “noise,” but not impossible if you have a marketing provider who can partner with you and who understands the options.