Typically, your customers are starting their search for moving companies online, so you need a solid online presence. For business success, moving companies require a detailed strategy to get on your prospect’s radar. Each industry has its tools and tactics, the moving industry included.
Once you’ve developed the right digital marketing strategy for your moving company and continue to update for each year, you’ll begin to see the difference in increased calls, website visits, and new moving clients. Even if you have a marketing plan for your business, a separate digital marketing strategy is essential in reaching clients and scaling your business. Once you have a well-defined process, you will be better prepared to focus your marketing efforts. You should customize your digital marketing strategy for your particular business and market.
Why Does My Moving Company Need a Digital Marketing Strategy
In a nutshell, having a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your moving company helps you increase qualified leads and conversions, optimize your marketing budget to reduce your cost per lead and increase your ROI, increase your credibility, and establish your brand as the authority online. When you develop your online presence, you can accurately and positively depict your business. When correctly set up and executed, you can also ensure that you show up in search engine results when prospects are looking for moving companies for their next big move!
Before You Get Started
While we’re sure you’re chomping at the bit to get your marketing game in gear, there are a few things you need to do before you strategize for the year.
First, what makes your business different from the rest? What is your USP?
Define your moving company’s USP or unique selling point. Your USP is the thing that gives you a distinction that your moving company is better than other providers in your market. Whether your unique service offerings, guarantees, or customer service, it sets you apart from your competitors.
Your local market has several moving companies from which your audience can choose; it’s essential to know why they should choose you. This way, you can express this in your marketing. You’ll need this before you begin, as you will use this USP in your marketing efforts, including your website, social media engagement, communications, and branding.
Identify Your Ideal Customer.
Next, you need to know your ideal customer, so you will learn how to reach them and what to say in your message. You’ll need to understand their needs, wants, and the obstacles you can help them overcome. Knowing this will help you craft your marketing message, blog posts, and more. You’ll need to know what channels are best to reach them. Use your current clientele to hone in on your ideal buyer persona.
Understand Your Customer’s Obstacles.
Then research your competitors, locally and around the country. Find out what methods work for them and what they can improve upon in their business. You’ll also need to look at their marketing efforts. Check out their website, social media profiles, and ads that they place. Browse through their blog posts and see how they speak to their customers and what value they provide.
While researching, you’ll also analyze your marketing efforts over the prior year. What methods did you use? Use analytics to determine which ones worked. Were some things working, but you needed to be more consistent in your efforts?
Lastly, you need to set your goals to know what you want to achieve and have a benchmark to evaluate your results. Be specific with your goals, like we want to increase sales by 10%. This goal will then lead you throughout your strategy session.
Then set your objectives to reach your goals. To increase sales by 10%, you need to gain 200 more leads. To generate 200 more leads, you will create a moving checklist to distribute to those who subscribe to your website or blog. You’ll then select the methods to help you achieve the objectives and goals.
Set up KPIs and benchmarks for your digital marketing strategy. KPIs, key performance indicators, are specific metrics that measure your progress in reaching your goals. Your benchmark is your goal for a particular method. In the case of email marketing, your KPI could be your open email rate, and the benchmark is 30%.
The Components of a Digital Marketing Plan
After establishing your company’s identity and what it has to offer, who your customer is and how to reach them, and how you will analyze your results, you can move to set up the components of your digital marketing strategy.
To create an effective digital marketing campaign, having a clear vision of your company and customer personas is crucial. You can develop a tailored strategy for your customers and ensure desired outcomes with the right analytics.
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness
When it comes to the ‘meat’ of building your company’s digital marketing strategy, understanding the EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness) factor is essential. To get the most out of your strategy, form a partnership with your marketing agency so that you can provide different content and media to build out a valid search solution for movers strategy. This way, you’ll be able to maximize results and ROI on paid advertising campaigns.
What to look for:
- Frequently Asked Questions. Listen to your movers, drivers, sales team, and customers during each call and experience, whether during a sales call, estimate visit, or actual move. Find a way to document their questions and go back and answer them on your various platforms. FAQs are great topics to build your content strategy.
- Branded photos. Make sure everyone has their t-shirts, hats, and jackets when taking pictures. Try to take candid shots during packs and moves. Place your team in front of the truck, the office, their house, and other locations that your audience might find relevant.
- Amateur videos. Yes, send us your phone videos! Upload to your Instagram or Facebook authentic, short videos of you and your team moving a house, packing an office, loading a truck, or transporting to a storage unit. I get it, you think it’s not that interesting, but you’d be surprised how far that authenticity can go in building trust.
- Customize blog content. We are happy to write our client’s content and do our best to make it unique, but we recommend sending us your thoughts and ideas. If you are a moving company, showcasing an unusual packing scenario or how you went out of your way for a customer can build that expertise and authority.
- Reviews. Keep up with those reviews! After every move, have a process in place to request feedback. Make sure they get shared on social media and your website.
1. Web Design & Branding
Your Moving Company Website
Your company website will set up your online presence and provide your audience with a place to learn about your company and offerings, get to know your area, and reach out to you to schedule their move. It gives them a place to find your business address, phone number, and more. Not only does your website need to be aesthetically pleasing, but it should also be user-friendly, easy to navigate across all devices, include automation like moving calculations forms, and display strong calls to action.
Web Design Is The Foundation of Your Moving Marketing Strategy
A high-quality, branded website is where you must start. Your moving company website must be current, have relevant information, and be aesthetically pleasing. When customers feel confident that you are a reputable company, they are likelier to choose you for their next moving job. Your website will help to instill that confidence.
Optimized and well-designed websites increase leads and conversions. It will also lead the user through the decision-making and booking process.
Build On Your Brand.
Creating an established brand identity that reflects your company’s purpose is essential as a moving company. A powerful logo, striking colors, and other visuals can form your business’ distinct personality and convey a message of professionalism and trustworthiness. By using cohesive branding across all channels, you will give customers a consistent image of your brand that will help create meaningful connections with them.
building moving company brand.jpg
Content Marketing & Your Movers Blog
Content Marketing
As part of your marketing strategy this year, we recommend a comprehensive content marketing calendar. I don’t mean writing a Facebook or Instagram post monthly or a blog once a month. I mean to build a monthly calendar of ideas and media you can share across all platforms.
Everyone loves a good video or answers a question thoroughly, especially search engine crawlers. The content you post should be centered around your target market.
Use blog posts, videos, downloadable checklists, and guides to help your audience. To create content, try answering your audience’s questions, offer tips for moving and packing, and spotlight your company and its processes.
Movers Blog
Your mover’s blog will be an important piece of your content marketing. Sharing valuable information and tips on your blog encourages prospects to see your business as a go-to source, and it will rank higher in search engines. It’s imperative that you publish new blog posts regularly. If you are still deciding what to write about, start sharing moving and packing advice with your audience and how to choose moving companies.
2. Build & Manage Your Online Reputation
Prospects feel more comfortable booking their move with you when your company has a positive brand image. While you’re working on marketing your company, you have to stay on top of reputation management. Reputation management is about monitoring how your audience perceives your business and then taking steps to improve your brand image if necessary.
online review example
Good reputation management is about controlling what your audience sees about your business online. Monitoring what others are saying about your business on social media and online review sites is essential. List your company on review websites. When people search for moving companies in your area, reviews matter; make sure your customers have only good things to say about your services and their experience.
Research your business and search for conversations about your moving company by name. You will read the feedback to improve your operations, respond to customers, and answer questions posters might have. Beware of trolls online, and don’t respond to their comments.
Remember to use a positive tone to respond to comments and reviews. And don’t just read and comment – act! Use the feedback to make changes to improve your online reputation.
3. Search Solutions
There is no one solution to capturing new leads digitally. Having options is where we’ll adjust the levers. You start with one campaign, where we’ll adjust and review, then start another campaign and adjust and review. You might have two campaigns simultaneously, but you’ll adapt each and increase your focus and budget depending on what works best.
Search Engine Optimization
A website is only effective for bringing in new clients if optimized. When your website is optimized for search engines, it is easier to crawl, index, and rank for keywords. Most people who search Google for moving services stop on the first page of the results.
Properly optimized websites are more visible and receive more visitors. Optimization includes active keywords and phrases your prospects may use to look for moving companies. You’ll then use those words in your website content and blog posts. SEO optimization includes on-site, off-site, and Google My Business.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
When structuring your website, use on-page SEO, including optimized content with keywords in your URLs and a proper structure using H1-H3 headings, meta page title, meta description, and alt text in your images. You must also create internal links and use calls to action.
Off-Page Search Engine Optimization
Off-page SEO includes backlinks to your website from authority websites to build credibility. Backlinks include mentions of your company website on other websites, press, and business partners. Each of your pages needs to be optimized with links for specific keywords. The more backlinks to your website, the higher you’re ranking.
Local Search Engine Optimization
Local SEO is concerned with your immediate market area. This could be by city, suburb, county, and community. Those looking for moving companies start their research online through a Google search, social media referrals from friends, or a print ad they received. They are looking for dependable movers. When properly optimized, your website will be one of the first to appear when prospects search for moving companies in your area.
To set up an effective local SEO campaign, start with your Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP). NAP information counts towards citations or mentions on the internet.
Local Maps
Start by claiming your Google Business Profile (GBP) account if you have not done so already, and start to optimize your business listing. Make sure you choose the appropriate categories, give a full business description, upload photos and videos, and use all of the GMB features available. Google visitors to message your business and call directly from the listing.
Success in Local SEO includes business listing, citations, reviews, your GMB listing, and location-specific webpages. The goal is to have your business appear in Google Maps’ three-pack, but it’s based on a hyper-local strategy. As of 2023, you still should use your home address. We recommend a budget to lease office space in the more popular locations.
Keyword Selection & Optimization
When we optimize your GMB profile and verify your Name, Address Phone (NAP), the next step is to choose relevant keywords and phrases. Prioritizing those keywords your potential customers are using to find moving companies.
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising allows you to use your targeted keywords and phrases to boost your ads. PPC ads are posted as soon as you create a campaign, but returns can take 1-3 months as the platform learns whom you are targeting, how well people respond to the ads, the value your landing page provides, and your competition. Your company is only charged when users click your ad.
To get the best results, you must ensure that the landing pages that these ads direct your audience to are high-quality and relevant with very clear calls to action like ‘Call Now’ or ‘Get A Quote in 1 Hour.’
Then, budget how much you want to spend per click on your ad listing. Set daily budgets for PPC spending to ensure you’re staying within your budget.
PPC ad example moving company.jpg
Online Directory Listings
Online directories are lists of businesses and websites where your audience can find the services and products they need. Some directories cover a particular municipality, and others only include companies in specific industries. Search engines like directories give you another place to get backlinks and improve your rank in local search.
4. Expanding Your Reach
Expanding your reach is about becoming more omnipresent. It’s about getting outside your network of current clients and vendors and expanding to markets where others may not have known you.
Social Media Marketing
Many people look for moving companies on social media platforms. Social media sites provide a platform for sharing information about your moving company, promotions, and more. They also allow you to engage with your audience and extend your reach to their friends and followers.
When your customers review your moving company on social media, you gain social proof to build credibility in your field. Social media ads are a cost-effective way to get leads.
Email Marketing
Yes, email marketing still works, and it offers an exceptional return on investment. Email marketing returns $38 for each dollar spent. This ROI is especially true for moving companies.
It’s essential to use email marketing to not only get your prospect’s attention but also lead them through the buying journey. Email marketing lets your moving company update your customers and provides helpful tips and tools to build and maintain relationships.
5. Marketing Automation
Running a moving business is challenging work! Managing sales, staff, and drivers, quality checking deliveries, is a crazy position. So, you should take advantage of the power of automation.
With marketing automation, you can take one aspect of your day and automate it by leveraging the many tools out there, like smart forms, automated SMS responses, email marketing, and evergreen content.
Your moving company can stay connected with automated crm, email, social media, and text messages.
These automation tools should help you to identify your target audience, develop content, and perform tasks based on preset schedules and the behaviors of your audience. It will also help you make the customer journey seamless. You’ll generate more sales by nurturing client relationships from start to end.
Finding ways to take as much off your or your sales team’s plate can help you scale your business!
6. Analysis and Reporting
Continuing Improvement Through Analysis and Reporting
Once you execute your strategy, your job is not over!
Start tracking your progress and analyzing the results of your efforts. Research and constant iteration is the only way to determine which methods are working and which need to be reworked or discontinued. Make sure you’re tracking website traffic and where it originates, how many leads and their quality, how many sales you have gained from your efforts, and your conversion rates. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking all these metrics.
Analyzing trends and marketing strategies is essential for any moving company looking to stay ahead of the competition. Understanding how customers act, react and interact with your business will provide valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. Keeping an eye on industry-wide moving trends can reveal potential opportunities to take advantage of and pitfalls to avoid. Staying informed on what techniques are working for your competitors can also help you become more proactive in developing innovative solutions that set you apart from the rest. Utilizing this understanding of the market allows businesses to remain agile and adjust their strategy when needed, ensuring they have a competitive edge at all times.
Partner with Moving Marketing Results to Boost Your Digital Presence and Grow Your Business
Moving Marketing Results works with moving companies around the country to improve their visibility online. We work with owners and sales teams to develop a solid digital marketing strategy and execute the plan. If you’re currently working with a plan and are still waiting to see results, let us audit your campaign to find opportunities for improvement.
Book your strategy call to learn more about digital marketing for moving companies and find out how we can help you! You’ll also find our Internet Marketing Checklist especially helpful!
