In Episode 2 of the Trades Secret Podcast hosts Devon Hayes and Amanda Joyce discuss cutting-edge trends that are shaping the digital marketing landscape in 2023. Discover how you can tap into these contractor marketing trends to gain a leg up on your competition.
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Transcription:
Amanda Joyce:
Hi guys. I’m Amanda Joyce.
Devon Hayes:
And I’m Devon Hayes.
Amanda Joyce:
Today’s topic is 2023 Contractor Marketing Musts, and here’s why you should care. These are going to be cutting edge trends that are going to give you a leg up on your competition and help you attract new customers in the coming year.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.
This is for you if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.
Learn from home services, industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.
Let’s dive into today’s trade secret.
Devon Hayes:
Okay, so there’s probably more than this, but Amanda and I have kind of narrowed it down to the top four because we know that this stuff can be overwhelming, so we’re trying to just keep it kind of in some concise, digestible bites. For any contractor out there, and actually anybody who uses Google, something that just came out in December of 2022 was continuous scroll, and we did a whole long podcast on this, but basically on Google, instead of 10 results on that page, on the results page, you have a continuous scroll, which is about 60 results with a whole bunch of ads blended into that. That definitely changes like the Google Ads landscape for 2023. And it also changes content marketing and the importance of your SEO titles and your meta descriptions. And that’s just saying, say you have a page on roof replacement and your headline just says roof replacement.
You’re competing now with 60 different results, so you’re going to want to have something that’s a little bit more catchy. What we try to do and advise our clients to do is have sort of a benefit outcome statement where possible, it’s kind of hard to squeeze that into a title, but you continuously want to be telling the customer what’s in it for them. If you can manage to get a benefit outcome statement in your SEO title, and most certainly in what’s called your meta description, which is just that little description right under kind of the title on that Google results page, you’re going to be able to attract buyers to actually click through to your website, where hopefully your compelling content will have them complete a form and it’ll turn into a lead for you from your website. That’s kind of one of the big things. Google continuous scroll, update your titles to benefit outcome statements to attract users there. And then-
Amanda Joyce:
Before move on from continuous scroll, I wanted to ask you real quick, can you think of a couple metrics that people might want to kind of track, whether it’s in Google Analytics or in Search Console, things that they might want to just keep track of to help them see how this is impacting them? I know we don’t want to get too in the weeds, but.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, yeah, no, great question. Okay, so you can track this. You can see how many impressions you’re getting in your Google Search Console. Real quickly, there’s two tools. There’s Google Analytics that measures your website’s performance, and then there’s Google Search Console, and that measures how you’re doing on Google itself, how many times your website shows up on that results page, whether or not people click through to your site or not. In Search Console, if you’re seeing that you are getting a lot of impressions for a certain keyword, but people aren’t actually clicking through to your site, that suggests that maybe you don’t have a compelling enough title or description. Or a lot of times if it’s a brand search, then they’re just grabbing the phone number right from the search engine results page, and they don’t need to necessarily click through to your website, but that should be taken into consideration.
If it’s contact info and your brand name, you can assume they’re getting what they want from the SERPS page, but if it’s something more specific and you’re getting a ton of impressions but not a lot of clicks, that’s where you’re going to want to update your title and your description that shows up on Google. I know, kind of a lot of information there, but we dive into that really deeply on our Continuous Scroll podcast episode. Check that one out. I want to get to the next thing, the second list on our item of four for 2023 marketing trends, the importance of video content marketing.
Again, December, 2022 is a big month for digital marketing. We had ChatGPT rolled out, in its like nascent stages. It’s not going to show any sort of transactional queries. It’s not going to give any informational, or it’s not going to give … There’s no video, there’s no images, there’s no transactions, but it does give a lot of information. And while we have, we’re a few years out from it actually competing with Google in those areas, we know that video content is going to be huge, not only to compete with that, but just in the marketing landscape in general, right?
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. We love seeing in social, we love seeing it just across the web as consumers, and Google loves it as well. And from what we’re seeing, they just really like to … They favor that kind of content.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, and it goes back to YouTube is owned by Google and Google is a narcissist. We tell everybody that all the time. They will self-refer and check their own products before they go to an external website outside of their own kind of company. Having your videos on YouTube, I mean, you can do informational videos, you can do customer reviews or testimonial videos, you can have sales videos. There’s videos just for social media where you’re showing what’s going on in the office or a company party. I mean, there’s explainer videos, there’s all kinds of videos, and they don’t have to be perfect to be on the web.
They don’t need to be perfectly polished and produced. You just need to start getting the content out there. Contractors are unique in that you have a ton of really cool projects and things that people are interested in. Take a minute, record what you’re doing, get those before and afters, turn it into a video. There’s so many different softwares out there that make it easy, but by far and away that’s going to have a great impact on your digital footprint and your online visibility as a whole with every marketing effort that you make in 2023.
Amanda Joyce:
Absolutely. And one of the things we see a lot in social for our clients is some of those videos that to the everyday contractor, it’s just what they do and they don’t realize how much consumers that aren’t out there in the field find it interesting. If you’re using a crane, if you’re moving a lot of materials around, if someone’s using a large piece of equipment, people like to see that. You don’t need to say anything profound. Just sharing that kind of content is really impactful and social. Then a lot of times it can play over into other pieces of video too.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, absolutely. And even video ads is going to be a big thing this year too, so we’ll kind of talk more about the ads landscape here coming up. Let’s jump into item number three on these podcasts. We try to keep them 20 to 30 minutes for you guys.
Amanda Joyce:
20 minutes. Yes.
Devon Hayes:
2023 trends. Number three, Amanda Joyce, content marketing musts.
Amanda Joyce:
Content marketing.
Devon Hayes:
Talk content to me.
Amanda Joyce:
Content, content. We’ve all known this forever. Content is king. It’s what makes you rank in the search engines, and it’s just really important though. We don’t want to just write content for content’s sake. We wanted to remind you guys about a recent update from Google that has really … This is an example of Google telling us what they want. It’s our opportunity to work towards that. You definitely want to still write content from your brand voice, all those things, but you need to make sure that you’re keeping something, you’re keeping the acronym EEATS in mind. that is E-E-A-T-S. That stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
I know that’s a whole lot to wrap your brain around, but at the end of the day, Google is wanting you to help them understand why you’re an authority on whatever it is you’re talking about. Don’t just pontificate about whatever it is you consider yourself an expert in and move on and expect Google to trust you. This makes sense because over the years, there’s enough content that’s been produced out there. Google doesn’t want to favor stuff that isn’t factual. They don’t want to be in the middle of all that. It’s really important to keep in mind that you want to display that in the copy that you’re writing. I feel like you were going to say something, Devon.
Devon Hayes:
Well, yeah, and all the spam sites that have popped up to try and that actually don’t meet the user intent, and it’s just super spammy. Those have popped up all over, and then they try to sell out those URLs with the whatever specific content. Google is really trying to make sure those sites don’t rank because they’ve come up with a way, they figured Google’s algorithm out, but then Google always catches up and kind of gets rid of those spammy guys.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, exactly. This is their latest attempt to clean up some of that spam and make sure that the search results are giving quality information. Another great thing to do is make sure that the content you’re writing is evergreen. You want to make sure it’s something that’s going to live today and still be relevant to somebody a year or two for now. That’s not to say that you can’t go refresh it, but you want to create content that’s going to continue to resonate, because sometimes it takes a while to start to rank, so you don’t want to spend all this time getting something to rank that isn’t going to be evergreen. And that brings us to our next tip, which is revisiting existing content. If you have content on your website, even if it’s really good and it already ranks and you guys get a lot of traffic from it, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go back and tweak it every once in a while.
Make sure that the copy is all up to date, that it’s reflective of whatever’s happening in your industry at the time. We have a client that just the other day, they do a lot of stuff with EV rebates, and he sent me a quick email and was like, “Just a reminder, we’ve had some updates here locally on what rebates are available,” and we got in and just refreshed the content right then. You want to make sure that all that stuff is super relevant because if you’re ranking for it and somebody in your market finds you and thinks you’re the authority, and then they were like, “Oh, this doesn’t even match what I’m finding elsewhere on the web,” suddenly you’ve lost all that authority that you’ve worked so hard to gain. Just make sure you’re revisiting it and you’re looking at what else is ranking for those keywords and continuing to zhuzh that content. Just because it’s good, doesn’t mean it can’t get better. I feel like you had something
Devon Hayes:
Give it a zhuzh. Give it a little zhuzh.
Amanda Joyce:
Zhuzh it.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah. And sometimes we get caught up with a little marketing jargon. I was going to say, you mentioned the term evergreen content, and I was just going to have you kind of just succinctly let everyone know what you mean when you say evergreen content, just in case someone’s not familiar.
Amanda Joyce:
Yes, absolutely. I apologize.
Devon Hayes:
Oh no, don’t … We do it all the time.
Amanda Joyce:
We both do this. We get caught up in it. We start sharing acronyms and saying things that are … And just like in any industry, there’s some of that vernacular that isn’t going to always translate to other people. Evergreen is content that is going to be, that’s relevant today, is going to be relevant tomorrow, that just is … It’s going to continue to be interesting over time. And even if you’re going to mention something like seasonality in your market, if you’re a roofer and you’re talking about ice dams, you can still write something that’s relevant today that will be relevant tomorrow and that you could even lean on it next winter if you wrote it this winter.
Devon Hayes:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Amanda Joyce:
And then-
Devon Hayes:
Oh yeah, sorry, my internet was being wonky, so I was like, “Oh shoot, I lost it.” But that happens of course, when we’re in the midst of recording and that’s what happens on podcasts, so.
Amanda Joyce:
Yes, exactly. The joy of technology. Perfect. On that note, I feel like we should touch on our last top trend for 2023 that we really think you guys should be keeping an eye on. And this is taking advantage of Google Performance Max. If you’re currently running Google Ads or you’re considering it in 2023, this is definitely something for you to do some research on, whether you’re managing it in-house or you’re working with an agency, start the conversation and look into it. This is Google’s latest attempt-
Devon Hayes:
Say the name again.
Amanda Joyce:
It’s Google Performance Max. You can search that, and you’ll find a bunch of information. It’s a newer Google offering, so they’ve got plenty of content out there for you to consume and learn about it. But top level, the gist of it is it’s an ad offering where you basically go in and provide video image ads, text, a landing page, all of the things that we would normally want to give Google if we’re running ads, but you’re kind of giving it to them and then saying, “Use your beautiful AI and manage this for me and help me get more eyeballs in my market.” When you do this, when you take advantage of this, they’ll be showing ads for you in YouTube and display and search and discover and Gmail and maps. It’s kind of-
Devon Hayes:
Wow.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. They’re trying to take something huge and make it more digestible to your everyday business owner. Previously, if you were running that broad of a campaign, you’d probably be working with a really high dollar agency, and quite honestly, it wouldn’t be for the everyday business owner. It’s a really cool way to try to offer this. But I do also warn that like many things Google does, at the end of the day, they are trying to make more money off of more ad dollars. It’s certainly not a set it and forget it, just give them your content and them run with it.
One of the things I’ve been seeing a whole lot about, I haven’t seen this in practice yet, but apparently when you provide all of these ad elements to Google, if you don’t include a really strong video ad that’s like six to 15 seconds, they’re going to make something for you. And it might not be to your liking. They’re using AI, it’s imperfect. If you’re going to do this, I would say make sure that when you get in there, there’s an opportunity for you to upload all kinds of different elements. Make sure you’re providing every element they ask for, because if not, you’re giving them free reign to just use AI and see what comes up. And as we’ve all discovered, AI is imperfect. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes-
Devon Hayes:
Actually that would be a fun experiment just to see. Let’s just what they come up with for us, just roll the dice
Amanda Joyce:
That’s a great point.
Devon Hayes:
… guys. This is what happened to us. I can only imagine.
Amanda Joyce:
That’s a great idea. I feel like we’re going to have to do that in a future podcast for sure.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, just experiment and just see what they deliver. Might be really amazing or not.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, exactly.
Devon Hayes:
Okay. That’s massive though. I mean, that’s a really huge thing. Google Performance Max, this takes it from having to go to … I know you’re AdWords, or sorry, Google Ad certified, you’re the pro on the paid media side of our agency here. Forgive my ignorance, but is there separate platforms for Google Display ads, like Google Maps Ads, like Google-
Amanda Joyce:
Thankfully for that, they at least make it easy. You can do it all inside of the single interface. Historically you’d run a display ad, you’d have a display campaign and a search campaign and a YouTube campaign, and they’d all live in separate campaigns, maybe you can stack them so you’re using similar audiences and things, but it’s just a lot more levers to pull. This is you saying, “Okay, Google, show me what you’re working with” basically. It’s them wanting you to let them kind of take you on a test drive of all of their ad opportunities and it’s a little bit risky.
You just have to watch it really closely. That would be my only caveat, if you’re going to test this, just have a tight budget and just watch it really closely. They’re obviously going to allow you to exclude things that aren’t working for you and stuff like that. You just have to stay on top of it. If you’re doing it yourself, watch it close. If your agency’s running it for you, just ask for a regular touch base on what they’re finding, what they’re changing, what’s working, what’s not, and maybe you’ll end up deciding that display or YouTube works for you and previously you’ve been afraid to test it, so.
Devon Hayes:
It’s kind of like a digital self-driving car, like-
Amanda Joyce:
A hundred percent.
Devon Hayes:
… go ahead and do it, but-
Amanda Joyce:
Don’t take a nap. Don’t sleep on the job.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, maybe have a snack while it’s happening, but don’t totally check out.
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly, exactly.
Devon Hayes:
You got to love that though. It’s like having another robot assistant almost. If you just have to-
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly.
Devon Hayes:
… check.
Amanda Joyce:
And having done this for so long, it makes me excited and scared at the same time. Years ago, I would talk to a small agencies or small businesses that would say, “Oh, I talked to a Google rep and they convinced me to turn everything on broad match,” which is meaning you’d run a keyword, but then Google gets all of this … You could say Red Shoe and they will show you for red tint or something like that. It could be that far off base with how relevant it was. You had to manage it real closely, and if somebody didn’t know what they were doing, they’d just click all the levers and check out and then look back in two months and be like, “Oh my gosh, I just spent all of this ad money and it went to something I irrelevant to my business.” It’s only gotten smarter over the years, but those are the kind of things I saw back in the day that always makes when Google starts talking about their latest, “We’ll do it for you.” I’m always like, “Oh. I trust you but.”
Devon Hayes:
Okay. Yeah, that sounds nice. Awesome. Well, I mean, yeah, I can’t wait to test it out and see how it does. And guys, I don’t know, look for a future podcast on our experiment with Google Performance Max and Elevation Marketing. Okay, so for today’s takeaways here, we’re going to wrap this up for you. We had four takeaways, four 2023 marketing trends that you should be aware of and you should care about. Number one, continuous scroll on Google. Now there’s like 60 organic results, so make sure you update your content to have catchy SEO titles and descriptions, trying to use those benefit plus outcome statements. Number two, videos, make videos, explainer videos, FAQ videos, social fun videos, videos on videos, videos.
Amanda Joyce:
Videos, videos, videos. And they don’t need to be high polished, just make them.
Devon Hayes:
Yep, absolutely.
Amanda Joyce:
And content marketing, revisit your existing content as you’re writing. Write for EEATS. Really show that authority and make sure that Google understands why you’re an expert on your given topic, and test Google Performance Max.
Devon Hayes:
Absolutely. Well, thank you and we will … As always, actually, if you have any questions, comment, hit us up. We’d love your feedback and appreciate you listening to us. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.
Amanda Joyce:
Thank you so much.
Audio:
That was today’s trade secret. Thanks for listening.
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