In this modern day and age, marketing isn’t optional anymore, it’s essential. This is especially true for moving companies who want to grow, scale and dominate their local markets. Now, the question isn’t if you should be investing in marketing, it’s instead important to figure out how much you should invest if you want to see results. A solid marketing investment can look like a few different things for different relocation companies, so we’re here to help you make every dollar count and bring in new customers or make your business visible. A proper marketing budget will help set you apart from the competition, retain your current customers and grow your business. Let us show you how to get results.
Why Should Moving Companies Invest In Marketing
It’s no secret that the moving industry can be very competitive, especially in large cities or areas. In areas such as these, you need more than just word-of-mouth, you need a proper marketing strategy and what people are actually searching for. Even the best moving company with years of experience can struggle to come up on top without a proper marketing budget that brings in consistent leads. Here is what the right marketing strategies can help you achieve:
- Build Brand Recognition
- Generate consistent and high-quality leads
- Improve online reputation
- Increase revenue
- Outrank competitors
When looking at the benefits, it’s obvious that marketing isn’t an expense, it’s a strategy designed for growth. When you rely on word-of-mouth or other similar strategies, you’re limiting your growth potential. In the end, it’s important to know that effective marketing is essential for sustaining long-term growth by attracting more customers from your area.
How Much Should You Invest in Marketing?
The exact number depends on a lot of factors such as whether you’re a small or large company, just starting out or established as well as other factors such as current growth stage, company goals, vision and similar. But, a good rule of thumb is to invest around 10% to 20% of your gross revenue in marketing to support your brand awareness and growth. In actuality, this number is more between 7% and 30%, but if you’re just starting out, 20% should be sufficient. Now you’re probably looking at this and thinking this is quite significant, but don’t forget the potential returns. Don’t forget that you recently started out and you need people to hear about you and you need them to trust in your ability to get the job done.
You’re trying to attract new potential clients and by scaling your marketing strategy appropriately for your business size, you can achieve great results. It’s also important to remember that marketing is not a one-time effort, it’s instead an ongoing process that even established companies have to regularly do to stay afloat. These larger and established companies can comfortably scale their allocated marketing budget to just 5% to 10% since they usually already have steady lead flow and brand awareness. Some marketing strategies ask for a much larger percent, especially if you’re looking to scale aggressively.
How to Increase Marketing ROI
When trying to maximize your ROI (return on investment), it’s essential to differentiate between investing and getting results. This is not a sure thing where if you invest a certain amount of money, you will be guaranteed a certain amount of results. That’s why getting a good return on your investment requires careful planning. These are some of the things you can do to maximize your ROI on your marketing spend:
- Use dedicated tools to track your marketing campaign, leads, sales and similar metrics
- Improve your ad quality
- Optimize marketing efforts or just experiment
- Prioritize local or area SEO
- Research your Customers
- Content marketing and blog writing
- Reach out to specialist to help you
Sometimes, doing something unexpected could also work, but it’s important to know that high quality leads are who usually turn into customers. Knowing which key metrics you should look out for is also part of increasing your ROI. Look at your cost per lead, customer acquisition cost and conversion rates to determine how effective your marketing is. Once you have your data, you can easily see where you need to improve, which resources you can scale with and how you can nurture high-quality leads and turn them into customers. As a side note, make sure that your booking process is easy. You might be getting leads, but if they don’t know how to book a move, you’re losing out on potential income.
Marketing Strategy How to Grow Your Business
It should come as no surprise to you that as your business grows, so should your strategies. This is especially true for marketing and how much to invest in it. During these phases, your business grows, and you should be ready to address specific needs at these different stages.
Start Phase: If you’ve recently started out, your main focus should be on visibility and building a solid foundation. Start by creating your Google Business Profile and start launching Google Performance Max campaigns. This should boost your daily received calls and when you pair this with a simple, conversion-optimized website you should be able to start showing up for local keywords and searches. When you’re starting out, it’s about getting seen and generating your first leads. So, spread the word any way you can and make your online presense strong and optimized, ready to convert visits into real customers.
Optimized Lead Flow Phase: When you start generating some results, it’s time to optimize your lead flow and make sure they can come from multiple different sources. In this phase, you need to start focusing on some advanced SEO, professional website design, high-quality backlinks, Meta Ads campaigns, Google Ads campaigns and any other source outside of Performance Max that you can find which can generate leads. Getting a consistent, daily flow of leads is important and you should be trying to have at least 2 to 5 leads per day. During this phase you should test different lead generation methods, tinker with your settings and figure out which ones work best for your long-term growth.
Growth Phase: This should be your final phase, where you’re switching the focus to fine-tuning and scaling. All your systems and campaigns should be in place and all that’s left is to make sure they are constantly optimized for maximum performance. In this phase, you should focus on setting up a budget for marketing on a quarterly basis. You should know how much you want to grwo and based on that increase your budget incrementally. If you notice a campaign isn’t working properly, focus on the ones that do work and expand them further. In this phase, careful planning is a must, and you should try to predict changes in the market so that you can scale much more easily. Make sure your Google Business Profiles are sharp and optimized, your SEO landing pages are targeted and make sure that your growth targets are aligned with your current marketing strategies.
Key Marketing Services
To get the most out of your investment, you should focus on services that move the needle and increase the performance of your business. These are some of the marketing services you should be using to increase conversions:
- Google Business Profile Management: Having an optimized GBP is the number one way how you could get free and high-quality leads. When managed properly, your Google Business Profile helps enhance your online presence by building your brand image, creating trust in your business and increasing visibility toward other potential customers. That’s why it’s important to have verified customer reviews, photos, services and more, be optimized and shown on your profile.
- Custom Web Design and Development: Your website is your digital storefront and making sure that it’s well-designed, and user-friendly should be your top priority. Having a customer-centric website with a mobile-friendly design, optimized, clean and fast is how you will build trust and get bookings. When your website is able to convert visitors into leads, that should be a clear indicator of a well-optimized website.
- Google Ads: PPC or Pay-per-click advertising on websites such as Google have the potential to bring immediate traffic to your website. With this method, your ads will be shown to people actively looking for moving services. It’s important to set up targeting for your PPC campaign and your schedule will fill up very fast.
- SEO for High-Quality Leads: With SEO, you can easily get to the top of search results for difficult keywords such as “Movers near me”. Sustainable growth is also possible through SEO strategies that have been proven to work. When you improve your SEO, people searching for specific keywords can find you easily and become high-quality leads. You should also focus on Local SEO, backlinks and content creation to bring in organic, long-term results and improve your overall page ranking and trust the search engine puts in you.
- Meta Ad Campaigns: Setting up succesful Meta Ad campaigns is one of the key aspects of a succesful marketing service. This is especially true when you’re trying to target a younger generation which are usually searching for services much more differently than before. You need high-quality video content as well as a well-optimized campaign if you want to get this done right. Since meta has a very strong algorithm and smart targeting options, it makes it a great option if you’re looking to get more and more results every single day. If you have the campaign set up properly, you can scale quickly and consistently because Meta no longer cares just about how many likes or followers you have, it’s grown into a more powerful tool for daily lead generation, but only if you know hot to use it right.
Alone, these services might not do too much to improve your business, but when you use them together, and you use them efficiently, they have the potential to create an optimized marketing ecosystem that drives consistent leads. Utilizing these services is the stepping stone toward building trust in with your potential customers which in turn will help you grow as a moving company. All of this will happen naturally as you enhance your local search visibility both online and on-site through your Google Business profile. That’s why when you put all of these tools together, they should help you grow consistently year after year.
Importance of Marketing Investment for Moving Companies
A very common mistake that most business owners do is that they still look at marketing as expense, but in reality marketing is an investment and the sooner you realize this, the faster you will grow your business. This means that any money you put into marketing should come back to your multiplied, but only if you plan it right. Think of marketing as the fuel for your business. For example, let’s say you set up a 3-month marketing budget of $1,000. You get a few calls, close a few jobs and you make around $4,000 to $8,000. This revenue is how much your marketing campaign was sucesful. So, the next thing you should do is from that revenue, let’s say it’s $8,000, you should always reinvest between 10 to 20 %. If you’re starting out recently this should be toward the higher end , so you should be ready to invest those 20%, or $1,600 to keep getting new jobs.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that your services will not continue to survive without marketing, and a serious business should always have a calculated monthly marketing budget. Since you already made a comitment to grow and you reinvested 10 to 20%, after three months you should scale your budget again by adding more money into it. The more you grow, the more you can reinvest which then becomes a sort of infinite growth loop cycle. Just make sure your campaigns are optimized and that they work, and always remember that marketing isn’t an expense, it’s a business growth engine. When you treat it like one, it can keep bringing you more work and more profit.
Conclusion
Today, moving companies that want to grow, stand out and generate consistent high-quality leads need to invest in marketing. It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out as a business or if you’ve been in the market for a while, having a marketing budget ready and putting it toward proven strategies is a must if you want to move the needle. SEO, social media, PPC, website design and much more is important if you’re looking to get a serious return on your investment. Find the right mix of services for what your goal is, or contact us directly and we will be more than happy to help you. We can help you make marketing more than just an expense, we will help you create a powerful engine for trust, reputation, growth and long-term success in the moving industry.