As Chief Operating Officer, Dan Bedell spends his day working closely with his marketing teams to make sure that all of their clients have excellent plans that are helping them grow. Dan emphasizes that an important part of their success is their omnichannel marketing strategy.

Omnichannel refers to the multiple ways for businesses to get in front of their ideal customers. In the past, it was a race to see who could gain the highest organic SEO reach to be found first when searched. But now that everyone is doing this, it’s important to have a more well-rounded approach to marketing.

This includes:

Dan explains that each of these pieces work together to reach your audience in the right place and at the right time in a way that resonates.

Part of this shift to omnichannel marketing is occurring because of the changing buying cycle. People are spending less time searching because they are discovering what they need before they need it, thanks to platforms like Google and Facebook understanding user preferences, past activities, and interests.

While PPC can be valuable for businesses and is known for producing high conversion rates, it is most effective at the bottom of the funnel. This moment is called the “Zero Moment of Truth.” It is when customers know what they want to buy and who they want to buy from.

If you only focus on PPC, you could miss out on the rest of your audience who are just at an earlier point in the buying funnel.

To take advantage of this evolving buying cycle, it’s important to have a pre-conversion plan, made possible through omnichannel marketing.

To illustrate what a pre-conversion plan is, Dan uses the example of Christmas shopping.

If he is targeted with ads in August for various products, like a robe for his wife, even if he doesn’t buy it that early, when he is scrambling at the last minute on Christmas Eve he will be more likely to go back and buy it.

“Get me to buy the robe prior to me doing the PPC search, and you’ll have me as a customer.”

This pre-conversion plan not only sets you up for success by reaching your audience before they need you, it also decreases the chance of your competitors booking your potential customers.

Although there is no cost per click associated with SEO, it is actually often more expensive than PPC because it is a very technical, time-intensive speciality. Dan says that while it is always valuable to have your business show up organically through SEO, it does take a serious investment of time and money.

Dan highlights how Facebook is now being treated like a portal to the internet. Customers are able to find product recommendations and do searches before they even go to the internet. This makes Facebook a very valuable pre-conversion point of connection for your business to meet potential customers.

Facebook and Google are anticipating the “Zero Moment of Truth” and are getting brands in front of an audience before they are ready to buy.

Unlike a cost per click model, LSAs operate on a cost per lead model. LSAs appear at the top of Google search above the PPC ads, which is prime real estate on Google. If you’re a local business, you can’t decide how often you show up, but you can optimize your business information and practices to boost your profile. For example, when choosing which businesses to show a customer after they do a local search, Google takes your business’s location, ratings, and how often you answer your phone into account.

After taking all of these different avenues of marketing into account, Dan emphasizes why it is so important to have a marketing strategy that combines each of these tactics in a way that fits your home services business goals.

“The purchasing decisions are being pushed further and further up the funnel by the way technology is working... There is too much opportunity to get in front of the ideal customer sooner in the buying cycle. We tell our advertisers is we need them to be doing an omnichannel approach so they capture business so that business is not being poached by their competitors, prior to their PPC search.”