Video Marketing for Home Services: How Local Contractors Can Win Customers with Content
- Video content dominates online engagement, and home services companies that use strategic video formats—like DIYs, explainers, testimonials, and reels—can attract, educate, and convert more local customers.
- To stand out, businesses must capture attention within the first 3 seconds, optimize for vertical formats and silent viewing (92% of users mute mobile videos), and include strong calls to action and subtitles.
- Using a marketing platform like Surefire Local allows service pros to plan, schedule, and distribute videos consistently across multiple channels, ensuring they build trust and visibility while saving time.
Spend any amount of time online today, and you’ll quickly find yourself viewing video content. Video is the king of the Internet, and video marketing is quickly growing into the best way to engage with local customers.
Whether you’re looking for remodeling marketing tips for your home improvement company, want to improve the marketing for your HVAC company, or have a roofing company looking to drive more traffic to your website, a video content strategy could be the key factor in growing your business. Here are some key factors in helping you develop and implement a plan for local video marketing for home services companies.
Key Video Marketing Trends for Home Improvement Companies
Why is video marketing for home improvement and home services companies so important? Because video is what people want to see. In fact, 40% of American consumers view video content daily. If your brand isn’t using video, you’re missing potential customers.
Today, successful companies are learning how to use video to support their marketing efforts. They’re often partnering with content makers to create video content, or they’re learning how to do it themselves.
In addition, local businesses are learning how to market across different devices. For example, they may have a video ad that plays on local television stations targeting their local home services market, while also posting on social media to their stories to engage with online customers. Since 83% of Americans use two screens at a time, especially while watching TV, using video in this way can reach a larger number of people.
Clearly, video marketing is necessary for today’s home improvement, roofing, and other home services companies. Here are some video marketing tips for home services companies to make your video content more effective.
Create a Video Library
One of the perks of video marketing for home services businesses is that you can use the videos repeatedly. For example, if you post a how-to video for your HVAC company showing customers how to change their air filter as part of their DIY maintenance, and you have a week where you need social media posts in the future, you can resurrect that video.
As you film your video content, keep it available in a video library so you can reuse it. You can host this video library on YouTube or your own website. If you choose YouTube, you can add SEO elements to the description and the tags to boost your organic local online marketing.
Plan a Diverse Selection of Videos
As you build your video library, consider filming a diverse selection of videos. Depending on your home services industry, you can choose from:
- Branding Videos: These videos outline specifics about your company. For example, you can outline your company’s core values or mission statement, look at company culture and events, or even highlight your people in a video.
- Explainer Videos: These short, instructional videos provide more details about your services. Explanations for common repairs or the reasons behind maintenance services are all examples of explainer videos.
- Product Videos: If you’re promoting a particular product often, create a video outlining what you love about it. Be honest, and be willing to do pros-and-cons if there are some downsides to a particular product.
- DIY Videos: Sometimes, it’s better for your business if your customers do their own maintenance or minor repairs, so you can focus on the bigger jobs. DIY videos that outline safety, maintenance, or minor repairs can all provide value to your customer while also helping them make your job a little easier. With these, be careful not to take away your own business by telling customers how to do a job that’s better left to a professional.
- Educational Videos: Educational videos are similar to explainer videos, but the focus is on educating customers. For example, an HVAC marketing video may teach customers that it’s time to repair their system, while a roofing marketing video may focus on why cleaning gutters is so important.
- Reels: Reels are short videos, often less than a minute, that get posted on social media channels like TikTok and Facebook. Often, you can make a reel clip out of a longer video, giving you another place to post the same content. Keep in mind that reels should have an educational or entertaining bent.
- Live Videos: “Going live” can be a great way to engage with your customers. After you finish a live, it can live on your social media page. Good content for lives includes unexpected things you find on the job site, current events that involve your company, or frequently asked questions discussions that encourage audience interaction.
As you build this library, be sure to optimize for the platforms you’ll use. For social sites, vertical 9:16 aspect ratios are important. For YouTube marketing, using the platform-specific features, like Chapters, will help your content resonate with viewers.
Capture and Keep Attention
Once you have some video content ideas for your business, it’s time to plan the videos. The key here is to grab your audience’s attention quickly. People’s attention spans are shortening due to the plethora of short-form content out there, and as a result, you have about 2.7 seconds to grab attention before a video viewer clicks away. Find a way from your initial few seconds to make someone want to keep watching.
So how can you grab attention, especially when your content may not be particularly entertaining due to the nature of your business? Consider these ideas:
- Tease the ending of the video, such as “Watch to the end for the big reveal.”
- Use language like “Shocking,” “Emergency,” or “Surprising” to hook the viewer.
- Start with a question.
- Open with a testimonial.
- Shock with a surprising image or fact.
- Share a personal or humorous story.
Pull your viewers into the action right away, and you’ll find that your video is more effective.
Optimize Content for Engagement
Now that you have some ideas for your video content, what are you going to do with it? You need to post it online through your various social channels. But before you do, make sure it’s optimized to generate engagement.
As previously discussed, make sure the intro hooks the viewer right away. Jump into the action or the “before” picture of your job. Then move into the content quickly. You can also help draw people in with an enticing caption for the video that makes them want to click and learn more, and the thumbnail image should be equally engaging. In that caption, add a clear call-to-action telling the viewer to “watch now,” and on the thumbnail include text enticing the viewer to click.
Add subtitles to the video whenever possible. Subtitles make your content accessible for everyone, but they’ll also draw in viewers when they have the sound off. You may think that people don’t watch videos without sound, but they actually do. In fact, as many as 92% of mobile users watch video content with the phone on mute.
Finally, consider adding interactive features to turn passive viewers into engaged viewers. Interactive elements that require the user to click to continue the video will increase engagement. Interactive elements are particularly helpful if you have a longer video.
Post Video Content Consistently
Finally, be consistent with your videos. If you have a “Tuesday Tips” series that provides helpful maintenance or DIY tips for your target audience, faithfully post every Tuesday. If you create a video series, make sure you post the full series so you do not confuse or frustrate your viewers.
If you’re thinking that posting regularly is too difficult for you, consider using a tool to help. With a tool like our Surefire Local Marketing Platform, you can create multiple videos at one time, then schedule them to post throughout the weeks and months ahead. You’ll save time while still maintaining the consistency that your viewers need.
Humanize Your Content
AI video content is on the rise, and it does work well. However, if you want your videos to stand out, add entertaining, humanized elements. Especially in industries where expertise is necessary, such as HVAC, roofing, and home improvement, viewers prefer to see human content creators. Human-created videos will be more engaging and effective.
Leverage Local Marketing Tools to Make Video More Effective
As you’re planning your video content marketing strategy, make sure you have the right software. In addition to the software to make and edit videos, consider an online marketing platform, like Surefire Local, to streamline your efforts. With Surefire Local, you can plan, post, and monitor your video content, easily optimizing it to reach the most people.
If you want to see how the Surefire Local Marketing Platform can help you grow your business, attend a demo to see it in action.