We have a running joke here at Security Dealer Marketing, whenever we overcome a challenge — whether it’s a piece of code not working that takes us hours to figure out or learning that Google is going to change their algorithm resulting in our having to change thousands of landing pages — we always say out loud, “Who’s ready to buy those lawnmowers?”

We say this because lawn mowers hardly ever change, nor does the landscaping industry. Technology, however, is always evolving, forever changing and becoming more challenging.

So when it comes to marketing in 2018, the suggestions here are what we will strongly encourage our customers to focus on in order to maintain and improve their lead count each month.

Know Your Audience

Collect, collect and collect as much data as you can on the people that visit your site, call in, engage with your social media ads or see your vehicles driving down the street.

The day and age of guessing where your marketing efforts thrive is over. Forget any marketing efforts that use a shotgun push effort toward your potential customers.

Learn from 2017 and look at your data. Learn if more women or men came to your site or saw your ads by pulling up your Google analytics, Facebook/LinkedIn ads manager or by asking your marketing agency to provide you a report on where your traffic came from geographically and from which campaigns — what were their ages? What was their income? How many times did a visitor revisit your site? Which ads provided the best results of the year? Did your branded searches improve? Use these or any other data that will allow you to better create targeted ads in 2018.

Be Laser Targeted and Segment Your Marketing Efforts

Today more than ever people are bombarded with advertisements. For this reason you need to segment your marketing efforts in 2018. No longer will a general ad appeal to everyone — not in today’s market. You need to collect data as mentioned previously so you know how many buckets/segments you’ll need to create.

For example, if your data tells you that you have women between the ages of 28-35 mostly visiting your site, create ads that are geared toward that demographic; don’t just create an ad, create two or three and put them on Facebook to see which one performs better. The one that performs better is now your benchmark; run it and create another to see if you can improve your results.

Increase Your Brand Awareness

Often here in our downtown area of Covina, Calif., we will spend time at local drinking holes or Starbucks to spark the creativity, and on occasion we’ll turn to the people or person next to us and ask them, “Can you name three home security companies?” More often than not, they come up with only two: ADT and Bay Alarm. And why wouldn’t they? These two giants are all over the place. So how do you compete?

Spend a mere $100 and start creating ads on Facebook if you focus on residential. If you focus on commercial, take that same $100 and put it toward LinkedIn ads and set your ads to a CPM basis (cost per thousand) and set it to a 10- to 25-mile radius from your office’s zip code and start to create ads. You can simply show your logo and your slogan, or better yet, create simple videos with your iPhone talking about issues you’ve helped resolve with a home security system — things like package theft or post recordings of your company being involved within your community.

As your come up with creative ideas to create more brand awareness, make sure you install or have installed Google Analytics and pay special attention to how many people are typing in your company name per month; if few to no searches are being made, try adjusting your ads and measuring from there.

Remarketing Is an Absolute Must

We can’t stress the necessity of remarketing enough. In our marketing efforts and according to our data, the majority of leads that come through your website will be due to your remarketing efforts. But it must be laser targeted. If you created a landing page for mothers with newborns, for example, make sure your ads that follow your potential customers also speak about newborns, and throw in an incentive like a free door/window sensor, a free month of monitoring or a free month of diapers so they want to click.

Until next month, adios muchachos!