Best Home Inspector Marketing Strategies

For home inspectors, marketing can make or break their business. It’s something that’s more challenging for them than it is for other industries.

Why?

Home inspector marketing still heavily relies on interpersonal relationships, which can be a tough cookie to crack for some people. At the same time, home inspector marketing also doesn’t exclude modern digital methods.

So how can you grow, and what is the best way to find the middle ground between these two wildly different approaches? Read on and arm yourself with the knowledge that will give you a significant advantage in the market.

How Important Are Real Estate Agents?

As a home inspector, you cannot survive unless you have a good relationship with real estate agents, as they are the main source of new clients.

Because of this, they’ll have to take up a majority of your direct marketing efforts, even though you probably cringe at that fact. Naturally, you’ll also market to them indirectly through your digital marketing efforts (more on that later), but it’s important to lock down the basics first.

Here’s how you can win over real estate agents:

1. Visiting their offices 

The classic methods of home inspector marketing still work and are usually the most powerful way to increase business. This includes showing up to real estate agents’ offices and trying to win them over.

You’ll first need a bunch of addresses to real estate agency offices so you can plan out your route and visit each one. Your goal here is to try to book lunch and learn, which is harder than you might think. 

Go up to the receptionist of the agency, introduce yourself and your company and ask if there is an opportunity to provide lunch and learn for their agents or a way to sponsor their real estate office. 

This interaction can go a lot of ways. They might reject you, tell you that you must pay them to provide lunch and learns. They might say yes, and instruct you to send an email to the broker to get on their schedule. 

Keep your expectations realistic, as you’ll likely have to visit the office multiple times until you get on the calendar. Make a list of all the interactions and be prepared to give up on the offices you’re not making any progress with within three or four visits. 

Once you do get agents in your class, it’s your time to shine!

As you can tell, this is very time-consuming, and even worse, it can be costly. 

To stand out, you should make yourself as memorable as possible. Bring sweets and small gifts such as branded office supplies and alike. 

2. Visit open houses

The best way to get introduced to real estate agents is by visiting open houses. 

Use your charm, bring some goodies both for the visitors and the agent, and try to build a relationship with them. Our advice is to avoid doing this while the agents are busy, as it might be counterproductive, to say the least. 

Request lunch, leave them your business card, and hope that your charming personality hits the mark.

3. Use social media to build relationships

By posting frequently on social media, you can showcase your brand in the best light. You also have to interact with your followers and discover and follow agents in your area. 

For instance, you could highlight and tag agents you worked with, show properties you inspected, and post photos of defects you keep running across during your inspections.

4. Automate your marketing

Technology allows us to automate channels such as email and texts. So if you’re not using it, you are missing out. While we won’t get into the platforms you can use, we will provide a few pointers on the types of communication you can send.

The first is follow-up emails you should send to your clients. For instance, you can send inspection reminders, tips for inspection, etc.

You can also send follow-up emails to your active listing agents and, more importantly, send emails to inactive agents. Whenever an agent isn’t using your services, you can use automated emails to nudge them in the right direction through your content.

How To Market to Clients

Even though home sellers and buyers aren’t your main source of income, you should still include them in your home inspector marketing efforts. 

As a plus, these methods also indirectly target agents, so in a sense, you’ll be hitting two birds with one stone.

Here are some home inspector marketing ideas:

1. Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques for improving search engine rankings. It’s essential and one of the best investments you can make for your home inspector marketing. 

SEO helps optimize your website and increase your visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs), and will, over time, exponentially increase the organic traffic to your website. 

This practice can be quite complex as it requires a lot of effort and encompasses other home inspector marketing techniques, such as

2. Content marketing

With quality content, you can not only increase your ranking (by writing your post around relevant target keywords) but also build a following online. 

By addressing the common pain points of your audience through valuable tips, advice, and opinions, you grow your online presence and position yourself as a leader in your industry. Additionally, this gives you something you can send to your agents or clients in your email marketing campaigns. 

3. Review generation

By generating positive reviews, you can improve your local SEO since customer feedback is one of the factors that search engines take into account for rankings. At the same time, this home inspector marketing tactic also builds social proof, which is necessary for conducting business in the modern age. 

Why?

Most customers nowadays look for online reviews before deciding on a business.

4. Pay-per-click advertising

While SEO increases organic traffic to your website, pay-per-click (PPC) ads do quite the opposite. PPC allows you to show targeted ads to your audience to get them to click on your ad. 

This home inspector marketing tactic is great if you want to achieve fast results without spending too much money. Since you’re only paying per click, this is a cost-effective method of increasing the traffic to your landing pages or promoting new content.

Nonetheless, we’ve seen too many businesses rely strictly on this without having a healthy amount of organic traffic first. We’ve also seen many inexperienced companies botch these ads up and receive unfavorable results. 

That brings us to the next point:

How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency

Marketing your home inspector business can be extremely tough as you have to play two very different fields at the same time. To make matters worse, they’re both equally important, and you cannot afford to mess them up.

When it comes to reaching agents directly, you can hire additional personnel to help you cover more ground, so to speak. For targeting clients and indirectly promoting your business to real estate agents, you should work with a marketing agency to yield the best results.

SEO and PPC advertising are both important and can go a long way in establishing your presence online that’s always going to be there, even if you’re no longer able to afford enough cookies when visiting real estate offices.

Your best choice is Oamii, a digital marketing agency experienced in home inspector marketing. We’ve got an extensive background in SEO, content marketing, reputation management, as well as PPC ads. 

Call 561-228-4111 or fill out our online contact form and receive the best marketing service without busting the bank! After all, you’ve got to save money for that candy you’ll be handing out.