Digital Marketing for Septic Services: Social, Email, PPC, SEO

What are the Advantages of Digital Marketing for Septic Services?

Lead generation alone cannot justify the time and effort required to run a successful digital marketing campaign for septic services. Offline marketing strategies also generate leads.

Compared to home services businesses with characteristic ebbs and flows, septic companies rarely struggle with leads. They do struggle, however, to manage the multiple septic tank emergency calls they receive daily.

Beyond lead generation, here are some extra benefits that justify septic service companies making use of digital marketing:

1. Cost-effectiveness

Digital marketing strategies are perfect for septic services companies with a tight marketing budget as they cost far less than traditional marketing strategies.

You can run social media and Google ads with a minimal budget. Digital marketing strategies, such as social media accounts and a Google Business Profile (GBP), are free.

Indeed, having a larger budget can deliver greater results. However, you can always start with a small budget, increasing the amount as you generate more revenue. This is better than TV, radio, and billboard advertising, which require a significant up-front investment, even though they’re not guaranteed to work.

2. Versatility

Regardless of your size, years of operation, niche, or growth, there’s a digital marketing strategy for you.

For example, a septic company that’s yet to build a strong social media presence can run social media ads. Another septic company with an established brand can start posting organic social content to engage with customers.

3. Targeting

Digital marketing is highly targeted. You can target specific audiences (read: potential customers) on channels they already frequent, using their interests, demographics, browsing history, etc.

With such advanced targeting, it’s no surprise that digital marketing strategies generate highly qualified leads with a high close rate.

Now that the benefits of digital marketing for septic services firms are clear, let’s look at the different strategies. 

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves using social media networks—TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook—to connect with your audience, build brand recognition, generate revenue, and boost website traffic.

Social media marketing has two main components—posting organic content on your social media handles to engage followers and running targeted paid social media advertisements to reach a wider audience.

Septic services companies use social media marketing in myriad ways. They respond to brand mentions, participate in conversations, run ads, and post content such as:

• On-the-job or behind-the-scenes videos showing techs in action.

• Before-and-after content that showcases the results prospects can expect if they hire them.

• The latest industry news to demonstrate their commitment to best practices and modern advancements 

• Informational content that illustrates their expertise and helps customers solve a problem.

You can also combine different content types into one post to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously, just like Grant’s Septic Techs does in this TikTok post:

The video shows how they resolved a customer’s complaint of sewage backup, explains what it means, showcases the result two years later, and encourages viewers to install their everlasting septic system. 

This video educates the viewer, shows the project's behind-the-scenes, and proves the company can handle modern septic systems. 

The post also generated interest in the company’s everlasting septic system installation services (check the annotation on the screenshot) and received massive engagement (28.3k views, 371 likes, and 55 bookmarks).

To replicate Grant Septic Tech’s TikTok success, follow these steps:

Strategize

What are your goals? What types of posts resonate with your target audience? What will you post about? Which platforms will you use? 

Answering these questions is essentially what a social media strategy entails. To answer the questions, use audience research—customer surveys and competitors’ social media handles analysis.

Post consistently

Post consistently to succeed and receive greater reach from social media algorithms. 

To remain consistent, schedule posts, create content in advance, and encourage techs to always return from the field with content, such as before-and-after snapshots, videos, etc.

Listen and engage

The “social” in social media is there for a reason: it’s all about interacting, connecting, and engaging with others. So, only posting content is insufficient to maximize the platform’s advantages.

According to a recent Sprout Social survey, more than half of the most memorable brands on social media respond to feedback on their content. Plus, 37 percent of marketers surveyed prioritize engaging with followers over posting a lot of content.

So, watch out for customer engagement opportunities. Respond to brand tags, comments, and direct messages. You can also share your thoughts on trending topics about the septic tank industry.

Pro tip: To track social media mentions and comments, use social media listening and management tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social.

Track, analyze, and iterate

Social media marketing doesn’t stop at creating and posting content. You must measure its performance to discover weak points and know when to change strategy.

Start with the social media platform’s built-in analytics dashboard to determine your follower count, posts’ reach, and impressions. Then, get a social media analytics tool to go beyond the basic metrics.

Speaking of performance analysis, consider using ServiceTitan’s Home Services Marketing software to track the performance of your marketing campaigns.

Instead of using only vanity metrics such as website traffic and incoming calls, the tool ranks all your campaigns according to generated revenue.

This is possible because the software lets you create and assign unique phone numbers to each campaign so that the system can match each job booking to its source campaign.

The tool even goes as far as using a heat-map diagram to show the exact geographical locations generating the most revenue—the more intense the blue color encircling an area, the greater the revenue you’ve generated there.

This makes it easy to know the exact jobs each campaign generates so you can allocate your marketing budget in a way that guarantees maximum return on investment (ROI).

Email Marketing

Email marketing involves using emails to promote your services and engage with recipients—prospects and existing customers. Emails help you maintain top-of-mind awareness until customers are due for their next septic tank maintenance.

Due to the personalized nature of an email inbox, email marketing is an excellent channel for building trust and fostering rapport with potential customers.

Considering the many advantages of email marketing, it’s no surprise that it attracts severe competition, leading to cluttered inboxes. An average office worker receives 121 emails daily—that’s 15 emails every working hour in an eight-hour day.

Here are some strategies to stand out in cluttered inboxes and stay out of spam or trash folders:

• Always use catchy subject lines to capture people’s attention. But Megan Bedford of Mugyver Consulting advises you to avoid exclamation points, dollar signs, emojis, all-caps, or words such as “free,” “promotion,” or “offer.” This is to prevent email service providers from marking your email as spam.

• Optimize your email design for mobile devices.

• Clean your email list regularly to remove subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time and increase your open rates.

• Never buy email lists.

• Personalize the greeting and content.

Beyond personalizing your email’s greeting and content, another way to connect with recipients is to send them content that is hyper-relevant to their current needs.

For example, you can send emails only to those customers whose septic tanks are almost due for maintenance. Or promote a free inspection to prospects who requested a quote but are hesitant to take action.

This increases conversions, open rates, and click-through rates.

For example, Megan Bedford of Mugyver Consulting helped a client segment their customer base and send hyper-relevant emails with unfilled estimates to customers. This generated 50 inbound calls.

If you want to bulk-send hyper-relevant emails, consider using ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro Email software.

With it, you can segment your audience to send them targeted emails that resonate with their current needs.

ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro Email also lets you create and design eye-catching emails using any of the several professional-looking templates available on the platform. You don’t need to buy premium design tools or hire designers.

Finally, the software delivers detailed reports about your email marketing campaign’s performance. This way, you can tweak your campaign and see the exact number of jobs it’s bringing in.

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC advertising is a marketing strategy where businesses pay a specific amount to promote their services on digital platforms such as social media networks and search engines.

With PPC ads, you bid on keywords that you want to trigger your ads. Then, when someone clicks on the ad, you pay a specific amount (the cost per click or CPC) determined by:

• The amount of competition for the keyword.

• Your maximum bid—the highest amount you’re willing to pay for a click.

• Your ad’s quality and relevance to the search.

The CPC can be high, especially when several other septic services companies compete for the limited PPC ad placements available. However, a properly optimized PPC ad can bring in a lead that more than covers the cost.

For example, paying $3 for a click results in a $200 job, making more than 6,500 percent profit.

Running PPC ads starts with picking a platform, of which several exist. These include Facebook, Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads), Instagram, YouTube, Taboola, and Reddit Ads, among many others.

However, Google Ads is the most popular, as it has a digital advertising market share of 39 percent. Plus, the Google search engine accounts for a significant portion of the world’s traffic and, by extension, a huge proportion of the world’s ad clicks and impressions.

PPC ad platforms receive a lot of competition for limited ad spots. Only a few ads earn a spot on the search engine or social media news feed at any time.

For example, only three to four ads out of the several participating in ad auctions at any given time earn a spot in Google’s sponsored section.

Here are some things to consider to increase your ad’s odds of appearing:

• Use the right keywords and targeting filters—audience demographics, interests, etc.

• Tailor your landing page to your ad copy and marketing objectives.

• Schedule your ads to appear when customers are more likely to search for septic services.

•  Target local residents.

Also, use these tips from Mark Kennedy, CEO at SEOM Interactive, to reduce ad spend and increase conversions when using Google Ads by structuring your ads correctly:

• Segment keywords by theme or location into ad groups so each query activates a specific ad and landing page. For example, septic pumping should trigger an ad for that query and a landing page all about pumping out sewage, not a general septic tank landing page. 

• For multi-location companies, each location-based query should see an ad with that town in the headline and a landing page about that area, complete with localized, unique content, images, etc. 

• Always include relevant calls to action. 

“So many times I see an ‘over-localized’ page that focuses too much on the location itself, and not the service and benefits they offer,” says Mark Kennedy.

Beyond structuring your ads correctly, measuring their performance and consistently optimizing them for conversions can reduce ad spend and increase conversions. ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro—Ads platform can help you do that.

The platform integrates with Google Ads and Google Analytics, which helps you access detailed PPC ad campaign reports.

You can also use the tool to create dynamic call tracking numbers and attach them to different PPC ad campaigns, which automates booked jobs, sales, and revenue attribution. This way, you can reallocate your marketing budgets to high-performing campaigns and discontinue or tweak those failing to generate revenue.

Recommendation: Check out how to connect your Google Ads and Analytics accounts to ServiceTitan.

Another excellent tool in ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro – Ads platform is the Ads Optimizer.

The tool automatically optimizes your ads for revenue using Titan Intelligence—ServiceTitan’s AI for trades—which analyzes conversion data from Google and ServiceTitan to learn what high-quality leads look like. The AI tool then trains Google’s machine learning algorithm to display your ads to leads likelier to convert.

This increases your lead quantity and quality, boosting conversions.

Liz Soto, senior account manager at Proximo Marketing, who has been using the Ads Optimizer for clients, has this to say about the tool:

“What I love about Ads Optimizer is the fact that any jobs that have been booked and any revenue that has been booked are considered qualified leads and can then be filtered back into the Google Ads platform.”

“You can optimize toward a very specific type of transaction. So now you're getting a more qualified pool of data. Now Google can optimize toward that very qualified pool compared to the general pool of calls.”

Recommended watch: Discover how you can use the Ads Optimizer to boost conversion rates.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO involves improving your website’s traffic and ranking on septic tank–related search result pages, using strategies such as:

• Optimizing your website’s content with the right keywords (on-page SEO).

• Creating and updating your GBP.

• Building backlinks and citations—online mentions of your company across the internet.

• Optimizing your website for local queries such as “septic companies near me.”

Unlike PPC advertising, SEO is almost free, requiring only an up-front investment of time and few resources. Plus, as long as you implement the right SEO strategies and minor updates, SEO ensures your website keeps generating leads and conversions for as long as the internet exists.

Given that SEO takes time to yield results, one might be tempted to cut corners using black-hat SEO tactics—practices that violate the Google search engine’s terms of service—such as:

• Keyword stuffing: Using keywords unnaturally throughout your website’s content.

• Buying backlinks: Paying other sites to link back to your site.

• Link-exchange schemes: Entering agreements with other websites to link to each other's content.

• Cloaking: Delivering content to search spiders different from what appears on users’ browsers.

You should avoid such tactics, as they can attract penalties and cause Google to ban you from search engine result pages (SERPs) completely.

Online Reputation

Online reputation is people's perception of your business, which they form using online information. The two pillars of online reputation are:

• Information your company provides online—content on your website, business listings, and social media pages.

• What others say about your business online—reviews or testimonials, news articles, social media mentions, and brand mentions in online discussion forums.

Maintaining an excellent online reputation grows your brand’s visibility. It also attracts new clients who mostly use digital platforms—search engines and social media platforms—to search for septic services companies and evaluate local businesses.

To monitor your online reputation, consider using social media tools that let you know whenever someone mentions your company. You can also set up a Google alert to receive a notification on search engines whenever someone mentions your brand.

Finally, encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on your GBP. 98 percent of customers read online reviews for local businesses, and Google uses positive reviews as a key local ranking factor.

Encourage techs to request reviews before leaving the job site. Hand out postcards with online review tutorials to customers. And leave review request reminders at the bottom of invoices and payment requests.

Remember, it’s not just about getting reviews. You have to dedicate time to respond to them, even if they are negative, as most customers are more likely to pick a company that doesn’t leave reviews unanswered.

Now, monitoring online mentions of your brand, responding to reviews, and sending review requests gets more daunting as you grow your business. However, it’s very easy with ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management software.

The software consolidates reviews from all your business listings into one single feed so you don’t miss out on customer complaints and recommendations.

This makes it easy to respond to positive and negative reviews and try to turn an unsatisfied customer into a loyal one.

ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management tool lets you configure your system to automatically send customer review requests once a job is completed. 

You can even tailor the review request message to the customer by mentioning their name, the specific service they received, or a positive aspect of their experience.

Prompting customers for reviews right after completing a job leads to more authentic feedback, with the experience still fresh in the customer’s mind. Also, personalizing the request message adds a human touch, making it more likely that the customer will agree to take the time to leave a review.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is creating and distributing useful and valuable content—videos, blog posts, infographics, newsletters, and so on—to prospective and existing customers.

The primary goal is to showcase expertise to customers and help them solve septic tank–related problems. This way, when they face such a problem, you'll be the first company that comes to mind.

Content marketing brings many benefits, such as boosting online visibility, attracting new customers, building customer loyalty, and increasing industry authority. But it only works when you implement it correctly by following these steps:

1. Set a goal

Define what you want to achieve to facilitate tracking and measuring performance. The goal, of course, will determine the approach, format, and channel.

2. Repurpose content

These days, buyer journeys are complex. A customer may request a quote, read one of your articles, and comment on a social media post before booking an appointment.

To avoid missing out on prospects, you can repurpose your content into formats for these channels. For example, you can turn a YouTube video into a blog post or break an article into several social media posts.

3. Distribute your content

Create a distribution plan to maximize your content’s value. You could distribute it using newsletters, paid ads, influencer networks, etc.

Local Advertising

This refers to using digital channels to attract prospects and re-engage customers in your local service area. When properly executed, local advertising generates highly qualified leads.

Some examples of local advertising include:

Local SEO

Local SEO involves using strategies that increase your local search ranking. This ensures your website appears on local result pages, triggered when internet users in your service area search with local-intent keywords such as “septic companies near me.”

Ranking high on local result pages is a great idea. Customers prefer to hire a local business that can arrive quickly to fix their septic tanks, over distant septic companies that take longer to respond.

Also, 21 percent of consumers in the United States use Google to find local businesses, and 87 percent say they use Google's local result pages to evaluate local businesses.

Some Local SEO tactics include:

• Creating and consistently updating your GBP.

• Filing your GBP with reviews from real customers.

• Listing in local directories.

• Creating location-based service pages for each service area. Then, embed a Google map result in them. The map should have a pin showing your physical location.

• Ensuring your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent across all online mentions of your company

• Collaborating with local PR agencies and journalists to earn mentions on local news websites.

Local Services Ads (LSAs)

These are paid ads that appear on local result pages containing the company’s name, reviews, ratings, city, phone number, opening hours, and more. It empowers searchers to contact septic services companies directly—through a call or message—from local search results.

LSAs are an effective local advertising channel, as they ensure you appear when someone is ready to hire a septic services company. Also, the ad’s strategic placement at the top of search results helps you upstage competitors and increases the odds of searchers picking you.

To ensure you keep track of leads generated by your LSAs, consider using ServiceTitan’s Local Services Ads integration.

The integration pulls all LSA job bookings into your ServiceTitan booking screen. This way, you avoid the error-prone process of manually copying customer details.

Now Over to You

Digital marketing strategies are a great fit for every septic services company wanting to generate leads and connect with potential customers.

First, define your goals and decide which strategy best serves those goals. Then, septic services marketing tools like ServiceTitan can be used to measure and tweak the campaigns continuously to generate the desired results.

ServiceTitan is a cloud-based tool for home service providers to automate customer interactions, track marketing campaigns, and streamline business processes. Over 100,000 contractors nationwide have used it to boost their revenue by 25 percent.