The 28 Best Marketing Tools for Local Contractors

Just like building a fence or installing a pool, marketing your local contracting business is all about having the right tools for the job.

While some marketing tools aren’t 100% necessary, they do make executing your marketing strategy a whole lot easier. Building out a well-rounded martech stack will help keep your projects neatly organized and your marketing team focused on the most important tasks at hand.

But which tools should you use? How do you know which ones will have an impact and which to ignore?

We put together a list of the 28 best marketing tools that will help take your local contractor or home service business to the next level.

SEO Tools

Don’t dismiss these tools if you aren’t actively investing in SEO or trying to improve your search rankings. Your teams can still derive a mountain’s worth of insight to help them with building your marketing strategy, coming up with ideas for content marketing, spying on your competitors with competitive audits, and so much more.

#1: Semrush

Marketers need tools that provide a wealth of data that they can use to make smart, strategic decisions that bring them closer to achieving their goals. Semrush is an all-in-one toolkit that gives marketers in-depth insights into their SEO, content marketing, market research, paid advertising, and social media efforts. Users can also set up projects within the platform to automatically run scheduled reports and audits of their website to stay on top of their KPIs and any issues before they become problematic.

#2: Ahrefs

Search engine optimization is a heavily data-driven marketing strategy and your SEO is only as good as the tool that you’re using. Working off of bad information can lead you to make decisions that might end up harming your business instead of growing it. Ahrefs has one of the most robust SEO toolkits on the market today and it’s a phenomenal resource for veteran SEOs, junior marketers, content marketers, bloggers, marketing agencies, and e-commerce stores.

#3: Moz Pro

Moz is a comprehensive SEO tool that lets you dig into incredibly granular reporting to gain insights that will boost your inbound organic traffic. And when you get Moz, you get access to tools that cover keyword research, rank tracking, site crawling, on-page optimization, and backlink research.

Moz is a really great tool for their on-site SEO audits that are a huge help with your technical SEO and their backlink reporting tools. You’re able to access detailed info about your backlink profile to get a better handle on who’s linking to you, where they’re linking from, how many links you’re getting from them, and whether or not they’re good links.

Users will also be able to download and add the Mozbar extension to their browser. This tool quickly gives marketers detailed insights about any web page they visit, i.e. PA, DA, inbound links, external links, internal links, etc.

#4: Ryte

Ryte bills itself as a UX platform, but it has a robust set of SEO tools that help marketers find the right keywords to target, discover underperforming keywords and pages, track issues on your website, and much more. These insights help your team know that the work they’re doing is having an impact on your site’s visibility in the search results. Ryte also has a built-in connection with Slack so you can receive real-time updates about your site’s performance and rankings.

#5: SEO Pro Chrome Extension

Marketers need tools that help them quickly find the information they’re looking for without having to dig through hundreds of lines of code. The SEO Pro extension automatically collects and extracts key pieces of information from a web page after you’ve visited it. This free tool is especially useful for SEO audits since marketers are able to glean insights about a page’s technical SEO, load times, target keywords, Schema, and much more.

Paid Advertising Tools

Building paid advertising campaigns on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Bing, and/or LinkedIn is a powerful way to generate new business. — ADD MORE CONTENT TO MEEEE —

#6: Leadpages

Marketers need tools that let them quickly spin up new landing pages and A/B test variations to boost the performance of their paid advertising campaigns. Leadpages is one of the better third-party landing page builders out there. Their platform has a deep library of templates to choose from and an intuitive drag-and-drop visual UI to create your own pages. Leadpages also has a robust set of integrations so you can quickly connect to services like Google Analytics, MailChimp, stripe, Facebook, etc. with a couple quick clicks.

#7: CallRail

So many advertisers are focused on tracking a single type of conversion like transactions or quote requests that they forget about tracking phone calls. Which, depending on your industry, could be even more valuable than a straight sale. CallRail’s tracking platform helps you understand what makes your phone ring. Advertisers can gain insight into where phone calls came from and how long they lasted so you can focus your budget on what’s moving the needle for your business.

#8: Unbounce

Unbounce is a landing page builder platform that is action-packed with extra features that give marketers an enormous amount of control over their pages’ UX and the performance of their campaigns. Marketers can quickly build responsive landing pages, sticky bars, and overlays while also routing traffic to the highest-performing landing pages. Unbounce also has built-in copywriting tools to let you create, edit, and expand the copy throughout your landing pages in a flash, so you can get back to optimizing your campaigns.

#9: WordStream

WordStream has been one of the most reliable sources of information about all things PPC. They’ve recently expanded their services into offering tools to help marketers boost the performance of their paid advertising campaigns. WordStream’s toolkit includes graders for Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Google Business Profile accounts to see how they’re performing and if you’re missing out on any growth opportunities. These tools are a great resource for QA when you’re building out a campaign for the first time or as a pulse check to make sure your ads are firing on all cylinders.

#10: AdStage (Tapclicks)

Managing all of our PPC campaigns on all of the different platforms can be a major undertaking that takes up a lot of your time and energy. Adstage unifies your paid advertising campaigns and consolidates them on its platform. Where Adstage truly shines is in their automation tools that let you schedule out different ad variants in advance so you can focus on optimizing the rest of your campaign. It also offers a wide range of integrations and connections with third-party tools to help you quickly analyze data and share nights with your team.

#11: ClickCease

Click fraud is an unfortunate part of running paid advertising campaigns. While it isn’t prevalent in every vertical, it is more present in some than others. Having some form of fraud protection in place can save up to 20% of your budget by blocking engagement by bots, click farms, and your competitors. ClickCease is one of the most reliable solutions for this problem, and advertisers can use their service on both Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

Content Marketing Tools

There’s so much more to content marketing than just writing a couple of articles each month for your blog. Content can be anything from blog articles to videos on Tiktok or YouTube, podcasts, white papers, case studies, images posted to social media, and everything in between. The options are nearly limitless! This also means that you’ll need to right tools for the job if you want to get the most out of your content.

#12: Jasper.ai

Writing content, even if it’s just a headline, is equal parts creativity, data analysis, and optimization to come up with something that resonates with your visitors while also being clickable and will help you rank better in the search results. Sometimes, you just aren’t in the right headspace to make that happen. Jasper’s AI writing tools are great at priming the pump to get your creative juices flowing, or come up with variations on the copy you’ve already written to have a bank of content to pull from for your A/B tests.

#13: Copy.ai

Writer’s block is the bane of every copywriter’s existence. From blog content to ad copy, email marketing, and social media content, Copy.ai helps you write better content faster. This AI driven tool gives you over 90 templates and tools to choose from to get past the dreaded “blank page” phase to creating riveting content that resonates with your target audience. You couldn’t ask for a better tool to streamline your content marketing production pipeline.

#14: Canva

Eye-catching visuals are a core component of successful paid marketing campaigns. Without them, you’ll never grab the attention of your target audience long enough and they’ll scroll right past your ads. Canva is a free image, video, and social media design tool that lets marketers quickly create professional visual media. Their ready-to-use templates speed up the design process so you can slap a layer of polish on your ads without having to endure a lengthy design process to create an amazing visual.

#15: BuzzSumo

Picking a topic to create content around can feel like throwing darts in the dark, but BuzzSumo shines a spotlight on the topics that get the most engagement. Marketers can use these insights to better prioritize their content marketing to capitalize on trends or lean into topics that garner attention so their content doesn’t fall off the face of the planet. BuzzSumo offers a set of tools that helps you discover influencers that could amplify your content, collect more data on millions of data points, and find those content pieces that will kick your dopamine drip into overdrive by earning more likes, shares, and backlinks.

#16: Adobe Express

You can’t talk about creating stunning visual media without talking about Adobe. Millions of designers and marketers use Creative Cloud every day, but Adobe Express doesn’t get enough credit. Formerly known as Adobe Spark, Express is a free image and design tool that lets you put together agency-quality media in a flash. And you don’t have to be a professionally trained designer with a decade’s worth of experience to use it either. Adobe Express comes with some amazing built-in tools that let you animate text, remove backgrounds, add effects, and so much more to make your media demand your audience’s attention.

Social Media Tools

Social media managers know how time-consuming it can be to create multiple versions of the same post for each individual social media platform. Using any tool to speed up the process or gain extra insights into the performance of your posts is an absolute must. These social media tools will make your life much easier.

#17: Hootsuite

You might know Hootsuite as an all-in-one social media scheduling tool where you can plan out all of your posts, on all of your social profiles, from their dashboard. They’ve also completely unified customer care, social selling, audience management, and analytics all under a single roof. Marketers can go from answering questions from your customers to scheduling posts, checking granular performance data on your latest post, and managing your chatbots all from within the Hootsuite ecosystem.

#18: Buffer

If Hootsuite has too much horsepower for your needs, Buffer is a phenomenal alternative if you’re just dipping your toes into the social media management pool. Their streamlined toolkit has all of the important features you need to effectively control your messaging through your social channels. Buffer integrates with all of the major social media platforms and includes features like a unified inbox, customizable bio link landing pages, an automated posting schedule, and in-depth analytics so you know exactly what your posts are doing for you.

#19: MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar takes the hassle out of repurposing your existing content and redistributing it across your social network. Carefully curating multiple versions of your messaging to each social platform can be a huge time-sink. Marketers can create a library of posts that MeetEdgar will automatically repurpose and republish those evergreen posts for you during peak engagement hours. This frees up your time so you can focus on growing your business while your social messaging is on auto-pilot.

#20: Mention

An underappreciated, and under-utilized, aspect of marketing is Social Listening, which is when someone mentions your company, products, or services, but doesn’t link to your website. Finding these mentions without a tool would be like looking for a grain of sand on the Moon. Mention monitors billions of pages looking for mentions of your brand every single day so you can get direct feedback on what your customers think about you, weigh in on conversations about your brand, and dig into in-depth reports to help you improve your social strategy.

Team Communication Tools

Whether you manage an in-house team or outsource your marketing to an agency, you need clear and open lines of communication to make sure your marketing stays aligned with your goals. Being able to quickly reach out to a team member to see where they are with a project or give clarity to help them get past a roadblock is key to running an efficient marketing strategy. These are the best team communication and collaboration tools that you should be using every single day.

#21: Slack

Slack is one of the most popular messaging apps that you can get your hands on. But it’s so much more than a simple messaging tool. Slack keeps your team moving in the same direction by making collaboration easy with clear communication. You can bring clarity to the chaos by creating individual channels to communicate with individual teams, hop into voice chats with Slack Huddles, and drag-and-drop audio or video clips into channels to not bombard your teammates with giant walls of text that no one wants to read. If you’re working with a remote team, Slack brings everyone together to make remote work feel like you’re all working side by side.

#22: Microsoft Teams

Teams is an excellent communication channel for companies that are already using Microsoft’s suite of products. This all-in-one communication tool seamlessly integrates with your existing infrastructure and opens up new lanes of communication with video meetings, phone calls, webinars, project collaboration tools, and messaging. Microsoft Teams has been an invaluable tool for companies that have made the shift to remote work. Their laundry list of powerful features and integrations consolidates your company and marketing teams’ messaging to a single platform so nothing falls through the cracks.

#23: Zoom

Zoom’s explosion in popularity in early 2019 has made its brand synonymous with video meetings. Whether you need to have a quick chat with a coworker, talk to the entire company, or host a webinar for your most valuable clients, Zoom has a solution that’s perfect for you. One of the new features that Zoom has added is Zoom IQ which uses AI to mine your conversations for insights to improve your conversation and presentation skills as well as help your sales team close more deals. This sales and marketing enablement tool helps you scale best practices faster and improve your strategy to produce clear, measurable results.

#24: Skype

Skype was one of the first messaging and video conference platforms that got it right at scale, which is why they’re still a serious player in today’s SaaS-dominated landscape. It’s one of your best options when it comes to staying in touch with your team and customers when you’re on the go and away from the office. You can’t always have a laptop and a webcam handy, but Skype is always there, keeping you connected to your company and vendors with features like HD video calling, call recording, smart messaging, screen sharing, and end-to-end encryption for private conversations.

Project Management Tools

A successful marketing strategy is meticulously planned and has hundreds of tasks scheduled out months in advance so your marketing efforts pull your company in a single direction. There’s no way that you can keep it all straight from memory. It just isn’t possible without a great project management tool like the ones below.

#25: Trello

Trello is one of the most popular project management tools for freelancers, consultants, and small marketing teams. The flexible card-based user interface and multiple boards give you an enormous amount of flexibility and visibility across your entire digital marketing pipeline. Trello lets you set due dates, assign tasks, create checklists, attach files, assign labels, and link to other cards and boards so you have all of the important info you need right at your fingertips.

#26: Monday

Monday is an amazing task management tool that isn’t just for marketers. It can be used in every department across your entire company! From sales to marketing, HR, operations, and software development, Monday.com has tools that are specifically built to help each department maximize its productivity by centralizing task management and communication to a single platform. Their platform has everything you need to support the long-term growth of your company.

#27: Asana

Asana is another great project management platform that makes it easy for your team to focus on the tasks at hand. What sets it apart is how easy it is to create custom rules to automate managing repetitive tasks like daily checks on your paid advertising campaigns, reminders for your daily stand-ups and weekly one-to-ones, filing your quarterly taxes, or any other task or project that follows a recurring schedule. You can also create custom templates that cover various company processes like onboarding or a pre-sales checklist so you can guarantee that your team is following the right procedure every time they handle a task.

#28: Wrike

Wrike makes collaboration easy. Whether your team is all back at the office or spread across the country, Wrike’s project management platform brings your people together so they’re always on the same page. Built-in features like live editing, team member tagging, personalized boards and task lists, and countless visualizations empower your team by showing them only the tasks that are relevant to them instead of forcing them to drink from the fire hose. This cuts out all of the unnecessary noise and lets them focus on what matters.

Recap

There are tons of great apps, products, and platforms that you can choose from to help grow your local contractor or home service business. Sifting through all of the best marketing tools and picking out which ones to add to your martech stack can be a tall order. However, you can rest easy knowing that the tools in this article are the best of the best and that our teams here at Hearth Marketing use most, if not all of these on a daily basis. If you still have questions about which tools are right for you, feel free to get in touch to speak with one of our marketing experts.