AI for contractors can solve your biggest home improvement marketing and sales opportunities

The home improvement industry has spoken. 

After surveying 500+ window, roof, door, siding and other home improvement business owners, Qualified Remodeler reports that 5 of the most important challenges and opportunities you’re facing are during the end of 2023 are:

1. Better sales strategy and management
2. Overall higher volume of leads for new business
3. Better marketing overall
4. Better internet marketing
5. Increased throughput without overhead

And now in 2024, AI can help turn all these opportunities into action. Let’s dive in to some tangible real-world AI use cases for sales and marketing to solve each of these challenges.

Better sales strategy and management using AI

Your home improvement business sales strategy and managed is built on:

• Your sales team and structure (appointment setters?, field reps?, territory managers?)
• Your lead flow and assignment (speed to lead?, shark tank?, round robin?)
• Your CRM (MarketSharp, LeadPerfection, Salesforce, Leap, something else?)
• Your transaction/project manager

So how does AI help?

The beauty in AI is, it’s consistent, granular, and scalable. Those are the traits that make up a great home improvement sales team too.

As an owner, or a manager in sales, marketing or your call center team, you need to know your sales team is performing well. That isn’t an easy job to do when you’re managing 1,000s of new leads, 10,000s of old leads and hundreds of active projects.

This is where AI comes in. 

AI for Sales Script Performance

Rilla is an AI and speech analytics company that focuses on the home improvement space. You can use their app in the field to record your sales reps’ calls, and the AI analyzes them for a variety of metrics so improvements can be made.

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Rilla is a perfect example of AI helping you manage your sales strategy. 

Not only does an AI tool like Rilla help manage your sales strategy, but it can set forth your sales structure. Speech and call analytics tools can work for your appointment setters, outside field reps, and inside sales reps.

Not only that, these AI tools, including AI dialers and more, can integrate directly into your CRM and other software. Giving you the starting blocks of a complete picture of your entire sales organization’s consistency and profitability. 

The alternative is, as a manager or owner would have to:

• manually listen to every phone call or in-person sale your reps are making,
• take notes or transcribe every sale
• cross reference against your script or playbook
• manually comb through thousands of sales to understand trends

It would be impossible. That is where AI can give your sales team the granularity, consistency, and scale you need to win in home improvement.

Try Structurely’s AI Sales Follow-up Message Generator to get 3 Months of Texts + Emails Written for your Home Improvement Leads

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Overall higher volume of leads for new business

Keeping your home improvement funnel fed is vital and lead generation is the spark that sets the rest of your sales in motion.

While it’s true you’re likely thought of as being in a “transaction” business – meaning, you just churn and burn through customers – we all know that mentality is wrong for repeat business and future lead generation and brand awareness.

Lead generation done right is a combination of the following:

• brand awareness, 
• content and message relevancy, 
• referral/word-of-mouth, 
• and online (and offline) presence

So how does AI fit into home improvement lead generation?

AI for content generation

Content marketing is one way to win the attention of your audience, which is also often free!

But, content is hard to produce. There’s image creation, video creation, message creation, and more. Creating a content machine is tough work, and it’s often not the focus of your home improvement business. (Do you really want to be a media company? Maybe you should think like that?)

Content creation is something that today, generative AI excels at.

Here are some AI tools to help with your content creation today:

• Bing image generator – create images with just a sentence. This can help you create high-quality images for your blogs, social media posts, and more with ease
• Jasper AI – AI copywriting tool for all your blogs, social media text, ad copy, and more. Jasper has fine-tuned their AI to write specific content in your voice, far better than the off-the-shelf AI tools like ChatGPT and others that write in a very broad tone
• Typeframes GPT – a ChatGPT plugin that lets you describe a video and it gets automatically created. Typeframes has a very professional look and feel for a video editor which makes this a great choice to help with your video production.

Google and other search engines will begin to favor you by putting out great content. And when it comes to home improvement marketing, being favored by the almighty search engines will pay you back 10 fold over your lifetime.

AI for website live chat and lead capture

Creating great content will drive visitors to your website, but then what?

An anonymous web visitor will do you no good when you need them to convert to some form of contact with a phone number and/or email (or at least a name!)

Website live chat is a great way to capture, and de-anonymize, your website visitors.

Podium is a great example of a live chat product that captures leads and gets their contact information, allowing you to text, call, or email them even after they’ve left your site. This is just another form of lead generation.

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Live chat tools can be tough to operate from a coverage perspective. This is where AI can fit in. Podium has built-in AI tools for their live chat, but many live chat companies offer AI-first live chat, so you don’t have to worry about having coverage in real time to answer the live chat.

Try Structurely’s AI Sales Follow-up Message Generator to get 3 Months of Texts + Emails Written for your Home Improvement Leads

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Better home improvement marketing overall

Using AI to help with content generation, an on-site live chat, and sales analytics as we’ve already outlined will contribute to making your home improvement marketing feel more professional overall.

But what else can AI marketing do for you?

Google and Facebook are behemoths in the marketing and AI worlds, and they’re in an all-out arms race to win your business. This means new world-class tools to accelerate your marketing. Let’s dive in.

Google AI ads 

Google Adwords and other advertising tools have now become AI-first. Meaning, that they bake in AI for you, to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

How? Well just listen to their experts here: AI marketing examples answered by Google Employees

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Facebook AI ads

Facebook too has moved to an AI-first approach to ad management. They’ve invested heavily over the many years of managing millions of ads into understanding what converts. 

This means you don’t have to.

You just:

• Create a few ad creatives
• Create a few ad headlines
• Create a few ad texts

Facebook will automatically optimize your campaign to deliver to those most likely to click, with the highest performing creative, headline, and text.

Facebook has even begun rolling out generative AI tools to help you create high-performing ads:

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Facebook and Google have the AI powers to do an incredible amount of work for you in your marketing. Leave these behemoths to their expertise and offload your marketing to them, so you can focus on running the rest of your business.

Better Internet marketing using AI

Outside of using AI for content creation, live chat, and ads, like we’ve already covered – you can use AI to better your internet marketing in your specific home improvement niche.

Internet marketing is a combination of:

• Brand consistency
• Brand uniqueness
• Brand presence
• and more

What this means is: that you have to stand out online.

There are a million ways you can do that whether it’s through a daily vlog, regular Instagram stories, regular posts on X (Twitter), or more.

But one way is to create unique and helpful content for your audience simply.

And in home improvement, that is a common desire of your audience. Many homeowners want ideas on what their remodel will look like.

A fun and easy way to help your audience relate to you online is to offer an AI remodeling tool, like Remodeled AI.

Your audience can simply upload a picture of their house and project, and ask for the changes. AI is notoriously good at these types of image generation tasks and will produce a before and after the renovation for your customers to visualize their space.

Your business could consider offering an app or service like this (including just creating a landing page for your users to upload pictures of their project, then you do the AI upload yourself and return them results)

This approach is a great combination of entertainment and education to your audience, that fits into your specific niche as a contractor, making it a great way to improve your internet marketing.

Increased throughput without overhead using AI

Who in business doesn’t want more throughput without more cost? Luckily, that is one of the core benefits of AI to the business world.

In home improvement, AI can be used to help you scale, without adding headcount or cost in several different ways. 

Conversational AI platform for your home improvement call center

You may have a call center to text and call your home improvement leads. You may not. Either way, somebody at your company is responsible for converting the leads you’re generating into an appointment.

Conversational AI is a perfect companion for this job.

Take Structurely AI for home services, which can automate the entire lead conversion process for you:

• Text your leads 24/7/365 in under 2 minutes
• Follows up until they respond for up to 3 months
• Has a 2-way qualifying conversation when the lead responds
• Schedule an appointment with your sales team (on an actual calendar)
• Or initiate a live transfer phone call to your sales team

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Conversational AI companies like Structurely can augment your home improvement call center operations without the need to add more humans.

This means you can scale your lead volume, create more content, generate more reviews, capture more leads, and more, knowing you have an always-present AI that will cover your lead conversion.

Try Structurely’s AI Sales Follow-up Message Generator to get 3 Months of Texts + Emails Written for your Home Improvement Leads

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AI is here for home improvement

2024 is the year to adopt AI or be left behind.

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2023 was the year technology companies raced to begin building the AI tools your home improvement business needs today. From content generation to conversational AI, there’s a use case for AI in your business today. 

If you need help figuring out where to start, talk to our team about an AI audit. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses begin to use AI, and we will talk through your sales and marketing funnel, CRM and another technology stack, lead generation efforts, and more to produce a 1-page recommendation on areas you can start using AI today.