Consumer Multi-Site Services: Digital Marketing Success Factors for Home Services & More

Featured professionals: Brent Spiller, Zach Ledwith, Bernardo Villar

Digital marketing remains a powerful strategy for consumer multi-site businesses to drive growth, differentiation, and investor interest. However, the e-commerce space is becoming more challenging to navigate due to increased advertising competition, higher customer acquisition costs, the proliferation of AI, and a shifting search landscape. 

At the recent PE Summit 2.0 hosted by CAMP Digital and Google, our Consumer Group saw the unique effects of these dynamics on the residential services sector. Below, we share four digital marketing success factors for residential services and other consumer multi-site models that should be top of mind for investors in an evolving digital environment.

1. Optimizing for a dynamic customer journey

Consumer behavioral changes and greater connectivity between digital marketing products and platforms are transforming the traditional customer shopping journey. People are increasingly engaging with online brands in a non-linear way, making it essential to design multi-touch marketing strategies that capture success across four key activities: streaming, searching, scrolling, and shopping. 

“Leading digital marketers are running integrated campaigns across these behaviors with unified budgets and goals, while using cross-channel attribution and advanced tools to optimize creative, cadence, and spend in real time,” says Bernardo Villar, a director. “Doing so can demonstrate scalable, repeatable demand generation and a higher return on ad spend to investors.”

2. Using brand equity to drive performance

While customer acquisition targets are becoming harder to hit across the consumer multi-site space, it’s clear that investing in a company’s brand creates a halo effect. This is especially true in residential services.

“Data from our latest home services consumer study supports the importance of brand trust and awareness,” says Brent Spiller, a managing director. “Consumers surveyed say that brand reputation is the number one reason for selecting a home services provider, while around 90% pick a business based on brand recall.”

And with today’s more complex customer journey, brand building is a key driver of lower customer acquisition costs and higher conversions. “Developing brand marketing campaigns on a variety of channels gives a company multiple touchpoints with their customers, increasing recall while reducing customer acquisition costs,” says Villar. “These are all vital indicators of long-term success in an increasingly competitive market.”

3. Harnessing the power of AI

Google and other AI-powered platforms continue to influence how people find answers, digest data, and discover business recommendations. Consumers can now see a summary of complex information from a wide range of sources instantaneously, limiting their need to perform further company or product research.

For residential service companies and broader consumer multi-site service models, that means it’s crucial to gain a presence in these new AI-driven products while maintaining visibility in traditionally popular channels like organic search and social media. “In Google, AI Overviews are a new marketing frontier and highly valuable real estate,” says Zach Ledwith, a director. “Winning businesses are finding new opportunities to appear in AI-generated responses and continuing to prioritize digital fundamentals like SEO, strong advertising performance, a fast user experience, a well-designed website, and helpful content. Search, in particular, is still one of the most important channels for home services businesses to be found by new customers.”

Meanwhile, AI tools can also drive more efficient and scalable marketing operations. “Innovative AI tools can automate time-consuming processes, leverage predictive analytics, personalize messaging, and scale creative, targeting, and measurement,” says Villar. “The most advanced businesses today are using these solutions to establish more effective marketing engines, all while uncovering ways to maintain visibility within a shifting landscape.”

4. Aligning marketing to business outcomes

Improvements in advertising capabilities and reporting are unlocking new possibilities for CMOs who need to do more with less. As advertising becomes more automated and predictive analytics enable better visibility into results, CMOs are looking to more accurately connect marketing activities with business objectives.

“More consumer multi-site businesses are tying marketing directly to sales, revenue, and profitability with advanced data and reporting,” says Villar. “Going forward, this ability to prove marketing’s impact on business growth will be highly coveted by investors.”

Digital Differentiation 

For consumer multi-site businesses, the digital marketing space is constantly evolving with shifting best practices. This transformation will continue to be influenced by multiple factors, including increased competition for customer acquisition among advertisers, several new product introductions and platform changes, and AI’s rising influence on consumer search behavior, operational processes, and marketing tools

“Leading brands across the consumer multi-site sector are uncovering new e-commerce strategies to stay ahead, accelerate growth, and signal operational excellence,” says Villar. “Those that can reach more potential customers through brand building, strong digital fundamentals, and innovative AI tools while building more efficient and scalable marketing engines will be primed for long-term success and investor interest.”

To further discuss M&A opportunities across the consumer multi-site, residential services, and e-commerce sectors, please contact our senior professionals.