Growth Is Top of Mind for Pest Control Operators in 2024

The past several years have been strong for many pest control businesses, with the industry as a whole showing annual growth of 6.2% between 2016 and 2021. Now, pest control operators (PCOs) are looking to reinvest that revenue into growing their businesses.

While obtaining new customers is consistently among the top goals for PCOs, it often proves to be among the most widely reported hurdles they face. That difficulty in finding new customers highlights the gap between what pest control companies want to accomplish and what they deem easy to achieve. The question for many PCOs is how to go about bringing in new leads and securing new customers.

A Strong Digital Presence Creates a Solid Foundation

Finding new customers for your pest control business leans heavily on knowing where to find them. While word of mouth and customer referrals certainly play a role for PCOs and other service industry professionals, their more modern cousins — online reviews and web search results — are crucial for today’s PCOs.

Your prospects live in an increasingly digital world, and it’s important to look for them where they spend their time. You’d be hard-pressed to find just about any prospect without a smartphone or an internet connection, so taking steps to bolster your marketing efforts online and ensuring that your marketing is tailored to look and work well on smartphones has the potential to magnify your visibility to customers you won’t reach otherwise.

This need is one that many PCOs recognize. In a recent survey of pest professionals, social media advertising and online reviews took the lead when respondents were asked about which marketing strategies they plan to spend more on in the next 12 months.

In the same survey, pest control companies who listed dedicating time for marketing outnumbered those who listed dedicating budget for marketing by more than double when asked about their biggest marketing challenges. However, very few indicated that they plan to increase their spend on a marketing agency in the next 12 months.

With many PCOs struggling to find time to dedicate to marketing, innovative technology, and software integration can help streamline the process of organizing and following up with leads, requesting customer reviews, and even the process of building a professional website to ensure that customers can find you when the need for pest control arises.

Whether you handle marketing internally or choose to work with a dedicated agency, the key takeaway is this: if you aren’t marketing digitally in 2024, you aren’t marketing at all. Finding new leads and converting them to customers is at the core of increasing your revenue and growing your business, and digital marketing is the foundation of any successful contemporary marketing strategy. To learn more about marketing your pest control business in the digital space and how the right software can help you find the time, explore PestPac by WorkWave’s marketing solutions today.