Over the past few years, businesses of every size have been bombarded with messaging around the use of AI and what it can do for your company. For large enterprises with substantial in-house IT capabilities, it’s relatively easy to justify an expenditure on AI. The math for smaller, blue-collar firms (such as the home services sector) is less straightforward, but still worth evaluating.
Elevating your marketing efforts, for example, is a leading use case for AI. It can potentially provide your home services marketing with a level of personalization that might otherwise not be practical or cost-effective for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), for example. So let’s take a look at how businesses in the home services market might benefit from the use of AI.
So What is AI, Really?
Let’s start by quickly explaining what AI actually means. The term itself just means “artificial intelligence,” or using computers to imitate some aspect of how human brains do things. The basic concepts of AI go all the way back to the 1950s, when computers were still brand-new. The two kinds that matter most, right now, are 1. Predictive modeling, via “machine learning” (ML) and 2. “Generative AI” (including large language models [LLMs]).
Machine learning teaches the computer, by repetitive examples, how to recognize something specific and then predict or classify future examples accordingly. That’s the kind of AI that’s built into all kinds of marketing tools, from Netflix video recommendations to the advertising algorithms, such as those on Facebook and Amazon.
Generative AI is the one that’s getting all the hype right now. General-purpose LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are trained on massive quantities of text-based content, and image tools like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion are trained on massive quantities of images. If you give them a prompt (“send a polite reply to this fundraising email, but say no”), they’ll create an appropriate piece of text or an image following your instructions.
Personalizing Your Home Services Marketing With AI
Both types of AI can play into how you market home services to potential clients. ML algorithms aren’t something you’ll use directly, but third-party services that manage email or text-based marketing campaigns, and major advertising platforms like Google’s and Facebook’s, use this kind of AI to help you get the results you want.
Generative AI is a different ballgame. You might use it to create drafts of your emails or advertisements, for example, or to help you brainstorm marketing messages.
Both types of AI can go a long way toward helping you personalize your marketing messages, and that’s important. Management consultant heavyweight McKinsey has done studies on the subject for years, and their results show that personalization brings big improvements in your marketing results when it’s done well. So let’s take a look at how you can use both kinds of AI in your own business. We’ll focus first (and primarily) on generative AI, because you can use generative AI directly on the respective provider’s platforms without needing to build additional integration.
Responsible Data & Outreach Note
Use AI and contact enrichment in a privacy-first way. Only contact people when you have a lawful basis to do so (for example, existing customers, inbound inquiries, referrals, or opted-in lists), and follow all applicable telemarketing, SMS, email, and privacy laws. Avoid uploading personal data into general-purpose AI tools unless you have appropriate permissions and safeguards in place.
Using Generative AI for Home Services
Because generative AI is a general-purpose tool, the only real limitations on how you use it are your time, your creativity, and the budget you can allocate for general platforms like ChatGPT andClaude, or platforms that are purpose-built to support marketing like Jasper for copywriting or Crayo for short-form videos. Every business has its own needs and priorities, so we won’t attempt any kind of comprehensive list of AI ideas. This is just a discussion starter, to help you imagine ways you might use AI to generate leads and sales.
A few representative possibilities include:
1. Getting the Tone Right
If you want your sales communications to sound like they’re coming from a neighbor instead of a corporation, you’ll need to know how homeowners in your target area speak. Are there any particularly local running jokes, figures of speech, or topics that you ought to know? Are there words or phrases that will raise hackles and undo your good work? By reviewing publicly available community discussions at a high level (without copying personal posts or identifiers), you can identify common homeowner concerns and refine your messaging to sound local and helpful.
2. Finding a Different Perspective on Advertising Keywords
Major ad platforms like Google and Facebook have excellent tools for helping you choose which keywords to focus on. The problem is that the same information goes out to everyone, including competitors with deeper pockets, so you may struggle to find high-impact keywords that other businesses aren’t already leaning into. One alternative is to use AI to brainstorm keyword variations based on your actual services, seasonality, and common homeowner problems (e.g., ‘frozen pipe repair,’ ‘roof leak after storm’), then validate performance using your ad platform’s keyword tools.
You’ll still want to double-check those keywords against the usual tools from your advertising platform, but you may find some under-the-radar options your competitors have overlooked. Think of it as a home services take on “Moneyball.”
3. Having AI Craft Multiple Drafts of Your Sales Communications
Even for the most robust marketing teams, putting together one good sales message can be time-consuming. Crafting two, or six, or a dozen — so you can test them against each other, and see which message performs for you — would be even more of a challenge. But tools like Claude and ChatGPT can crank them out in seconds, and you can change the prompts you give them to emphasize different benefits of your services (“Okay, but this time focus on the safety aspect”).
You definitely should not use AI-generated drafts without giving them a close look and tweaking them as needed, but when you’re done, you should have several versions of your sales message ready to use. You can have the AI tweak them for the strengths and limitations of a given communications method (shorter for text, longer for email, for example), or have specific messages ready to use with different types of potential customers, such as new homeowners vs long-term residents.
Maximizing the AI Tools in Services You Already Use
Learning about the AI tools in services you already use, and how you can leverage them, is the other quick way to bring personalization to your messaging with AI. Without getting into detail (check your own platform’s documentation to see which options are available to you), here are some AI tools to explore:
- WordPress makes a broad range of AI-powered functions available when you use its platform to create a company website, including content-creation tools, readability and SEO optimizations, and a nearly-unlimited range of other AI capabilities through its ecosystem of plug-ins. If you’ve built your site in-house, rather than using WordPress, the hosting service you’ve contracted with may offer some degree of AI integration as well.
- Major web browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) have begun to incorporate AI as well, usually through extensions. Some, for example, will transcribe your calls or video chats with prospects (or your team) in real time, so details don’t get lost. Others will help improve your writing, either by clarifying the grammar (like the familiar Grammarly), or by fine-tuning your use of language in your sales and marketing messages. Each major browser has a huge ecosystem of extensions, so searching for those using terms like “AI” and “marketing” can help you find the tools you want or need.
- Mailchimp and similar email-management services have AI tools that can help you generate personalized messaging and email subject lines (those go a long way toward making sure your email gets opened). You can use the tools for keeping in touch with your existing customers, or for reaching out to potential new customers. These companies also have excellent analytics tools to help you with things like figuring out which draft of your message gives you the best results (phone-campaign providers can do this kind of thing as well).
- If you use paid ads through platforms like Google or Meta (Facebook and Instagram), lean into the AI tools they provide to help you personalize and target your ads effectively.
The Need for Contact Enrichment
The modern economy runs on data, almost as much as on dollars. No matter how you ultimately decide to use AI in your marketing, the results will depend heavily on the quality of the data you have available. The McKinsey report that was cited earlier, for example, states that personalization depends on data quality. Research firms, including McKinsey, have repeatedly emphasized that strong data assets are foundational to AI-driven personalization and customer decisioning across channels.
For home services companies, you’ll have two bodies of data to work with in your marketing efforts. One is your existing client base (assuming you’re not a brand-new startup), and the other is your pool of potential new customers. You’ll usually already have a solid base of information about your existing clients. Potential clients are a whole other game: You may have purchased leads from a third-party service, or you might be drumming them up yourself through mailers, promotions on social media, or referrals from existing customers.
One thing all of those sources have in common is that the information can be maddeningly incomplete, which hampers your ability to leverage AI and other tools to create personalized, effective sales messages.
This is where “contact enrichment” comes in. It just means taking steps to fill the gaps in the information you have for your contacts and make sure the data you do have is as up-to-date as possible, whether they’re existing customers, inbound leads, referrals, or opted-in prospects.
Investing in Better Data
Let’s look at a few real-world scenarios to explain why contact enrichment is so important:
- You want to do some email-based follow-up marketing with your existing customers. Unfortunately, for most of them, all you have is partial contact information (for example, a name plus an old phone number or email).
- You’ve been given a referral by one of your customers, but all you have is a name and a number. You’d like to know first that the phone number you have is working and is their most current number. You may also want to validate the referral details before you reach out, so you don’t waste time calling the wrong number or miss the right contact window.
- You’d like to target customers like the ones you already have, but don’t really know a whole lot about them, other than which of your services they’ve used.
It’s never a bad thing to know more about the people you do business with, or want to do business with, and that’s where Spokeo for Business can be a game-changer for you. Spokeo for Business aggregates data from a wide range of publicly available information to help organizations validate and enrich contact records efficiently. To look back at the examples we’ve just given, you could:
- Search your existing customers using Spokeo, which could show you additional ways to get in touch with them if they’ve gone cold, including updated phone/email fields (where available) and address validation signals, or give you information about the age of their home, helping you better position your company’s services, and much more.
- Search the name or phone number of your referral. First and foremost, that will tell you if there’s an error in either of those pieces of information. Beyond that, it will give you additional contact validation signals and household context that may help you route the inquiry correctly and tailor service recommendations.
- Use batch workflows to validate and update contact records you already have—such as existing customers, inbound inquiries, referral lists, or opted-in prospect lists—so your outreach is more accurate and timely.
With that kind of data in your pocket, now you can use those AI tools effectively to personalize your home services marketing. For example, you might also use batch workflows to validate and update contact records you already have—such as existing customers, inbound inquiries, referral lists, or opted-in prospect lists—so your outreach is more accurate and timely. You could then have your chosen AI tool sift through them to find the ones that match patterns based on service needs, property-related signals (where appropriate), seasonality, and location at a high level. Finally, you could create specific campaigns to target various sub-groups within your list of leads more effectively.
The Right Tool
No matter your strategy, success will rest in large part on the quality of the data your marketing team can achieve. It’s a competitive advantage that can set your company apart from both local and national competitors, if you can harness it constructively.
Spokeo for Business can help you maximize the value of the data you already have and build on any new information you acquire from existing or potential clients. In a data-driven economy, superior access to information can benefit all businesses, including SMEs. To learn more about how Spokeo for Business can help your business, to arrange a demonstration of the product, or even the opportunity for a no-cost trial, reach out to our team through the contact information on our homepage.
Sources
TechTarget: The History of Artificial Intelligence: A Complete Timeline
McKinsey Company: Unlocking the Next Frontier of Personalized Marketing
WordPress: Flex Your Site’s Features With Plugins
Mailchimp: Level Up Your Business With AI Personalization
Google Ads: Do Even More With Your Campaign