Improve your Lead Generation
Where do you get your leads? The majority of home improvement business comes from a word-of-mouth customer referral. You naturally get those leads by doing a great job. Be proactive about getting leads from satisfied customers. Ask them for three names of people they know how could use your services. Encourage your happy customers to give you great reviews. Make it easy for them to do by providing a QR code to scan for the webpage and send them an email request. Use your customer database by doing follow up calls to mine for more customers.
How do you generate new leads? Long term planned marketing and advertising will bring leads to your sales team all year long.
Stay In The Race
The following marketing strategies will help fast track your company to reach potential customers.
ADVERTISE – Signs (building and vehicles), direct mail, print ads, digital ads, and sponsorships all contribute to immediate brand awareness.
WEBSITE – Optimize your website for SEO and Lead Generation. To be effective your company website should have the following:
Honest Information – Be informative and resourceful to consumer. Write blogs about your business, how to choose a good company that does what you do and what to expect from a contractor.
Pleasing Pictures – Have professional photos of your work or work that you do. Nothing tells what you do like photographs. Before and after pictures are particularly effective.
Tell A Story – Give specifics about your work. Do this with a case study or customer testimonial.
Capture – Create an easy way to gain viewers information. Have many calls to action throughout your website.
REVIEWS and REFERRALS – Get reviews from your customers. Send them an email with a link where they can write something. Reward them for qualified customer referrals with cash or gift card.
79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Read this case study about how reviews helped a Southern California AC/HVAC company.
SEO – It’s very important to be found online. The more you are on the web, the more you will be found. There are many SEO companies that will provide you with a free audit. It will report your Google ranking, if your website is secure, mobile friendly, easy to use and quick loading. The audit will provide you recommendations to improve your website.
EMAIL MARKETING – Emails are a great way to stay in touch with your customers and entice them to come back or refer you. Be consistent and have valuable content. Keep the email short, interesting and don’t send too many.
BE CONNECTED – As a home improvement contractor, you should stay active with social media, popular organizations, and industry associations. It’s free to create profiles on many sites for examples: Facebook, Pinterest, Yelp, BBB, Home Advisor and Houzz. Industry groups keep you up on your industry and typically have membership dues such as The National Association of the Remodeling Industry.
Generating customer leads takes time, planning and work. Quality service and friendly staff build the foundation for repeat business and referrals, but proactive marketing is necessary to keep a constant lead generation flow. How you brand, market and advertise your services is important to keeping the leads coming in all year long.
