Contractor Lead Generation 101: How to Get Leads for a Construction Company

After 7 years of practicing marketing for contractors and construction companies, this article summarizes my understanding of this topic as it stands today. My goal is to give you a concise breakdown of the current options. I will present them in order of importance and effectiveness.

This information and how I rank these forms of lead generation are not based purely on my opinion but also on data I’ve gathered while marketing for over 100 companies across the country. We currently have around 50 clients that my team and I manage marketing for on a monthly basis and we pay very close attention to the numbers. This gives us insights into what is most and least effective on average.

Another thing to note before you go deeper into this subject is that a lot of business and marketing is common sense. If you stop and think about things for a minute, I guarantee you will be able to figure a lot out on your own. I spent years reading other peoples’ words as the gospel and thinking that everyone else had the answers and I didn’t. Eventually, I figured out that most people are full of crap and just regurgitate what someone else said. The marketing industry as a whole is a serious case of monkey-see-monkey-do.

As you go through this article, stop occasionally and think about things for yourself. Take some notes. Trust your own thoughts and instincts. Business is pretty simple when you boil things down. It’s all about forming relationships with people who want to trade you money for your skills and expertise. If you can figure out a way to consistently form new relationships with people and make them happy, your business will thrive. Now, let’s get into the marketing and lead generation stuff.

The following chapters are organized by order of importance and effectiveness.

Word-0f-Mouth: The King of Contractor Lead Generation

I’ve talked to thousands of contractors over the years and at least half of them have been in business for a long time with no marketing besides word of mouth. That immediately tells me that they are making their customers happy. Happy enough, at least, that they are willing to share their beloved contractor with their friends and family.

In my opinion, word-of-mouth is the best way to get new customers. When someone is referred to you and calls you looking for an estimate, the sale is already half made. These people are usually the easiest to deal with and take the least effort to close. When you get one amazing customer, often the people they refer to you are equally as amazing. It’s such a great chain reaction for running a happy business.

The downside of the word-of-mouth strategy is that it’s not very controllable and often unreliable. You might get 3 referrals in one month and then nothing for 3 months. This is usually the point where people call me looking for help with their marketing and lead generation. They want to find another way to get customers so they can smooth out this pattern a little it.

My most successful clients are masters of word-of-mouth marketing. They go above and beyond to make their customers happy and many of them even keep in contact with past clients and occasionally ask for referrals. They also understand that they must keep feeding new clients into the pool in order to keep referrals coming in. They rely on other forms of marketing for this. The next best form of lead generation is what I call The Foundational Marketing System.

The Foundational Marketing System (FMS): Getting You on the Playing Field

I’ve been doing this online marketing stuff for a long time. It started 7 years ago when I had to figure out how to get customers for my own remodeling company. I started with advertising on Google and eventually ended up trying just about every form of online lead generation that you can imagine.

What I learned is that there are two things that are required for you to get leads online:

1. People must be able to find you.
2. You must be the best-looking option they see.

Where are people looking? One word. Google. How do you be found on Google? With your website.

FMS Step 1/3 – Your Website: Your Internet Kingdom

Your website is the one place on the internet that you have full control over. It’s your kingdom and what you say goes. For this reason, this is the #1 place customers will look when they want to learn about your company. It’s also the #1 place search engines like Google look to understand who you are, what you do, and where you do it.

People who are looking to hire a contractor must be able to trust whoever they are hiring. They want to scope you out and vet you before they even talk to you. As avid online shoppers, average consumers are quick to make decisions based on what they are able to find online when they do a little digging. That is why it is critical to have a website that presents your company in a transparent and professional way.

What about search engines? What are they looking for? The reason Google is the best search engine is that it reliably shows the best search results. So common sense dictates that if you want Google to show you first, you must be the best search result. Keep following this line of reasoning yourself.

What makes your website the best search result? Best for who? Your customers, of course. If your website gives your customers a great experience, then it is fulfilling it’s role. If your website gives the best experience in relation to your competitors, then your website is the best search result. That is the basis of  Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short.

There are some technical things that go into SEO that I won’t get into in this article. I did put a video on Youtube not too long ago about this subject so you can check that out here.

Being on Google is step one and used to be the only thing we had to worry about. These days, Google has another way for you to be found on their search engine that is too important to pass up. It’s called Google Maps and it’s a special search engine for local businesses. Let’s talk about that next.

FMS Step 2/3 – Your Google Maps Listing: The Amazon for Local Contractors

Discovering the power of Google Maps felt like cracking the code for contractor lead generation and local marketing in general. This too is common sense. Let’s dig in.

The average consumer in the 21st century makes most of their online buying decisions based on one thing: reviews. Reviews can literally make or break your business. It’s a simple process that people go through and one that you have probably gone through countless times on your own:

1. You want to find a local business, perhaps a restaurant.
2. You type into Google: “restaurants near me”
3. The first thing Google shows you is Google Maps.
4. You open up Google Maps and look at the map to see which restaurants are close by.
5. You click around and quickly judge them based on their reviews. If you see one with 1 star, there’s no way in hell you are going there.

You’re probably nodding your head and maybe even having an AHAH! moment, but just in case your doubting me about the importance of reviews, consider this.

If your beloved grandmother or child recommended a restaurant and you went to Google Maps and saw that they had 50 reviews and a 1-star rating, you would certainly read some of those reviews. If people were saying the food made them sick and they had cockroaches crawling up their legs as they ate, there is 0% chance you would go to that restaurant. It’s the same thing with contractors. Bad reviews or no reviews = not even considered unless there is no other choice.

This is the power of reviews. When people see your business show up to a few others they are immediately attracted to the highest rating with the highest number of reviews. Again, the concept is simple:

1. Show up when people search.
2. Have more positive reviews than your competitors.

Do those two things and you will 100% get phone calls!

I Ran a Test to See Just How Well this Lead Generation Strategy Works and the Results Blew Me Away

To demonstrate how good it works I created a totally new company back in August of 2022 called Coeur d’Alene Landscapers. Coeur d’Alene is the town I live in.

I did the absolute bare minimum when setting up the marketing for this new business. I created our standard Foundational Marketing Website which you can see here. Then, I created a Google Maps Listing. I didn’t put any information on this listing and I didn’t add any photos. Both of these things are what we do for clients but I wanted to demonstrate that this works even if you do it half-assed. Finally, I got 12 people to leave me a review.

It is now January of 2023 so it’s been 4.5 months since we launched this new business. Just this week I got 3 phone calls from people looking for landscaping services. Two for snow removal and one guy who wanted an entire yard built next spring. In total, I’ve received about 15 leads from this website. If I were actually wanting to get a landscaping business off the ground, this would be an amazing start!

So, what is the path these people are taking to find me?

1. They search on Google for a landscaping company.
2. They see me on Google Maps
3. I have more reviews than a lot of my competitors so they click on my website link.
4. They see my website is professional and that I do the services they want.
5. They call or fill out the contact form.

I’m starting to get so many leads that I’m now looking for a local landscaping company that wants to take them. If you know anyone, let me know!

FMS Step 3/3 – Search Engine Optimization: Playing Google’s Game

SEO is a huge topic on its own but I like to boil it down to simple terms. You can think about it like this. Google’s main job as a search engine is to show the best search results. If you follow a logical train of thought you can arrive at the conclusion that if you want Google to show your website, all you need to do is make sure your website is the best search result. Simple, right?

Over the years this concept has proven itself to be true over and over again. For this reason, I look at SEO as a competitive sport. All of the companies in your area that have websites listed on Google are competing to be seen. If you happen to be the only one, you will automatically float to the top. If you’re in a rural part of the country, then you might just be one of these lucky people. Otherwise, you need to figure out how to win against your competitors.

The internet is crowded and is getting more so every single day. We have to take every edge we can get. A huge edge is that most companies still don’t know how to play this game well. Some of them hire “SEO” companies that are stuck in the past. These companies will try to use tricks and techniques meant to fool the search engines and get their client to the top spot. Google is fully aware of all of these tricks and is constantly eliminating their usefulness with what they call algorithm updates. This is why I always say to just be the best search result. That will beat all the tricks and techniques 9 times out of 10.

So I’ve convinced you to just be valuable, but how do you do it? It’s simple. The most important thing you can do is give people what they’re looking for. You know your customers better than anyone so what exactly are they looking for on your website? Figure that out and give it to them. If you can do that well, Google will notice.

Google Is Always Watching

The thing about Google is they’re everywhere. They’re watching everything that happens on their search engine, on websites, and even on your phone. Do you use Google Chrome? They’re watching that too. Google Maps? Yep, they’re watching that too. They know where you go, what you do, and what you search for. Creepy, I know, but you can take advantage of this as a business owner.

When a local homeowner searches for a remodeling contractor, Google watches them carefully. They see what websites they click on, what Google Maps listings they browse, and who they call. Let’s look at a specific example.

1. Mary and Joe want to remodel their kitchen. It’s up to Mary to find a contractor. She goes on line and types in “kitchen remodel near me”.
2. She browses Google Maps and reads some reviews. After checking a few listings, she has chosen 3 to reach out to. She goes to each website and spends 5-10 minutes reading about the companies. When she’s ready, she fills out the contact form on each one.
3. 4 months later Mary goes back to one of those listings and leaves a long 5-star review about how great the company was to work with.

Google saw Mary search “kitchen remodel near me” because she was logged into Google when she did it. They watched her browse the websites because Google Analytics was installed on all 3 of them. Finally, they saw her come back and leave a review on one of the Google Maps listings. This is a very clear signal to Google that they showed her the search result she was looking for. If Google sees a pattern of this, they will show the company more. Remember:

Google’s main goal is to show the best search results. This ensures that people will continue using it instead of other search engines.”

For Further SEO Studies

SEO is a huge topic and the technical parts are worth knowing. I stress the rest because if you have the technical parts without actually having a valuable website that gives your customers what they’re looking for, you might show up on Google but it won’t do you any good. You want people to buy from you, not just find you and think you look silly.

I have some videos on my Youtube channel about SEO. You can also read about it all over the internet. Just remember, most of the internet is full of monkey-see-monkey-do information repeaters. It’s ok to study but don’t forget to think for yourself!

Google Local Service Ads – Google Guaranteed

Google Local Service Ads are one of my favorite new ways to get leads for contractors. It’s easy to confuse this with Google Ads, formerly Google Adwords, but it’s totally different. Let me explain how it works so that you’ll see how different it really is. The process for you to get on Google Local Service Ads is something like this:

1. Go to the Google Local Service Ads website.
2. Fill out your company information.
3. Provide contractor license number.
4. Fill out a separate form for a background check.
5. Get approved – now you’re “Google Guaranteed”
6. Choose a monthly budget which usually starts out around $1500 for ad-spend.

What makes this different than Google Ads is that you pay for phone calls instead of clicks. Someone types something into Google such as “plumber near me” and they see your ad up top. The ad pulls information from your Google Maps Listing.

When someone clicks on the ad, they see your reviews, pictures, etc. But, the only option they have to contact you is by calling. They are not offered a link to your website.

When someone calls you, the phone call is tracked through the Google Local Service Ads system and looks like this.

Each call is recorded by Google for quality control. If a spammer calls you, you do not have to pay for it. For the most part, we are only paying for appointments which is really nice.

In a way this is very similar to lead reselling companies like Angi and Houzz. The differences are many:

• The lead is sold to me and nobody else.
• Your ad draws information from your Google Maps Listing so all the reviews you get there help your ads.
• There is no middle man – Google is sending you calls directly.
• You don’t pay for fake leads.
• You don’t have to call a lot of leads to get one appointment.
• You can start and stop it whenever you want without committing to long term contracts.

With all those benefits in mind, there is one big negative. It’s only available in more populated parts of the country. It’s also only available for certain services. I think as time goes on Google will expand into more areas and more services but it’s a process.

Ultimately, if you already have a website and Google Maps Listing working for you, Google Local Service Ads is a great way to get additional calls coming in. From my experience so far it’s expensive but profitable. Don’t forget to keep close eyes on the numbers! You should track every single call in a spreadsheet and be able to see at a glance how much you made from the leads you bought from Google Local Service Ads.

Facebook Ads: The Dog Whistle of Marketing

I used to bash Facebook Ads a lot because I didn’t understand how to make them work for me. I tried dozens of times only to think it was a total waste of time and money. In 2022 I discovered how powerful they could be in the right hands and I’ve been using them as much as I can ever since. In 2022 alone my ads brought in over $1million in sales.

Facebook Ads work really well for some people but I’m not sure they can work for everyone. I’m still exploring this. The real secret to making them work centers around the offer you’re making. I made a Youtube video recently about this concept. It’s kind of difficult to explain but once you get it, you get it. It took me months of thinking about offers for it to really sink in.

If you can offer something to someone that they cannot just go on Google and easily find, you’re on the right track. On top of that, if you can make that offer so good they feel stupid saying no, then you have a really good offer. Do these two things and you can mine gold straight out of the internet.

One thing that makes Facebook Ads so powerful is the feud they are having with Apple. Ad agencies across the planet are losing their minds about this thinking it’s the end of the world but I think it helped. It seems to me that the regular old Facebook algorithm works a lot better now than it used to. I don’t have to do nearly as much targeting as before and the ads work great. The secret is having a good offer!

The Facebook Algorithm Oversimplified

The Facebook Ads algorithm is the key to everything. Once you come up with a few really good offers to test out, you set them loose on Facebook. At first, the algorithm shows your ads to all sorts of people who are randomly chosen. Every time someone expresses interest by clicking on your ads, filling out your form, or some other action, Facebook takes note. Over time, Facebook figures out what kind of people to show the offer to and it ignores everyone else.

This is how you can harness the power of data for yourself. There’s a reason I make identical ads and change nothing but the 1 sentence offer at the top. I want to test various offers and I can only do that by keeping all the other variables the same. Over time the algorithm becomes very efficient at showing the ads to the right people but it still isn’t one of those things you can just set and forget.

At my company, my team rotates new versions of ads every single week. We are always testing various ads and using the data we gather to learn and get better. Over time we get better at crafting our offers just like the algorithm gets better at knowing who to show our ads to. Together, we make a masterpiece of profitability.

With all the upsides, there are still downsides. The biggest one is that the platform is very technical to use. There are also 3 ways to do just about everything. You can run ads directly from your Facebook page but that is not what I’m talking about in this article. I’m also not talking about boosting posts. I’m talking about using Facebook Ad Manager to craft ads from scratch. We also have to create our own custom automations to spit the leads out to emails, spreadsheets, CRMs, etc.

Once you get past all that and get your ads dialed in, it’s so nice to use. My clients absolutely love it!

Here’s an example of an ad that gets really good results. You can see how simple it is. When you have a great business and you make your customers happy on a regular basis, simple advertising will work wonders for you!

Google Ads

Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is the first online marketing technique I used to generate leads for a construction business back in 2017. It was my favorite method for a long time but over the last few years, my love for this platform has dwindled. Let me explain.

The first thing to know about google Ads is that it works on a bidding system. When you want to advertise on Google using Google Ads, you have to bid on keywords and you get charged every time someone clicks on your ad. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you are bidding on the keyword “kitchen remodel”. Google will show your ad to anyone who types in anything related to kitchen remodeling. If someone sees your ad and clicks on it, you pay Google for that click. That’s why they call this method of marketing Pay Per Click, or PPC for short.

The Cost Per Click, or CPC, can range anywhere from a few cents to hundreds of dollars. I’ve paid up to $180 per click myself when I was running ads for a painting contractor in Portland, Oregon. Wow! That’s a lot of money to pay for someone clicking on an ad, right? Yes, it is! But, why is the cost per click so high?

Since Google Ads works on a bidding system, the bids will always rise as different contractors compete for the top spot. They will continue to rise until they get too expensive to make a profit on. When that happens, the prices will stop rising and level out a little bit, always hovering around that equilibrium point.

Most contractors think they want to spend as little per click as possible but they are wrong. Whoever can afford to pay the most per click and still make a profit will be able to price everyone else out of the market and horde all the leads for themselves. Unfortunately for you, there are some major corporations who are dominating the home services space and the local contractors are the ones getting priced out of the market.

The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish – Lead Reselling Platforms

You’ve already heard me talk about these companies a few times in this article and here they come up again. The lead resellers are the largest buyers of clicks in the entire home services industry. They use Google Ads to advertise in every city, town, and suburb around the country. They can afford to pay more than anyone else, but why?

To these lead reselling companies, the leads are the product. They can buy one lead then turn around and sell it multiple times. This allows them to pay more for that lead than a contractor would, theoretically. These companies act as online bullies and are able to push around small local businesses that are trying to use Google Ads. The ironic thing is that a lot of the companies that advertise on Google Ads are also buying leads from Angi and other lead reselling platforms. The very platforms that are making their ads cost more! They are paying these guys to make it harder for them to advertise! It’s crazy. This is why I always push local companies to Google Maps. It’s one of the few places where these big national brands cannot compete.

And Spam Will Inherit the Internet

Another problem I have with Google Ads these days is the huge level of spam. There are so many spammers, bots, solicitors, and other non-customers cruising around Google and any of them are able to click on your ads and cost you money. Sometimes you can get around some of these with tactics like negative keywords but it makes it much more costly and difficult to do properly.

When you compare this with Facebook Ads, I prefer Facebook for this reason. When you pay for Facebook Ads, your ads are being delivered to specific people based on who the algorithm is targeting. It’s not possible for just anyone to go online and click your ad.

Google Ads Is Still Useful Sometimes

When my team and I use Google Ads today, it’s usually for specific things. We might target a particular neighborhood with a specific offer that is tailored to them. Or, we’ll bid on our brand name so that when someone types in the actual name of the company we’re advertising for, we can make sure we’re at the very top of the page. It’s common for companies in competitive niches to bid on each others’ brand names to try and swoop up customers so we try to limit that as much as possible.

If you asked me when I would use Google Ads I would tell you that I would most likely try all the other methods I’ve mentioned first. If everything else is tapped out, Google Ads is always good for some more leads. There are some rare cases where you can find an edge and make a lot of money with Google Ads but it takes skill, experience, and usually a little luck.

If you don’t agree with me, please leave a comment below!

Lead Resellers: A Scourge on the Construction Industry

You can tell by the title of this chapter that I’m not a huge fan of these companies. That hasn’t always been the case. Back in the early 2000s, my family’s remodeling company bought leads from HomeAdvisor. It was amazing back then. We could buy leads for ~$15 a piece and most of them were pretty good. We got a lot of great customers this way.

Over the years, the quality of the leads went down as the price went up. Around 2014 it was so bad we finally decided to stop the service. At that point, it had been years since we thought it was worth it but it’s hard to stop something that you’ve been doing for so long. That’s when we got our first taste of their customer service.

We called them up and said we wanted to cancel at the next renewal. They pleaded with us not too but we had already made up our minds. A couple of months later the yearly renewal happened anyways. When we called to ask them to cancel it and refund the money, they refused and said we needed to charge a cancellation fee. Luckily we were able to call our bank and just cancel the charge. The HomeAdvisor people called us another half-dozen time to try and get us to sign up again. It was a joke.

Who Am I Talking About?

I could go on all day about these and I have in other articles. I wrote a long one comparing the various options for buying leads. It compares a lot of the big names such as:

• Angi Leads (Formerly HomeAdvisor)
• Angi Ads (Formerly Angie Leads)
• Houzz
• Yelp
• Thumbtack
• Nextdoor

There are more but these are the major ones. I wrote a gigantic article comparing many of these companies including some pros and cons for each so if you’re trying to figure out if any are worth trying, check it out here. You might want to read the rest before you consider buying leads though. Here are my biggest gripes.

They Lock You Into Long Term Contracts

The word for the sales tactics companies like Angi use is predatory. They call all new contractors and promise them the world. They’ll say anything to get people to hand over their debit card numbers and agree to a long-term contract. I know because I talk to these people all the time. They call me with horror stories of being taken for thousands of dollars. Some of them even go out of business because of this.

I just talked to a guy the other day that signed up for Angi Ads at $1000 per month. He thought he was just trying it for a month and that it was a month-to-month contract. Unfortunately for him, it was a 12-month contract with a 25% cancellation fee. He tried it for a month and was unhappy with the leads he was buying. When he called to cancel they said, “Sure! That will be $4000 to cancel.” The poor guy is kicking himself right now.

Do yourself a favor and don’t sign or agree to any long-term contracts. Also, never sign up for anything with your debit card. Use a credit card and just pay it off every month. If you ever need to dispute a charge, your bank will fight hard to get their money back but if you used your own money out of your own account, they will not fight nearly as hard to get it back. It’s just the way it is. I never use a debit card unless I’m going to an ATM, which is rare.

The Lead Reselling Business Model is About Quantity Over Quality

If you talk to 100 contractors who buy leads, almost all of them will tell you that a huge portion of the leads they buy are not good. Common reasons I hear are:

• They don’t answer the phone.
• They aren’t interested in hiring anyone right now.
• They were looking for a service that I do not offer.

The reason for this is easy to figure out by practicing a marketing technique I call “Pretending to be your customer.” You can do it right now.

Go to Google and pretend you’re one of your customers searching for your service. If you do remodeling then type in “kitchen remodeler near me”. You’ll surely see Angi somewhere near the top of the page, probably in the ads section. Click on their website which offers to let you browse contractors in your area.

In order to browse contractors you need to put in your information starting with your zip code. They’ll get your location, contact information, and information about what kind of project you’re thinking about. By the time you get through the form, your contact information is being distributed to various contractors. At no point does it tell you this is what’s happening. For this reason, a lot of people fill out this form without realizing their info is being sold.

That’s one reason I believe a lot of leads are “no good”. They aren’t actual leads, but contact information that someone put in unknowingly.

They Buy These Leads on the Open Market and Resell Them to You

This is one I didn’t find out about until recently when I was speaking to the owner of a small lead reselling company. He was telling me how there is an online marketplace in the shadows where a small group of companies collect leads from around the internet and sell them through an automated bidding system. Companies like Angi bid on these and the lead goes to the highest bidder. Then, they turn around and sell it to you!

As a capitalist, I have no problem with companies reselling things but it’s another clear reason why a lot of these leads are “no good”. On the same Google search you did earlier, you’re likely to see a company running ads called Powell and Sons. They look like a local company because they use the catchphrase “Voted Best In X City” but don’t be fooled! They run similar ads across the country. I filled out the form on their website and immediately got a call from an operator. The operator confirmed I was in X location and a few minutes later I started getting calls from contractors. I asked them where they were and guess what they told me. Angi Leads! Mystery solved.

Why do I view this as a problem?

I have spent the last 7 years practicing internet marketing and one of the golden rules I’ve learned is that you have to be extremely clear about what is happening online. We do everything we can to guide people in the right direction with our websites and advertisements and aim to be 100% transparent about what will happen if someone fills out a form. The last thing I want is to be misleading people and doing things they did not expect. It’s bad for business.

To Summarize My Thoughts on Lead Resellers

Back when Angi Leads was HomeAdvisor, I think these companies actually provided a valuable service. In the early 2000s not many contractors had a website or the means to create one and Google was still figuring out how to let people search for local contractors. Afterall, it wasn’t until 2005 that Google Maps came out. In those days, it connected homeowners and contractors that would have otherwise not been able to connect.

Flash forward almost 20 years and the internet has changed. Most contractors have a website and the barrier to entry to get one has never been lower. It’s not necessary for these lead reselling companies to exist, at least in their current form. I believe they do more harm than good because they:

• Crowd out local companies on search engines.
• Increase the difficulty and cost for small companies to market themselves.
• Rely on shady tactics to sell their services and get contractors to sign bad contracts.
• Sell a lot leads that have no chance of turning into customers.

Once in a while someone accuses me of saying bad things about these companies for my own personal gain. That’s not it at all. I’ve been getting calls every week since 2018 from contractors who are in a desperate situation because they signed a contract with a lead reseller that was supposed to help them grow their business and it’s doing the opposite. I can’t help them but I might be able to help someone who has yet to go down that path.

If You’re Going to Buy Leads, Do These Things

If you’re going to buy leads, you have to double down on your sales and tracking efforts. It’s critical that you squeeze all the juice out of every lead you buy because most of them will yield none. Here are some simple tips.

• Call leads the second they come in, every time.
• Call them as many times as it takes to get someone on the phone.
• Don’t be upset when they are upset. Be understanding and empathize with them. Nobody likes getting bombarded with phone calls and that’s what’s happening to them.
• Track every single lead in detail. That means:
  • How many calls did it take to reach them?
  • Were you ever able to reach them?
  • Did you have an appointment?
  • Did you provide an estimate?
  • Did you close the deal?
  • How much was the deal worth – revenue and profit?
  • Why or why not did it work out?
• Seek credit for all of the bad leads. You are usually able to get refunds for 2-3 per month.

Some of these things you should do for all of your leads no matter where they come from but it’s extra important when you’re buying leads. You need to know exactly how much you spent and made from this marketing channel so you can see clearly how well it is working.

There are some people that make it work. I call them lucky because it really depends on where you are in the country and how many competitors you have. If you’re the only one in your town buying leads, it might be pretty nice for you. This isn’t the case for most people.

Best Practices for All Forms of Contractor Lead Generation

A lot of tradesmen start their carriers as an employee; I know I did. A common thought among these folks is “I do all the work and my boss makes all the money. I can do it better than him so I’ll just work for myself.” Sound familiar?

Then, they go out and start a business and realize over time that there was a ton of stuff their boss was responsible for that they weren’t even aware of. Estimating, bookkeeping, payroll, taxes, marketing, the list goes on and on. Well, it’s the same in marketing.

This article so far has been about some of the channels you can go through to get leads but let’s talk about the things you might not know about. These are the things that will eventually learn through trial and error but I hope to help you skip a few years, a lot of effort, and even more money-spending. Let’s go!

In Summary: Thanks for Reading

Well, that’s a pretty solid breakdown of the world of contractor lead generation as I see it. There is certainly more to it but that’s a fantastic summary. Most of this stuff is common sense. People need to know who you are if they are ever going to hire you. Once they know who you are, you need to look better than your competitors. Once you get the client, you need to make them happy. Once they’re happy, you need to get a review. If you do all of that consistently, your business will grow and prosper.

If you’ve read this far, you are obviously serious about this. I like to work with serious peope. My company, Adapt Digital Solutions LLC, is dedicated to helping contractors and construction companies grow and thrive. We offer various services and have all-inclusive packages that take care of everything for you so that you can focus on the most important thing: keeping your customers happy.

If you’re interested in talking to us about your company, we can offer you a free consultation call to go over your options. We won’t try to push you into anything and we only take money from companies that can truly benefit from our services. All you need to do is click the button below and head over to our contact form. Fill it out and choose a time on our calendar that works for you and we’ll call to see if we can help you out.

If you are not yet ready to talk, you are welcome to join our email list and get occasional emails from me when I write new articles or have something special to offer.

I appreciate you reading this article and hope it was a good use of your time. If you have feedback or questions, there is a comment section below. Thanks for reading.

— Chuck Kile

A Preview of the Next Article I’ll Write: Best Practices for All Forms of Contractor Lead Generation and Marketing

If you really want to be in control of your business, you need to know the numbers. We all know we have to track our finances. The government makes us do this because they want to make sure they get all their taxes. But, what about other areas of the business?

In the next article, I will go over what I’ve learned about tracking and numbers. In business, numbers can guide the way for a lot of the decisions we make and the truth is, most of us aren’t even tracking these numbers. That’s why it all starts with setting up some basic processes for tracking this stuff as you go. If you can make it a habit now to record what’s happening, in a year or five you’ll be able to look back and see clearly how your business operates and how you can change it.