Getting More Qualified Leads Without Overwhelming Yourself
For small contractors and remodeling businesses, getting found online is crucial these days. Most homeowners start their search for a contractor by googling something like “kitchen remodeler near me.”
The problem is, if you run ads on Google or do typical lead generation, you’ll get a ton of leads that require a lot of tedious follow-up calls and emails. Compared to dealing with referrals and repeat customers, it can be like pulling teeth. Most contractors hate having to work their way through so many low-quality leads.
Here’s the thing. They aren’t low-quality. They are normal. You’re just used to dealing with referrals which aren’t even leads. They’re like customers being hand-delivered to you! You just have to not mess it up!
As a contractor and the owner of a marketing company, I’ve realized that our core marketing service works because it’s very close to getting referrals. Prospective customers do a lot of research and homework to find our clients and when they finally make contact, it’s almost like they’ve already chose to work with them. All our clients have to do is take them through the process.
It requires less calls, less follow up, and generally less hastle to get customers this way.
The key is guiding the homeowner’s journey:
- Make yourself easy to find in the organic results with good reviews, photos, and a great website.
- As they go deeper into your site, add in some qualification questions to filter out bad fits. For example, ask about their budget.
- By the time they contact you, they should feel like they already know and trust you.
- When you do get that lead, call them ASAP and focus completely on giving them an amazing experience.
Basically, organic leads should go straight from lead to customer without much nurturing. Just focus on being human, asking the right questions, and delivering epic service.
If you want more leads, I recommend doubling down on organic instead of trying to process tons of low quality leads. Work on your online presence until you hit the natural lead cap for your market.
Going further requires stepping back from operations and treating your biz more like a sales machine. And most contractors don’t want to play that game…nor should they!
If you’re going to do regular advertising, have reasonable expectations
If you’re doing advertising and getting colder leads, you just have to expect that you won’t reach a lot of them. It will require that you call them over and over again to reach them a lot of the times. There are things you can do such as call them back immediately. This will help your success rate.
The fact of the matter is, it’s just a lot harder to close deals with people that barely know you. Seems like common sense now, right? Referrals are great because they trust the person who told them about you. Organic leads the way we get them are very warm too because these folks found you on their own and have done some vetting already.
Advertising is a numbers game and there’s no way around it. To play, you must do some volume!
Good luck.
