Getting home improvement leads is critical to your business, but what can you do to get more?
These days, the best options include:
- Being more specific
- Using PPC ads
- Automating marketing tasks
- Optimizing your website
- Getting more reviews
Being More Specific
Being specific is always better when you’re making ads and marketing yourself to customers. It’s tempting to advertise yourself as someone who can do anything, but most people want to hire an expert in a particular role.
For example, given the choice between a general contractor and a plumber for pipe problems, most people will start with the specialist.
The primary thing to remember about this is that you don’t have to specialize your entire business to get more leads. The only thing you need to do is be more specific in your advertisements. You can put different ads in different places, and most customers won’t notice the difference.
Use PPC Ads
PPC ads are a great way to generate home improvement leads. Two factors make them an excellent choice: affordability and effectiveness.
PPC ads are affordable because you only have to pay when someone clicks on them. This means that if a hundred people see the ad and only two people click on it, you’re only paying for those clicks. This is far more sensible than ads that promise you a certain number of views but no guarantee on the clicks.
Getting these ads is mostly a matter of money. While you can set up campaigns and run them yourself, it’s usually better to hire a proven expert for a nominal fee and let them optimize your campaigns. This tends to be more profitable over time than doing it without any experience or training.
Automating Marketing Tasks
Automation is key to advertising these days. For example, services like MailChimp offer email automation that you can customize to your business needs. You can do a lot with this, from encouraging people to call you back for routine maintenance to personalizing content so people feel like they’re more important to you.
More importantly, automating your marketing drastically reduces the amount of time you need to spend generating home improvement leads and increases the amount of time you can spend working. That’s a positive feedback loop that can ultimately help you expand your business, or at least maximize the number of jobs you can get.
You can automate things besides email, too. PPC ads are already mostly automatic once you create them, but so are back-end things like filtering customer contacts to prioritize the ones that might be the most rewarding for you.
To a lesser extent, automating marketing tasks makes it easier to scale your advertising. This mainly matters if you want to find many new customers at a time, but automating makes it possible to advertise to far more people than you ever could alone.
Optimizing Your Website
Customers often visit websites to evaluate you as a person and as a contractor. There are two main parts to optimizing things.
The first is the site itself. A well-designed site for your business doesn’t need to be complicated, but it should reassure potential customers that you’re a legitimate, experienced contractor who can help them with their home improvement projects.
A few examples of your work, including both before and after pictures, are especially helpful here. If you want to get fancy, you can even include a time-lapse video showing the whole process.
The second part of optimizing your site is implementing SEO. This makes it easier to get noticed on search engines and that’s a major source of home improvement leads outside of referral services. Good SEO can also help filter potential customers so you only attract customers who offer the types of jobs you’re best at.
Getting More Reviews
Finally, reviews are crucial to getting home improvement leads. These are the deciding factor for many people once they’ve found you. Don’t be afraid to contact customers after you’re done and ask them to leave a review on your site or through another service.
More reviews are generally better but don’t push it if the customers seem neutral about the job.
Try to aim for at least a few dozen reviews, and more if you can get them. The number of reviews is even more important than the reviews themselves. People won’t trust two five-star ratings very much, but if you have a 4.8 score after two hundred reviews, that will reassure them despite the slightly lower score.
