Contractors

Tradesmen & Service Businesses: 12 Lead Generation Ideas

While word of mouth is one of the most essential tools you can have as a tradesman, there will always be a period where business seems quiet.  It is not enough to…

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While word of mouth is one of the most essential tools you can have as a tradesman, there will always be a period where business seems quiet. 

It is not enough to rely on word of mouth alone because relying solely on word of mouth will not get you a consistent amount of work.

While many companies make the mistake of not doing enough to get more leads, many busy companies make the mistake of taking the foot off the accelerator and allow the competition to catch up with them. 

So get ahead and stay ahead with these lead generation ideas for tradesmen & service businesses. 

Hand out Business Cards to Happy Customers

One way to make your word of mouth work as useful as possible is by handing out business cards. 

This ensures that your happy customers will pass your card out to friends and neighbors that require your services. 

Be Sure to Have an Online Presence

If you don’t have a website, you are missing out on a lot of potential business. 

A website is like your storefront and is one of the best tools you can use to get more business. However, when you are getting a website, it is important to know that they are not all created equally. 

At Hook Agency, we have created a process to create a website that will fit with your company and its goals to build your brand and help your ideal customers. 

Learn more about our website design here and get more leads. 

Register with Online Directories / Referral Sites

You may be thinking to yourself, is it worth it to even bother with these types of sites? And the answer is yes, it is more important than you may think to appear on these sites. 

There are still tons of people that use these to search for services, which means if you are not in those results, then you are letting your competition take all your business. 

You can also look at putting yourself on directories that are specific for tradesmen. 

Although you may have to pay a bit of a fee to be in these, the business you receive in return may be worth it. 

These websites spend large amounts of money on advertising and get high traffic. 

While there are benefits to these, there are some negatives. 

The initial membership fees are not cheap. 

You also need to continue paying fees to buy leads, which means you can easily spend a chunk of money before you even land a job.  

There are a lot of other businesses that you are competing against for similar jobs where many may have higher ratings than you because of their long tenure on the site. 

Even when you are on the site for an extended amount of time, you still need to pay ongoing costs to generate more work, meaning ongoing expenses are high and add up. 

Another downfall of having so many people to compete with is the pricing is going to have to be extremely low, or the customer can choose the cheaper option. 

So while these may have their place in your lead generation strategy, you are not as likely to attract long term customers that are willing to pay more for quality work. 

Check out Your Online Reviews

When things go wrong, people love to complain. But people also aren’t afraid to compliment work that they are impressed by. 

Be sure to keep track of whether or not any of your previous customers have left you any online reviews. 

You should try and find a way that works to ask your clients for a review when the job is completed and they are satisfied. 

Print and Handout Flyers 

When you’re good at something, you should get the word out any way you can. 

One of the cheapest ways to do it is through printing and handing out flyers. 

The only tough part about this is figuring out how you are going to distribute these letters and which areas you are going to target that will be the most lucrative for your business. 

If you don’t have the time to deliver all these yourself, you can just hire a flyer delivery service, or a few high school or college kids looking for some extra cash. 

Social Media

There are many options at your fingertips for social media, but for a small or medium-sized business doing local work, the best social platform for generating work is Facebook. 

With recent changes made on Facebook, business pages don’t do what they used to free of charge. 

However, if you throw some change their way, you can get your business and achievements shown to thousands of potential customers around your area. 

Email

Email marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. Creating a simple email that lets customers both past and present aware of the services and promotions you are offering so you can generate more business and leads. 

One thing to be careful of with email marketing is sending it to people who have not shown interest in your services. This could lead to them becoming upset with you and not using you if they end up needing services like yours for a project because you annoyed them with constant email campaigns. 

SMS Messaging Campaign

While it may be a little more intrusive than an email campaign, an SMS campaign has the ability to generate new business fast. 

The tools for SMS are usually easy to use and have a low investment required to get a campaign off the ground if you have the numbers for past, current, and hopefully future customers.   

PPC (Pay-per-click) Advertising

With PPC ads, you can get traffic to your website overnight and skip over all your competitor’s organic listings. 

If you have the budget for this, you could get your pages advertised at the top of platforms like Google, who just about guarantee ⅓ of all the clicks. 

While this does sound great, the second you stop paying for these ads, all of that magic stops working. 

This is why things like Search Engine Optimization that get your pages greater visibility on Google may be a better option. 

Because even after you stop paying for services, the work that was put into it will continue to perform and help get traffic onto your site. .

Start Partnerships

If you are in a trade, the chances are that you will know of another person in that is too. This is a great thing because you are able to refer to work with each other. 

An example of this would be a builder that needs an electrician to wire or rewire a house, or an electrician that needs someone to fill in all the holes after a rewire. 

By working together to get leads and offering compensation to other firms that recommend your services, you will often receive a lot of additional work.  

Get a Google Business Page

This may sound simple, but just by claiming your free Google business page, you can generate more work. And if you have a website, the backlink you will get from this is worth the effort. 

All you need to do is take about an hour to fill out your company information and you will get a free listing on Google. You can add things like pictures, information, services offered, and more. 

Search Engine Optimization

When you incorporate search engine optimization, you will have tweaks made to your website that will help it to show up for more things on Google that are in your niche. 

The truly useful SEO companies will use strategy content, ear backlinks from other sites linking back to yours, and make technical changes continually. 

These techniques will help more people to come across your website and get you more leads in the process.  

Hook Agency is great at getting your company to rank higher on Google and can bring you more leads. 

If you are looking to find out more about what an SEO company does, check out this post that talks about what an SEO company does in simple terms. 

You can also contact us and we can have a discussion about your company and what the best options may be. 

 

Hopefully, this gives you some more ideas on what the possibilities are for you and your company for lead generation. 

There are a lot of options out there that we may not even think about, which is why it is important to refresh our minds with posts like this. 

Good luck with your lead generation! And if you are in need of a website or looking for SEO services to generate your leads, contact Hook Agency today. 

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