There’s one question you must be asking yourself all the time: “How can I get more remodeling leads?” Unfortunately, the answer is indeed more complicated than it seems since there are many factors to consider, and also, remember that bringing leads doesn’t mean they are all good. You have to focus on guaranteeing that the ones you’re generating are worth your time and money and if they can turn into clients.
Good leads can be hard to find, especially when it comes to a business or field like remodeling, where projects are as many as the competitors you have. However, since your business’s lifeblood is your leads, there’s no way you can sleep with generating them. After all, one good lead can bring you thousands of dollars.
Therefore, to make sure you don’t continue in your desperation of finally accessing the remodeling leads you need and want, here you’ll find a few foolproof strategies you’ll be grateful of knowing from today onwards.
You Are an Educator, Then a Remodeler
If you ask someone from two decades ago how a remodeling business was able to obtain its clients, the criteria won’t be difficult:
- The client was referred by a friend, family member, or another client.
- The clients found information in yellow pages.
- Clients got a flyer with information and decided to give it a chance.
Things changed dramatically when the internet was invented. Now, most of the purchasing and education process can be done online. This means that you cannot dedicate enough time to a client in specific. Instead, all of them will research on their own. You must provide information and educate them with a generic alternative that won’t make you lose the opportunity to bring them into your company.
Many remodelers find it frustrating to use social media and website leads because they don’t know where the person is in the sales process. This is usually the main problem in lead generation.
Consumers prefer to be educated in buying decisions, so they won’t immediately reach out to make a purchase, and you won’t know when they are ready to make a decision regardless if it is buying, just contacting you, or maybe none of them.
Now, what does educating have to do with this? It is simple.
Remodelers that decide to provide information that educates their visitors are more likely to catch people’s eyes. This comes from decades ago, and right now, with the online alternative, it is even more crucial to remember it.
This can be translated as educative and valuable content at once. You ought to remember this to keep in mind that before a remodeler trying to sell your services, you should bet to educate your visitors and future leads and clients.
Nurture the Tire Kicker Leads
If you aren’t familiar with those leads, here is a simple yet accurate explanation: they are people who don’t seem ready to buy but are constantly and intensely interested in researching a potential remodeler to sign a deal with it.
The nurture part enters in this option because many make the mistake of asking those people, “What’s your budget?” or questions that push them to take any action in terms of hiring the service.
To avoid this and nurture, you should bet for questions like “What have you seen on Pinterest that inspired you?” The way this person responds tells you one of two things:
If they are unable to provide a specific answer for any question you have, that means they are not trying to make a decision right away. Instead, you should connect with them via social media or with a follow-up email, but don’t invest too much time and effort in trying to convert them because you will have the opposite result.
Whenever they offer a specific answer and tell you about what they want, this is a sign that they are more interested in a project and not just looking. We recommend sending a personalized follow-up email to this person and investing more effort in converting them. Otherwise, you will lose your chance to have this lead and future client.
You can give your sales pipeline the chance to flourish by creating a place where all leads can be found.
Each lead who interacts with your remodeling company should be connected to your company. The most popular way to stay connected is through Houzz, followed closely by Pinterest and custom educational emails.
Don’t Use Ambiguous or Indiscreet Phrases
Social media has the advantage of lowering the chances for remodelers to use industry terminology. Your work will speak for itself if your photography is outstanding or if your content is. However, we will go deeper into social media and content later.
For now, we want to focus on the lingo or terminology you should try to avoid during your posts, blogs, or any content you share with visitors. The most common examples include “Quality remodelers,” “There’s no better company in the world,” “We build green and anything you need, not like other companies…” and so on.
Let your content speak rather than claiming that you are a skilled remodeler. Let your references sing your praises for you.
Today’s self-educated consumer is reluctant to believe remodelers who boast about their work but don’t have the evidence to support it. Your marketing should avoid lingo and let consumers verify for themselves.
Focus on These Pages to Bring More Leads
Although the process of marketing remodeling services can be complex, we believe that adding a few pages to your website could improve the quality of leads you receive:
- Gallery Page.
This is where your high-quality craftsmanship can shine through (and you can remove unnecessary references from your website).
A central place where you can showcase all your best work is a valuable resource for the self-educated customer.
- A Process Page.
Once a customer is knowledgeable and confident enough that you can produce the quality work that they are looking for, the next natural question should be: “How do they complete it?”
This page should easily be accessible via your website’s navigation. It should also include a simple “Contact Us” form so the lead you have generated (since it is interested in your services) can contact you easily and without struggling, which can make it forget about you.
- A Conversion Page.
Marketing to remodelers is all about staying in touch.
A conversion page is, in our opinion, one of the most important because it adds a person’s contact data to your system, and it allows you to analyze their buying stage based on the content.
Link building
If you didn’t know, links are part of the several factors Google uses to rank a website in the search results.
Your remodeling company’s ranking in search results can be affected by the quality and quantity of backlinks it has included or not from reliable sources.
To change this, reach out to industry leaders and local businesses to find out if they would be interested in linking to your website content.
Earning links from other websites can help you appear higher in search results and attract more qualified traffic to your website, which means more remodeling leads.
Find More Remodeling Leads by Being Known.
Action is crucial, but having a good plan and going over statistics and metrics is one of the best things you can do, which is why we will go over a short process that will help with the specific items that will help you get more leads later in this post.
To get a lead, the first step is to “be found.” This refers to the awareness phase of the modern customer’s journey.
You could, for example, be found in search engine results pages through organic search or paid-per-click advertising. Potential customers (by doing this) will know you exist and are there to offer the services they’re looking for. However, it doesn’t mean they’re considering them seriously.
This is why the next step is to “be noticed,” which focuses on the next phase in the buyer’s journey and the consideration of your business or services.
To achieve your goal in this step, you have to provide something that makes them curious enough about your offer to get them to contact you and become a lead.
To get more leads for remodeling, it is essential to be found and noticed in this specific order.
Most remodeling contractors focus on the “be found” aspect. Still, they don’t take the time to work around getting noticed, or maybe the opposite happens, they are having a hard time being found, and when they are, potential customers notice them.
Where does this leave you? In that, you can’t neglect either of them.
This is why building a marketing strategy around these two steps will be crucial, and remember to invest as much time and money in both of them regardless of what you personally find more useful or not.
Optimizing Your Website & Improving User Experience
If you’re thinking about the best way of advertising remodeling services, SEO (search engine optimization) is the first thing that should come to mind. But why is that?
People in the United States and all over the world go to Google or other search engines and type “remodeling services,” “bathroom remodel,” “home remodeling,” and any other words or specific services they need.
The old-school option of looking at the newspaper isn’t something you will see nowadays, and instead, everything is about finding what you need online.
Here’s when you start thinking about how they will find your remodeling company, and the answer takes us back to our initial mention: SEO.
Keywords, title tags, and heading tags matter a lot in this aspect, and they are what you are more familiar with when anyone mentions SEO.
However, there’s much more involved than those three attributes since over 150 options are available to rank websites and make sure people find your company and remodeling services.
Below, you’ll find a list with some of the most crucial ones you should start looking up from now on unless you want your website to be ranking in the pages and never be found:
- Secured sites (HTTPS vs. HTTP).
- Mobile-friendliness.
- Page speed.
- Webpage content quality.
- Webpage content length.
- Social and local signals.
- Quality backlinks.
- Optimized images.
- Domain age.
- User experience.
- Search intent.
Many business owners and managers will argue that SEO and user experience are not compatible. Still, we find this statement absurd, considering that Google now values user experience more than ever when it comes to ranking.
If your rankings are strong, but your user experience is poor, your rankings won’t be a thing for too long. We even give them a day or two before they drastically fall.
There are many ways to optimize your website for generating remodeling leads and implement the SEO and user experience we’re mentioning:
- Focus on being a resource.
People are more likely to have an idea of what they want and to be able to express their preferences when hiring services.
A potential lead has been searching Pinterest, Houzz, and the internet for ideas about the type of remodeling they are looking for. Following this line, what you want is to be part of the project they are planning.
For it, you can start by writing a blog on the pros and cons associated with marble counters or anything that comes to mind and is valuable for the lead.
During this blog, you can show them your work by showing examples and providing knowledge about what you know and how you can help.
- High-quality professional photos are needed.
The adage “Show, don’t tell” will always be accurate, especially in the remodeling industry. High-quality photographs of your work will communicate your message better than words since people will trust you based on what you’ve accomplished during other projects.
- Details matter.
Take a minute and think: how many companies use words like “high-quality work,” “experienced,” “attention to detail,” or “affordable?” We’re confident the answer you came up with is “all of them,” and it’s only natural.
The problem is that these phrases are used so often that they no longer have any value as competitive differentiation.
It is crucial to mention unique, valuable things that will be of value to the reader. You can give examples of testimonials or tell stories about contractors who showed exceptional attention to detail and commitment to clients.
If you’re going to include value, you better do it as original as possible.
- Optimize for conversions.
Although it may seem obvious, many companies and marketing agencies overlook the importance of optimizing for conversions.
Your conversion rate can be affected by the layout, frequency, and placement of your calls to action.
Also, remember how important it is to include a contact form on your website. While everything else could be optimized to perfection on your website if conversion rate optimization is neglected, you are simply letting potential leads slip by.
Remember to Start PPC (Pay-per-click) Campaigns
Pay-per-click ads can be a great way to drive traffic to your website and generate leads.
However, handling those campaigns requires professionals, which is why it is recommended that you work with an agent who has PPC experience. If you are doing PPC in-house, guarantee it is a responsible and effective way to spend your money.
How? Start by making sure that the company or expert in charge of the PPC campaigns will allow you to receive ownership of your Google Ads account in the event that you cancel services.
Generate Remodeling Leads with Online Reviews
Being able to differentiate yourself from the rest is vital for getting noticed and securing the best remodeling leads.
Overall, review sites are becoming a more important competitive differentiation since customers’ opinions are more important than what the business has to say about itself, and it makes sense.
The statistics have shown that, indeed, customers put a lot of relevance and trust on online reviews, so you want to make sure to dominate them while remaining honest in the process.
- Online reviews are trusted by over 79% of customers when compared to personal recommendations.
- Over 85% of consumers don’t trust reviews older than three months.
- 40% of consumers only care about reviews that aren’t older than 15 days.
Based on this, you should have many positive reviews and make sure your clients continuously add them or handle the process manually with some of their assistance.
Since some users are lazy to read reviews, the option of review schema markup is one way to leverage them by allowing your average star rating to display under your URL on the search engine results page.
If you are struggling to get enough positive reviews or even some average ones from your clients, we’d suggest using a review collection platform like “Review Us.”
Doing this will increase the number of reviews and guarantee they’re mostly positive as well.
Don’t Forget About Email Marketing
Email marketing is simple and can help you get more remodeling leads that will grow your business.
Despite what many believe, the strategy or method isn’t only for large businesses. If you’re a small remodeler or remodeling company, you just have to be smart when working with this marketing alternative.
However, it isn’t a lie when people say it can be tricky to make it work, which is why the recommendation here will be followed with some tips:
- Make your emails easy to read (don’t pile them with information).
- Make them mobile-friendly.
- Focus on subject lines.
- Say “no” to purchasing email lists.
One idea to help you structure your email marketing strategy is to highlight completed projects.
This can include anecdotes and details from clients, some photos that remain mobile-friendly, and provide as many details of the projects as you can.
Your Blog Needs a Goal
This is one of the most important parts of SEO optimization. Unfortunately, it’s often overlooked and done poorly.
For a long time, blogging has been a popular digital marketing strategy. Still, it’s not always explained with the clarity and precision it deserves and requires, especially since it can be complicated to go over the topic.
However, to make it simple to know, think about this: your website’s purpose is to generate qualified traffic and leads, and your blog should help you achieve this goal.
It can seem logical, but it is not uncommon for companies to blog without any clear goal. Sometimes, they are so focused on getting traffic from blogs that they completely forget that not all traffic is good or “qualified.”
Believe it or not, some traffic can be a waste of time, and people with blogs, especially those trying to generate remodeling leads, fail in getting the traffic they need.
If it isn’t clear yet, it is as easy as saying that you won’t get any leads if you don’t have qualified traffic. This can be hard to believe, but you can blog for years and generate significant traffic but not get any leads.
If you want to solve this problem or get started with blogging, this is what you need to do:
- Choose strategic keywords or key phrases to use in your blog content.
- Keep track of stats and adjust your approach accordingly.
Houzz, Pinterest & Instagram: The Social Media You Need
Posting your bathroom, kitchen, or home remodeling work on social media platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, and Houzz is one of the most effective advertising strategies.
People look for inspiration, and they don’t want to visit a website to find some photos or examples that can work like them.
Instead, they want to access the content right away and guarantee it is simple to save them.
In the case of Houzz, its popularity, along with the photo-centric experience, makes it almost mandatory for remodelers to be on the platform if they want to generate more leads.
For Pinterest, you are way behind if you don’t know about this platform for remodelers.
Pinterest is a social media site that is built for visuals. This is why it is excellent to help you find remodeling leads: people are always looking for inspiration. They don’t want to read text; they just want the visuals.
Finally, Instagram is definitely a social media you should know and the best way to aim for residential and commercial remodeling leads and clients.
That being said, if you are still here and trying to digest the information, that’s alright. However, start working on your marketing strategy and include every single one of these methods as soon as you do it.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Remodeling Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Remodeling Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Remodeling Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.