To be a successful contractor, you need to have a steady flow of home addition leads each month. But well, that’s easier said than done. Generating leads requires time, effort, and money, even when the lead generation strategies you use are the most cost-effective and affordable out there.
Also, it’s quite hard to generate home addition leads in any city in the USA, even though so many people are searching for home addition services. The reason? The number of competitors and how some businesses are getting the best out of the entire process.
If you’re able to stand out and work around the lead generation strategies that work for your business and improve your lead scoring, you’ll be able to get more estimates and take on more jobs.
You will also have enough cash flow to allow your team to grow as large as they want.
Although it is not easy to run a business or bring in new customers, there are some things you can do. And we’re here to help you.
Follow the information and use those proven strategies to secure your home addition contracts. Let’s first learn a few things, though.
What You Should Know About Lead Gen
Contractors just starting out can find it difficult to be noticed. They might have the potential to be the cherry at the top of the cake, but they’re usually not putting themselves out there and selling their services properly. Or more like their brand.
Each business owner will experience a different rate of success. How you implement your strategies will determine whether you are one that is rising fast or slow.
We understand that it can be frustrating to try and work around your organic strategies and all the lead generation ones we’ll share. But as tempting as they are, you should be careful about paying for lead lists and using third-party directories.
These lists are often automated, so they may not give you the leads that you require. The list can also be sold to other companies that may be looking for the same leads.
We can tell you that you should work around paid options such as Google ads and increase your organic options, like SEO.
Get Started By Building Your Website
Websites are essential for every business. Do not listen to anyone who tells you the opposite, and focus on your site. More than 60% of prospects will find your site and will contact you or hire you; it’s just a matter of actually investing your time in it.
Consider it this way: A website can help customers find trusted professionals, and businesses can get more clients and sales by having one.
Although we all know that social media is a major part of our world today, people spend more time on Google searching and looking at websites than they do use social platforms for home addition services.
A website is also essential in online marketing. If you start with one website and then work your way up, you will get many results.
Google My Business Accounts make websites even more efficient. Your website can be optimized by using hyperlocal targeting.
To ensure potential clients can reach your account quickly, you must have accurate and clear contact information.
But, what can you do with your website?
- Your website can always be used to showcase your talents and show your prospects the past projects so they can seeyour potential.
- You can use testimonials from clients to help you build your brand and keep in touch with potential leads.
Although building a website with the many tools and professionals today can be challenging, it is possible with enough patience and sufficient resources.
Have You got Your Website Done? Optimize It
Let’s face it; your website is your best tool to generate leads and convert them. But if you focus only on the design and do not optimize it, you won’t get any home addition leads.
Optimizing your website will help people find it based on the effort you put into it. Are you using the necessary but hated keywords? Is your site user-friendly? Are you mobile-friendly?
These are all important, but optimization goes beyond them.
The principles of pptimizing your website are basic: if you do it, you should get more visitors. For this, conversion tools can be used to generate leads once new visitors have visited your site.
Are you unsure which tool is best for conversion? These are the best tools for converting:
- Calls-to-action (CTAs).
A call-to-action element of your website encourages people to take action. You can encourage people to click buttons and take actions such as contacting you or sending a message.
Are you having trouble understanding their meaning? It’s easy.
Your website should contain calls to action that are easy to see and make it easier for qualified leads to be converted into sales.
Your time and efforts should be worthwhile for future clients.
Calls to action are a great way to get qualified leads to buy or close deals. As long as they stay on your pages for more than a minute, they are likely to be considering your business.
Many users will not request a quote or send a message to us even if we place a CTA. It will encourage them to request a quote or send a message when they are ready whatsoever.
These visitors require a soft conversion opportunity. You can offer content to encourage them, along with the CTAs.
It can be offered in a section on your website. You may also include a contact form to gather information about potential clients.
Your sales teams don’t need to do anything other than provide qualified conversion opportunities via content offers.
- Conversational Marketing Works.
This method is often overlooked because it seems strange. What if we told you that it’s quite the opposite?
Let’s start by answering a question that you need to ask yourself: What is conversational marketing?
Conversation marketing involves establishing a dialogue with leads using tools, support, or answering their questions.
Chatbots and other chat-based marketing tools can be helpful in driving traffic to your most visited pages. It is great to have a homepage that highlights your company’s work.
Chatbots can answer anyone’s questions and provide information about past projects. You should not forget them and instead make use of them as an addition to this method.
They can answer your questions based upon pre-existing conversations or directly to you.
Chatbots are great because you can gather contact information from potential leads during the process so that your sales team can follow up later and increase your sales funnel.
If the lead isn’t qualified, your sales teams will refer them to another site. This will eliminate unqualified leads from your sales pipeline, and it will save you a lot of time in the lead generation process.
Conversational marketing is still relatively young, but it can effectively convert leads into visitors.
Research has shown that visitors are more likely to become leads if they quickly get the information they need.
Join Facebook Groups
Local Facebook groups are one of the best marketing tools to generate leads for your home addition business. This is often overlooked because people tend to think of other options on the same platform before considering it.
The group is a great way for local contractors to find qualified leads and become the local contractor for everyone, not only a few.
Simply go to Facebook and type in your city name. Select groups from the menu.
Once you hit enter, you’ll be presented with a list containing groups that match your search criteria. You should search for large groups with a community spirit that encourage collaboration and sharing.
If you don’t want your account to be removed or banned from future groups, you must follow the rules of each group set by the moderators or admins.
After you have found a group that suits your needs, submit a membership request.
These are some factors that you must remember to ensure you don’t have any problems joining groups:
- Before you join a group, make sure to read the rules.
- Introduce yourself and engage the group. However, don’t spam the group with your services.
- Let people know about your offer and let them understand that you are eager to join the community.
- This strategy is all about delivering value, answering questions of others, and positioning your services to people who ask for recommendations.
- When you build a reputation, others will recommend your services. This is when you know you’ve done a good job.
- To encourage customers to buy your product or service, offer incentives
What does the incentive mean?
Let’s say that a homeowner is renovating their kitchen.
Remodeling a home can be expensive. This is why many people will hesitate to contact you, even if they are in dire need.
To avoid this problem, you can offer an incentive, such as a discount on their first job in remodeling, when they request the services or a quote from your company.
You can also send personalized messages to potential leads to capture their interest in your services.
Incentive programs do not just include sales and rebates. Customers need fast delivery and easy financing. What makes your home improvement company stand out? Tell your customers what makes your business stand out.
Also, Keep in Touch
Sometimes it is not the right time to market in these groups or on any other platform.
This is especially true for large purchases that involve home additions. It is crucial to keep in touch with them to ensure that they know when you are available and when they are open to taking on new projects.
It can be hard to keep up with all the things you do each day.
Email templates can be used to follow up with customers automatically. This will save you time and allow you to invest in other tasks.
Even though automated emails are useful, it is important to keep in mind that timing is key. You may be perceived as being too pushy by your lead if they receive too many emails. However, if they wait too long, their lead might not be able to recognize your company.
The first email should be sent within 2 to 4 business days after the recipient has contacted you or shown interest.
Send enough marketing emails to keep leads interested. Send enough marketing emails to keep leads engaged, but not too many unsubscribe. You should not have a higher than 2% unsubscribe rate.
Search Engine Optimization is a Must
Basic SEO is important to drive traffic to your site and to get you higher in Google’s rankings. It can significantly increase lead generation if done correctly. It is actually our favorite part, and it is essential for every business.
SEO can be confusing and difficult to comprehend. It is essential if you want positive results and more leads.
Google My Business is a great place to start if you don’t know where to go. It will be explored further. We will now focus on the key aspects of this strategy.
We recommend these areas to help you get started with SEO:
- Use the correct keywords.
It can be used to reach specific audiences and attract search engines’ attention by including key keywords.
It is better not to use one keyword that has high search volumes but multiple keywords. You will compete with many brands for your keywords, so make sure you take advantage of every opportunity to stand out.
- Keep an eye on your competition.
Backlinks are links that connect to one website from the other.
This is a great way to get more leads than your competitors. It sounds easy, but it can be difficult if you want it effective. Avoid copying other people’s work in order to get your leads.
It is easy to identify potential prospects by simply looking at your competitors’ links. This information can be accessed via backlink checking software.
You may need multiple tools to collect the information. They only provide a snapshot of a URL’s backlink profile.
- Use long-tail keywords.
These keywords are phrases related to your home improvement business. They can be formed with more than three words, such as “Home Addition in Sioux Falls” or “Kitchen Addition for Home or Residential Properties.”
When searching for something, customers search for specific terms. Long-tail keywords can be used to help local customers find your site in search engines.
- Take control over your website.
Websites can look great on a desktop computer, but mobile devices are a different story.
Mobile-first indexing has made it imperative that your site be mobile-friendly. Mobile websites generate the most leads because people don’t use computers to search.
- Track your journey.
Questions such as “What strategies work for my company?” are crucial. It is crucial to identify if you are on the right path to finding crucial answers for your business.
To track your progress and identify areas that are doing well, you must keep track. This will help you determine which areas need more attention and which ones should be abandoned.
A CRM (Customer Relation Manager) is the best tool to track and analyze marketing and lead generation strategies. You can still use your contacts to determine which leads are generated each day.
What does CRM have to do with the people you speak to? Here’s a quick overview:
- Let your leads know how you found them.
- This will enable you to identify the source and determine which generation strategies are most effective for generating leads or clients for your business.
- Ask your customers why you are chosen to be their home-improvement professionals.
- Do they enjoy the content? Is it helpful? Are you in the top Google search results? What is it that makes your company stand apart from others? The CRM will answer these questions and review them.
An Incentive Referral Program
Word of mouth advertising is important and will continue to be important for one reason: People trust others who recommend services.
Technology has made it easier for people to share information about businesses and for individuals to decide whether they can trust a company.
Referral programs from customers are now more effective than ever for lead generation strategies. These programs are simple to measure, quantify and track, so set one as soon as possible.
How do you make it work? It all depends upon the niche of the company and the services offered.
You can create customized referral codes for each prospect or client to make it easy for them to get the code immediately. This will motivate them to refer you to other people when they need your service.
Invest Time in Multichannel Outreach
One of the costliest mistakes that home addition companies make is relying on only certain channels and platforms.
It’s normal and okay to use your main channel to reach your target audience, generate leads and convert them into clients. Did you know that your main channel could lose qualified leads?
We’re sure you didn’t.
Don’t get us wrong. You can still reach your audience through one channel, but other channels are more efficient and reach more people faster depending on where they live. You’re doubling your efforts if you’re present in all of these channels.
Here are some reasons why you should invest your time in this strategy.
- Increase the visibility of your company.
- This will allow you to provide a seamless customer experience for customers.
- Social media and other digital channels are something you might already be familiar with, so you’re probably on-trend.
Invest In Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click can be a great way of attracting leads that are likely to convert. It is important to use it wisely.
Ad clickers are 55% more likely to buy your products or services than organic traffic, SEO leads, or both.
SEO is still important even when you rely on ads, but you should still remember that it is a matter of combining different strategies. We stand by our statement about SEO being essential for every business. But you can combine SEO and PPC to generate high-quality leads.
PPC is all about keyword selection. This will determine the location of your ads and impact the cost per click (CPC). It also impacts how you reach your target audience.
Short-tail keywords can be difficult to rank for because they are only one or two words long. These phrases are very popular.
A bigger fund account will increase the likelihood that prominent companies will use short-tail keywords.
On the other hand, long-tail keywords have a lower CPC, which is great for lead generation. Because they are more specific, these keywords are less competitive.
To get the best results, long-tail keywords will be your best option. These keywords will allow you to get more clicks with a lower budget.
After you’ve chosen your keywords, it is possible to place a bid for your ad. You can bid for an ad click at the maximum price, but it is not as high as you think.
Once you have placed your order, your campaign will go live.
Paid ads may not be worth it for business owners who can get organic leads. Sometimes, however, a boost in traffic can be worth it. If the ads are correctly launched, they will produce better results.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Home Addition 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 Home Addition 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 Home Addition 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.