Restoration leads (e.g. water, fire, mold, smoke damage) can be simple to generate as long as you implement the right techniques. This includes as many of them as you can afford to add to your plan, business goals, and structure. Of course, you can start with just a few if you aren’t so sure about how everything works.
What we want you to keep in mind with all this is that lead generation isn’t only about social media or having a website without investing time in them. There’s much more involving this crucial step for your restoration business, which we will be going over soon.
It is important to search for the best methods to generate high-quality leads. You may also consider using services that could quickly bring them your way, but this doesn’t mean directly buying the leads.
To help you with this process, we decided it would be a good idea to share the secrets of your competitors and how they are generating leads while you’re having a hard time.
Therefore, look forward to these lead generation strategies that work perfectly for your business and niche.
Make Sure to Build a Website
Websites are essential for every business. This is how customers find professionals to work with, and it’s a way for businesses to generate more sales by showing what they are capable of and leaving the contact info in tactical places.
The idea of having a website overall is that you should aim for it to be listed if you perform a quick search of professionals in your area.
Besides building it, this website is even more effective if you have a Google My Business account for it so that you can use its hyperlocal targeting.
Your contact information should be clearly displayed to ensure potential clients can contact you quickly, as mentioned before.
Your website can be used to showcase your talents. Past projects can be a great way for potential customers to see what you can do.
You can also include testimonials from clients you have worked with or continue to work with to help build your reputation and keep you in the minds of potential clients.
You might be wondering if it is really that easy to build a website. Well. Not really.
But now, you have many options to choose from until you can afford a better option and create a professional website.
Keep in mind that running a business takes work and effort. If you want to generate residential or commercial restoration leads for free, then you may need to give more of your time and put some effort into this.
Optimize Your Website All the Time
If someone says that your website is the best tool to convert leads, they are right. However, that requires more than just having it live and leaving it alone with all the elements you’ve included.
Your website requires enough optimization to be found online and for people to actually convert into those qualified leads.
Let’s follow this logic: People will attempt to find information about your first contact, regardless of whether it’s an email, a call, or some other action.
This logic will lead them to search for your business in order to decide if it is worth their time. It is obvious that any 21st-century consumer will Google your business before doing anything else.
They must be able to make it to your site. You will also give them plenty of opportunities so that you can turn them into customers without any investment or effort.
You should optimize your website for conversions from the internet.
If you want to grow your client base and increase sales, word-of-mouth referrals are not the only way to get leads. You will lose to your competition and, regardless of how much effort you put in, the results will be disappointing.
Optimizing your website should result in more visitors. Conversion tools can be used to generate leads once new visitors have visited your site.
Are you unsure which conversion tools to use? Here are some you should focus on in order to achieve optimization:
Calls to Action
Call-to-action is any element on any page on your website that encourages people to take action. This means that you encourage people to do something specific you want them to.
What can you include as CTAs? Follow, like, comment, request a quote, get a bid for a project, and so forth.
Calls to action on your website make it easier for qualified leads to convert and are easily visible.
Keep in mind that you only want future clients who are worth your time and effort. You don’t want to be a client who visits your website for 15 seconds or less.
The people who are most worth your time when looking for restoration services will be the ones that you choose to spend your time on.
Content offers
Calls to action are a great way to convert qualified leads into buying decisions.
However, if someone is starting to look into restoration companies, it may seem excessive to ask for a quote. They aren’t necessarily able (most of them) immediately to find the right company or experts.
But they can still be potential leads.
These visitors require a soft conversion opportunity. You will encourage them to do so since it is where content offers are made.
A section of your website can allow you to offer content. This section often includes a contact form or inclusion that allows you to collect information about potential clients and visitors.
Your sales team doesn’t need to do anything but offer qualified conversion opportunities via content offers.
These are great opportunities to increase lead generation for your business without adding too much effort to your sales team.
Conversational Marketing
This method is often overlooked or forgotten by most people. We also understand how it can be a little difficult to remember when you look at the other methods.
However, it is one of the most effective ways to convert leads and clients.
What is conversation marketing? Conversation marketing is basically establishing a dialogue with your leads using tools or support or answering their questions.
Chatbots and conversational marketing tools can be used to increase traffic to your most visited pages. It’s great to have a homepage and pages that highlight your work as well.
Chatbots can answer questions and provide information about past projects.
It can also answer your questions according to pre-existing conversations, or you can have someone from your sales team reply directly through the chatbot.
The best thing about this tool? It can collect contact information from potential leads, so your sales team can follow up.
If the lead is not qualified, your sales team will direct them to another site that can provide answers but won’t waste your time. This will eliminate unqualified leads from the sales pipeline.
Conversational marketing is still a relatively new technology, but it can help visitors convert to leads.
Studies show that visitors are more likely to become leads if they get the information they need quickly.
Start Your Own Email Newsletter
Although this tactic may not be something many people consider, an email newsletter can help you to generate new leads, and it is probably one of the most optimal options.
Why? It’s a great way for people to stay in touch and remind them of what you do in this case.
You can get some services for free up to a certain number of emails. For example, Constant Contact and MailChimp allow you to save your time building the emails.
People are more inclined to sign up for your email list if you provide free content frequently. This is because they know that the information will be sent to them directly and that it will be of value to them.
You may be unsure of what to include in an email. Here are some tips:
- Sharing any updates or news about your business is always a good idea.
- Share your knowledge, ideas, and the latest trends in your trade.
- You can also share photos of your work to engage people and get them talking.
- If someone would like a link, please include it.
What information can you include? You can include a paragraph very similar to this in the email:
We offer a wide range of restoration services to help you restore your home or property, whether it’s apartments, homes, business properties, and any you have in mind. If this is something, you would like assistance in or need help finding qualified professionals and contractors, contact us at [email protected]. “
Some people find it a bit overwhelming to include this information in an email. However, some people may need to be encouraged to contact you after receiving it frequently. Of course, you don’t have to write this so accurately but rather come up with a message that adjusts to your audience as well.
Also, make sure that this section doesn’t overshadow the rest of your information. Instead, include it at the end and in a font that isn’t overwhelming the reader.
You want them to look at the value and then, just then, the option for hiring you.
Do Not Forget About Referrals & Reviews
Although you won’t believe it, one of the best ways for you to get restoration leads is through their words when someone has already worked with you.
Ask for testimonials after a job has been completed to allow future customers to see real reviews.
If you didn’t know, people trust brands and people 90% more if someone they know has recommended them. For example, a client recommends their friends to work with you for restoration.
You can also ask your friend or relative for recommendations if they are in need of similar services.
This is our favorite way to find restoration leads. As long as you offer great services and satisfy your customers, they will refer you without hesitation.
To get free leads, you must provide excellent customer service. Otherwise, this referring process won’t work at all. Need some tips for it? This is what you must remember:
- Never be late to appointments or anything.
- Your customers will be thankful if you keep your word.
- Professionalism is important.
- Be polite and friendly when dealing with customers.
- Make sure to tidy up your job site.
One last tip: Referral discounts can be offered to encourage customers to spread your business’ name.
Local Networking Works
It’s easy and cost-free to network in your community and get more leads.
It’s as simple as posting a business card in your local coffee shop. Participating in community service projects can also be a great way to get involved. But only if you have the time.
This option will benefit others and show your company’s values. It will also demonstrate your willingness to go above and beyond to help those in need.
You can also network by sharing your knowledge with friends and neighbors.
Some companies believe that sharing knowledge is a bad idea. They feel people will be more inclined to take on the project themselves than to call a professional.
This can be true. However, it all depends on how your handle sharing your knowledge.
You can give them all the information they need and offer your services free of charge. They won’t hesitate to call a professional if you provide all the answers.
If you make it more interesting and explain why a professional is the best choice, they will be willing to give it a shot.
If you’re not an expert in selling your services, this option may be difficult. However, we think you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.
Determine What Has Failed & What Works
What strategies work best for your restoration company? What has failed?
Track your progress to identify the areas that are working and those that aren’t so that you can get more leads in the future.
A CRM is the best option to track and analyze data related to your marketing and lead generation efforts if you ask us. You can still use your daily contacts to determine what is working to generate leads.
How does the CRM work with the people you speak to? Here’s a quick overview:
- Talk to your leads about how you came across them. This will help you to understand the source of your leads and also assist you in determining which generation strategies are most effective at generating new leads.
- Ask your customers to tell you why they choose you as their restoration company.
- Are they enjoying your content? How about the most recent guides and posts that you’ve shared? Do they prove to be useful?
- Are you the first Google search result?
- What made your company stand apart from all the rest?
These questions will help you understand the best lead generation strategy for your team.
Your sales team deals with customers and leads every day. They will learn what information is important to them and what converts new customers into leads by talking to them.
Understanding your current efforts, how they are performing, and how they reached your company will help you adapt your lead generation strategies.
Advertise Using Pay-Per-Click.
You’ve likely seen PPC (pay-per-click) ads at the top results of your searches. These ads are usually displayed above organic listings and have the word “AD” at the start of the title.
This type of ad generates many leads to your website and can help you get clients regardless of your company’s mission.
For restoration companies, it is important to include your name and services at the top so that any user can see your site. People will click on the first option because they are too lazy or Google is able to filter important sites.
How can this be used to generate more leads for you?
Keywords are used for PPC ads. This means that you need to be careful with which keywords you choose to use to get your ads to the top, and this is how people will find you.
Having reached this point, many people wonder how they will choose keywords. PPC can be performed using two types of keywords, so you’ll need to do some research.
Keywords with a shorter tail are those that contain only one or two words. They can include terms like “restoration” or “restoration company.” Overall, they are very generic and don’t provide much information about the searcher.
Avoid short tail keywords as they might not be relevant to the user’s intent. It is not a specific search but a global search that can include all types of companies and will not be relevant for customers. This will allow you to generate leads but not qualified ones over 50% of the time.
Long-tail keywords are the best choice for your business because they can contain at least three words.
You could substitute the keyword “restoration company” with “restoration businesses in Miami.” This will filter your search and make it easier for people to find you. You won’t have any visitors that aren’t interested or necessary.
Long-tail keywords are more specific and can lead to more sales qualified leads.
The keywords bring in more leads and are more reliable. Users search for the best results and will use specific keywords. You’ll find that customers who are ready to convert are not using short-tail keywords.
PPC visitors are half as likely to purchase than organic visitors. Clicking on your ads can result in more people becoming interested in your services and everything you offer.
Your Content Participation Must Be Good
It’s hard to compete with industry leaders, no matter how you look at it.
It seems like the big brands get all the attention, and smaller brands are left with little room to gain more leads or even prospects and visitors. What if we told you that there is a way to change the game?
It’s easy: challenge industry leaders with your content.
If they say that your industry is moving in a certain direction, you can tell them whether you agree or not. But not directly. Instead, you can use your content to reach them.
While some companies may use this strategy to comment on blogs with their thoughts or content to show what brand they are.
If your goal is to generate leads, you’ll need to work around any content strategy that opens opportunities to connect with others.
Remember, arguments and content must be valuable and backed up by proof. They should also be difficult to refute.
Are You Ready to Make Lost of Leads?
It is not easy to generate sales-qualified leads. You will also have to contend with your restoration industry competitors and work around everything your business needs. It’s definitely exhausting.
However, you will see great results if you use the above methods and don’t rush to finish everything.
After you have done the SEO and gotten reviews, and dealt with any other strategies, just focus on how things are working. We recommend that you try these options whenever you see them as a viable alternative.
Remember that quality leads are what you want and not any visitor.
Restoration companies with smaller sizes have more difficulty standing out from the crowd than larger companies when it comes down to getting attention.
You already know this information, and we don’t believe we must share any additional information.
But we remark this because it is important to remember that if you have difficulties with a large restoration company, you need to review your methods and steps for generating leads.
This is not just a problem for small businesses.
Even large companies with years of experience may reach a point where they are no longer competitive.
Don’t worry too much and whenever this happens, just take your time to review the information about your lead generation strategies as often as you need to, and then make sure to add any additional details that you feel are important for your future goals and tasks to avoid losing or being stuck with your leads.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Restoration 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 Restoration 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 Restoration 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.