Generating septic maintenance leads takes time in planning your marketing strategy and how you approach the sales pipeline designed for your company. But even before all that, a business plan must have been created when you thought about starting your company.
If the inception and organization of the business weren’t properly made, it is natural to have difficulties trying to bring more high-quality leads to boost your clientele.
However, this doesn’t mean you are doomed and need to lose against your competitors. It only means you will need to work harder on more platforms and make sure your business is going in the right way with the help of a well-established sales team.
With this in mind, where should you start to bring more sales qualified leads? The steps below will help you to achieve the desired results.
Invest Your Time Creating a Website
Your website should be your first point of contact and investment since over 70% of your leads will be generated here. Without it, your website won’t be a place for leads to land.
After all, keep in mind that your website meets two purposes:
- To attract potential clients.
- To convert website visitors to qualified leads that your sales teams can use.
To create a website that covers (because it isn’t the same to have a random one without any optimization), you need a design that is both attractive and makes people want to click on your contact options.
You will also need to optimize the building and design.
SEO (search engine optimization) is a confusing term that many people don’t understand, but it is extremely associated with your website. Also, don’t worry; it’s as easy as setting up online strategies to improve your septic maintenance website’s ranking in search engines for hundreds of keywords consumers are searching for.
While traffic is important, it is equally important to convert at most 1-3% of website visitors into qualified leads. You must make sure they find your site first.
SEO solves more than 65% of this problem and guarantees you are competitive in the market.
You might be surprised to find that conversions aren’t as frequent as you would like.
This could indicate serious problems in your user experience, images, and copywriting. These elements should be more prominent in your web pages and where you might want to focus your attention when creating and boosting your site.
This will increase organic website traffic over time and help you to get more leads for your company.
These tips will help you succeed in this endeavor:
- It is crucial to take a lot of time when building a website. Take it slow, and don’t fret about how long it takes. It will be worth it as long as you are doing it right.
- If you create long-form, useful content on your blog over time, you can rank for hundreds of search terms.
- Google My Business allows you to create online directories and social media profiles. It is important to ensure consistency in your company name, address, phone number, and website.
- Use high-quality, professionally-created visual and written content. You are a septic maintenance specialist who needs to teach others. These tasks can be outsourced to professionals, but it is best to stick with what you are good at.
- Every page on your website should be inviting visitors to take action. Visitors should find it easy to research, get a quote, or take action on your website.
- You can test and refine your strategy. A great marketing agency can help identify and fix problems if you have the funds.
Pay Attention to Your Landing Pages
Landing pages are crucial for website lead generation. They can also be used to help you attract more customers to the business by sometimes skipping the lead part.
Some landing pages can be used for informational purposes only. You can find a different purpose by looking at your prospects’ wants and setting the page accordingly.
What should you do with the information they have read at this point and leave you questioning what to do just now? It’s simple. It’s time to convert readers.
Visitors should be “pushed” by the information on your landing pages to decide whether or not they want to use your services.
You can achieve this by designing a landing page that converts. You should optimize it for a better user experience and include conversion-focused elements.
These are our top tips to help you reach your goal with these elements and pages:
- You should eliminate anything that does not help you convert web traffic into leads to avoid visitors leaving since they find some elements useless. Thus, they will feel the same about the rest.
- Please describe the service that you offer and why it is valuable to your clients in detail.
- It is important to clearly describe what happens to visitors after they click on an element.
- Knowing where each button should be clicked is crucial to get a specific action.
- Clicks can be reduced. To ensure that they aren’t bored, you should limit them to clicking three times to reach the desired destination.
Email Marketing Works. So, Don’t Waste It
Over the years, you’ve done a great job collecting emails from prospects and customers, or if you haven’t started, you will spend lots of time on this.
Regardless of what it is in your case, this strategy will be gold.
It is important to remember that you should have enough email addresses to be able to maintain your leads or make them come to you with attracting messages that will make them convert from readers to prospects.
Seasonal tips or offers can be a great way to increase customer value. Customers who have canceled services can be reengaged, or those who haven’t decided yet can be new for your sales.
Email marketing is a major move as you can meet new leads and bring back old friends thanks to the value provided in each message.
There are many mistakes that people make with lead generation strategies. To make sure it doesn’t go sour, here are some things to consider:
- It is sufficient to send 2-4 emails per calendar month.
- Create short, engaging subject lines.
- Make sure to use great images and keep your emails short.
- Be helpful. Sometimes subtle promotions are necessary, but you shouldn’t ask for their business.
Contact Forms Are A Must
If your landing page is clean and optimized, leads and visitors will be more likely to give you their contact details. Don’t ask for too much info if you don’t want them to leave instead of signing up. This has been mentioned before. It is important to discuss specific elements in detail and reduce all the steps.
Your website can convert prospects into sales leads in seconds by using the right contact forms on the landing pages.
Converting a lead to a customer can take weeks or even months. More information makes lead nurturing and conversion easier. To get started, however, you don’t need an email address.
You can request more information than just an email address. This should be simple, with all fields clearly marked.
Contact forms are very important and should always be available where they are needed most.
Each page on other websites will have one. This isn’t always the best strategy. Sometimes you only need one or reduce it to a button for conversion.
Deep Enough to Understand SEO
Remember what we were discussing about SEO (search engine optimization)? There are more details to cover.
Again, it is still the most important form of digital marketing. It will get your septic maintenance company to the top of Google and help it stay there to bring all the leads.
SEO can be sufficient to generate the majority of leads if your campaign is well-executed.
An excellent start to your SEO campaign is a Google My Business account, and despite what we mentioned before with the other ideas, this is where we would start as GMB has proven to be enough for some companies.
Next, you need to begin backlinking (linking to other septic websites with high authority) and content marketing (sharing information with potential customers).
An SEO expert can help you get your campaign started, or you can take it slow as long as you’re willing to go over the learning process.
You ought to remember in all this that SEO is more than keywords. After reading many articles, this is what you might have concluded or maybe not. After all, people tend to be too immersed in keywords but forget that they are useless without a well-planned lead generation strategy.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by all of the information. But in all this, we want you to put first that you must remember to take time to get to know your leads if you want them to be a part of your relationship.
Blog Content… High-Quality One
We have been mentioning content for a while, and this option is the one that puts it to play a bit more.
A blog can be a great way to marketing leads for your business. To get the best results, however, you must have high-quality content.
Content marketing should be as time-consuming as the other strategies if you want to achieve the best results, but it doesn’t mean it won’t get better over time.
We can recommend taking our advice, starting with: Consider the primary purpose of your content before you start.
Blog content is built on relationships. If you give enough thought to the purpose and creation of your blog content, these people will likely convert into leads or customers.
Before you start writing content for your blog, think about why you are making this investment as lead generation ideas. Consider how it will affect your business. Answer crucial questions like:
- How can you solve the problems your target audience has?
- What are the top websites that customers of our target market visit?
- Which one would you choose: 100 readers who are from your target market or 1,000 readers who aren’t that interested? This is basically choosing: traffic or actual clients?
- Are you able to create high-quality content using your core competencies? Or do you need to hire someone?
Think carefully about it since it can be hard to fix your content after you have started.
Manage Your Business’s Image Online and Offline
Did you know that over 75% of people use the internet to locate local septic maintenance professionals quickly? In fact, we dare to say that it is over 90%.
They also look into your reputation, what customers think about you, and your pricing.
Are you capable of turning up on time and completing the task that you have promised? If so, you probably don’t have much to worry about. But if you know you have many factors to improve, you need to pay attention to your reputation.
Word-of-mouth can also be used offline to your advantage, and this is why your reputation is important both online and offline. Ask satisfied customers for recommendations to friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances who might be interested in your services.
After your service is complete, hand them many business cards and ask them if they’d mind leaving a review on your site or any directory.
Listing your business online on review sites is a great way to get satisfied customers to leave reviews. This will increase your chances of bringing in more leads.
Google Ads, But Smart
These ads will help you increase traffic to your site and generate leads.
Google Ads, also known as PPC (Pay-Per-Click), can be a bad investment if you don’t take the right approach. This strategy works best for septic maintenance services that have a short sales cycle, high urgency, and a high sense.
It is a crucial strategy for niche businesses in both the short- and long term.
These are some tips for you to keep in mind if you want this to work out properly:
- Google allows you to budget up to $1,500 per month. If you don’t try your best, your ads won’t appear as often per day.
- However, don’t force yourself to do so if money is tight. It is only possible to reach it if you are certain it will be profitable and have the money.
- Spend between 5-10 hours per week with an agency to improve or learn more about PPC, so you know what to do.
- You can try different ad copies and find the one that works best.
- You can refine and create landing pages (as mentioned before).
Send Postcards
Although postcards may seem a little old-fashioned, they still work well. Why? Because they are easy to send and can target a wide variety of customers who have to deal with septic tanks.
You must first organize your mailing list. A mailing list is a good idea if you don’t already have one or are just starting to build one. You can buy them online or locally. Tho, we would recommend you build it organically.
It is important to only send names and addresses to homeowners or commercial owners who truly have septic tanks in their properties. This is more efficient and will avoid people hating you for continuously sending those postcards.
Now it’s time to start making your first postcard. A 4×6 inch card is a cost-saving option. These cards are simple to print and affordable to send.
Next, design your card. You can hire a professional if you don’t possess the necessary skills.
Make sure your headline is strong. You need to grab people’s attention as they might wonder why you are chosen to manage their septic tanks. What is your company’s advantage over your competitors?
Your services and offers should be highlighted. No matter the message, your postcard should not be thrown away by those who receive it since it should feel like something they could need at any moment.
Maximize Your Online Presence
Leads are always online and looking for solutions to their problems. Your job is to assist them.
You want to be able to get high-quality leads, so make sure you have a great online presence.
Google Places is the first step. Google Places is an online directory that lists local businesses. It also allows you to add your business, appearing in local searches.
You might be found by a customer searching Google for “septic maintenance in [CITY].” However, this is just the beginning since the platform offers free listings, so many competitors will be right in your neck. Thus, make sure your listing is attractive.
You should take the time to create high-quality content. You can add photos, videos, and details about your business to the site like you would do for your own website.
Your clients will be more comfortable using your service if you provide more information.
If you want to attract leads, reviews are an essential part, as mentioned a few lead generation strategies ago.
Your ranking will usually increase if you have more positive reviews. You increase your chances of a client calling you.
Encourage customers to leave reviews on the business’s website. Do not be afraid to offer discounts as more reviews equal more qualified leads.
Sites like Yext.com are great for those who don’t have time to manage all the information in front of a computer.
To have your listing on more than 40 websites managed by them, you will only need to pay an annual fee.
Social media is important. It’s a smart idea to use Instagram and Facebook to promote your business. Post new content each day, and get the reviews in the comments or post them on your content.
Contrary to popular belief, clients rarely buy based on logic. Clients buy based upon facts and what they can see with their eyes.
People make their final decisions based on how they feel about what others have experienced with you and how they see the results.
So, always focus on showing your value and bringing those reviews and general online presence to the game to market your desired leads.
Make the Reviews Be 5-Star Ones
Now, you will get tired of us talking about reviews, but there’s a lot to cover when it comes to them, and something we haven’t mentioned so far is: one thing is to get reviews, and the other is whether they are good or not.
Online reviews are used by over 80% of consumers to assess the quality of local businesses. 30% of those reviews are for any type of business.
They are trusted as much or more than referrals. This is why most companies invest their time and effort into them. These statistics will help you understand why.
- Respondents trust online reviews more than referrals from friends and family.
- 70% of respondents believe that positive reviews increase trust and confidence in local businesses.
- 83% of respondents believe that a company with at most ten positive reviews is more trustworthy.
What happens to negative reviews? This is the part you need to pay attention to.
Consumers are most likely to have negative opinions about companies because of negative reviews. Negative reviews can cause you to lose customers and ruin your business, but how do you fix some that you don’t actually deserve, but we are confident you will receive?
For example, find reasons to report them, like having a comment from someone who isn’t from your state.
Negative reviews play a significant role in 9/10 of consumers’ buying decisions.
However, it is possible to fix them with many positive reviews and improve your business work if you know you aren’t giving your best.
Also, respond as quickly as possible to any negative or positive reviews. If possible, on the same day.
If the review is positive, highlight any services or other information your leads may be interested in.
You can be positive if you get mediocre feedback. Ask for more details, empathize, and contact them directly to continue offline conversation.
If you are not satisfied with the review, ask for more information. Be understanding and take the initiative to solve their problems. To have a conversation offline, contact them immediately.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Septic Maintenance 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 Septic Maintenance 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 Septic Maintenance 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.