How To Get Leads For Your Home Improvement Business

Getting leads for home improvement businesses is hard.

You want to continue growing your business, but the phone isn’t ringing. Some weeks are busy, while other weeks you’re spending a lot of time on busy work.

With payroll to make and a family to feed, inconsistent work just isn’t going to cut it. You know you have to do something different. Waiting around for customers isn’t bringing the work you want. You need a plan for how to get leads.

This guide is for contractors who provide services directly to homeowners. You will learn effective lead generation strategies that can bring in new business and give you the confidence to hire that new employee, take that vacation, and grow your business.

We’ll talk about time-tested techniques for lead generation like referrals and word-of-mouth, and we’ll explore some modern marketing tactics that can help you get ahead of the competition.

Let’s go get some leads.

Key Takeaways

• Start asking every customer where they found out about you, so you know where your leads come from.
• Make sure you’ve covered the basics of how to get leads.
  • Set up and optimize your Google Business Profile.
  • Build a website that makes it easy for people to contact you.
  • Set up free profiles on top business directories.
  • Send an email to past customers to generate repeat business.
• When buying leads from a lead service, make sure you choose the right one and monitor your leads carefully.
  • Choose a lead service that reaches your target customers.
  • Know the difference between pay-per-lead, pay-per-qualified-lead, and monthly fee sites.
  • Avoid signing long-term contracts.
  • Consider hiring a receptionist or using a phone answering service to increase your speed-to-lead.
  • Test 2-3 lead service providers to see which brings you the most work.
  • Carefully track your Cost Per Lead to minimize wasted spend.
• For more control, build your own system to capture leads.
  • Set up Local Services Ads.
  • Optimize your website for local SEO keywords.
  • Send direct mailers a month before peak season for maximum effectiveness.
  • Use Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads to promote your services to a targeted audience.
• Remember that lead generation is a short-term solution for business growth. Build a reputation in your market to gain a competitive edge for the long-term.

How to Get Leads As a Home Improvement Contractor

There are Effective lead generation strategies help you attract the right customers. These strategies can include everything from optimizing your online presence to utilizing local advertising. The key is to find and implement techniques that work best for your specific business needs.

Before we start working out how to get leads, let’s take a step back and answer this question: “where do our leads normally come from?”

How to Identify Where Your Leads Are Coming From

Understanding where your leads come from is essential. It gives you insight into what’s working and what isn’t.

Think about it. You’re here to find out how to get leads, but you might already have the answer. And all you have to do is listen to your customers.

Start Asking Customers About Their Referral Sources

The easiest way to figure out where your leads come from is to ask every new lead how they found you. I recommend adding it to your first phone conversation, or including it as a question in your website form.

Keep it simple: “How did you find out about us?”

Avoid the urge to prompt them with examples. Let them fill the silence with their own explanation of where they found you. You might be surprised by the answers.

Okay, so now you’re collecting information about where your leads have come from. Great! Now let’s talk about the basics of how to get leads.

The Basics of Lead Generation For Contractors

It’s crucial to lay a solid foundation for lead generation. Getting the basics right makes a big difference. So before you go spending money to get leads, let’s make sure you’ve done all of the free stuff first.

Ensure Your Contact Information Is Easily Accessible

This one feels obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to miss. Make sure your contact information is clear and easy to find. Potential customers should not have to search for ways to reach you.

Examples of ways you can make it easy to reach you:

• List your phone number front and center on your website.
• Make sure your contact form works.
• Make sure your phone gets answered every time, even if that means hiring a phone answering service.
• Check and respond to your email at least once a day. If you’re having trouble keeping up, hire a virtual assistant.

This one step can significantly boost your lead conversion rates.

Optimize Your Google Business Profile

When it’s time to find a contractor nearby, many people start with Google. Your Google Business Profile can be a big source of leads on it’s own if you set it up correctly. Here’s what you need to do:

• Search Google for your business name.
• If your listing already exists, click the link that says “Claim this business”.
• Make sure your business name is 100% accurate. Even small spelling or formatting errors can torpedo your visibility.
• Make sure your business address is 100% accurate.
• Make sure your business phone number is 100% accurate.
• Select all of the services you regularly provide to your customers.

Keep your Google Business Profile updated with accurate information, photos, and customer reviews.

Tip: Don’t be afraid to show some personality and authenticity in your Google profile. This helps you stand out when people search for services in your area. For most of us, there are a hundred alternatives that our prospects could choose, so focus on showing the reason why you stand out from the rest.

How to Build a Website That Attracts Leads

Your website is often your first impression. It should be welcoming and easy to navigate.

Key Elements of an Effective Home Improvement Website

Your website needs a few critical features. It should have clear calls to action, an easy-to-use layout, and engaging content. Including customer testimonials can also build trust with potential leads.

Importance of Mobile Optimization

Many people use their phones to search for services. Make sure your website looks good on mobile devices. A mobile-friendly site can lead to more inquiries and bookings.

How to Reconnect with Past Customers for Repeat Business

One of the easiest lessons in how to get leads: re-use them. When someone has worked with you once, they’re more likely to trust you and hire you (assuming you’ve taken good care of them the first time).

Customer retention and re-engagement is a big topic, but here are two simple ways you can get more leads from past customers.

Sending Emails to Past Customers

Reach out to past clients with email updates. A simple message about your services can spark their interest. Perhaps they need your help again or know someone who does.

Hey there, it's been a while since we worked on your project, so I wanted to reach out and see how everything is going. If you have any questions for me, I'd be happy to help. Thank you!

You might be tempted to design up a pretty email like what you get from your favorite online store or local oil change place. I don’t encourage that. Over the years I’ve tested a lot of email campaigns, and I’ve consistently got better responses from text-only emails. They feel more personal. As with everything else I talk about here, the best way to know what works is to test it for your business and your clientele.

Creating a Customer Loyalty Program

This one is a bit more involved, but you might consider offering a program that rewards loyal customers. This can encourage repeat business and referrals. It shows you value them and helps them to remember to refer you when the opportunity comes up. I’ve worked with clients who offer a maintenance service for high-end clients, or provide referral gifts for customers who send their friends to you.

How to Get Leads From Online Directories

Directory websites are an under-rated and completely free way to get leads for your construction business. Setting up a listing on these big-name websites gives you one more way to get in front of local customers looking for your expertise. Here’s my two cents on how to make these work.

Setting Up Free Profiles on Top Business Directories

Create free profiles on popular contractor directories like Yelp, Angie’s List, or HomeAdvisor. These platforms can increase your visibility for free. A lot of these directories have a large search presence on Google, as well as reputations of their own.

By signing up for these directories and putting in your business information, you’re increasing your total “surface area” of your brand and increasing the likelihood that a prospective customer will find you. That’s always a good thing.

What You Should Know About Paying For Leads or Ads from Directories and Lead Services

Buying leads is an option some businesses consider. It’s important to understand the pros and cons.

When you buy leads through one of these websites, you’re “renting” their reputation in order to get introduced to a lead. Depending on the service, you may be the only contractor who receives the lead, or you may be competing with 4+ other companies for the business.

“Speed-to-lead” is the game here. Your ability to win on some of these platforms relies on your response rate. For some lead aggregators, the gap between the winner and the runner-up is just a few seconds delay. If you’re playing that game, make sure you’ve got someone operating phones full-time.

Lead services charge for construction leads in different ways. With some you’ll pay per click or per lead, while others will charge you a flat monthly fee. One of these is not better than the others as long as you’re tracking your leads and you can see that you’re getting projects (and revenue) at a rate you’re willing to accept.

Whatever you do, never sign a long-term contract with a directory or lead service.

If you’re considering using lead services, read my post about the 25 best websites for contractor leads.

How to Calculate your Cost Per Lead

Knowing how much you spend to generate each lead can help you manage your budget and determine when you’re ready to scale up your marketing and grow your business. This allows you to identify which marketing channels are truly effective.

Calculating your cost per lead is pretty straightforward on the surface. The math is basic:

Lead Generation Costs / Leads = Cost Per Lead

The tricky part here is how you capture and measure those two input metrics by marketing channel. Once you know where leads come from and how much we spent on that channel, you can calculate and compare cost per lead between channels to identify the areas where you can scale most profitably.

How to Leverage Social Media Advertising for Leads

Social media ads can be a goldmine for home improvement contractors. Here’s a quick take on how you can use social platforms to get leads, even before they’re actively looking for the service you provide.

Use Facebook Ads to Target Your Audience

If you want to cut out the competition, you have to learn how to get leads that aren’t already looking for help. That’s where Facebook Ads come in. Some of my favorite examples of successful marketing campaigns were done using Facebook Ads.

The great thing about Facebook Ads is that you can choose a specific audience based on location, income, and other data points, and then pay to show ads to only those people. And Facebook is the best at knowing a lot of stuff about its users. So you can be confident that they’ll find a way to show your ads to exactly the group you’re looking for. Then it’s up to you to figure out what your target buyer really cares about, and start consistently showing them ads where you talk about that thing.

Setting up Facebook Ads and building a successful ad campaign is too big a topic to cover here. If you’d like help figuring out how to get leads with Facebook, you can send me a message or set up an intro call.

Get Construction Leads Using Instagram Ads

Some contractors wonder how to get leads through Instagram. This is a topic all it’s own, but here’s a quick explainer.

Instagram is all about visuals. You need attention-grabbing photos or videos that appeal to your target buyer. This is really great for contractors that do visually appealing work, but I’ve also seen it used effectively by everyone from framers to carpet cleaners. I have clients in home service and home improvement who have landed some of their largest clients through Instagram, so it’s definitely not something to sleep on.

The easiest way to reach new prospects on Instagram is with a Boosted Post. You’ll need a Professional account in order to boost posts. From there, it’s as simple as clicking Boost on one of your recent posts, setting a budget and timeline, and letting it run. You’ll be able to see basic metrics in your Instagram account showing how that post performed.

That’s a quick high-level description of how to get leads using social media ads. There’s a lot more that we could cover, but I’ll save that for another post. Right now, it’s time to talk about the best way to get leads: your reputation.

Why Building a Reputation Matters for Long-Term Success

If you’re thinking about how to get leads, it’s probably because you need the work soon-ish. Unfortunately, this short-term thinking is a trap that holds back a lot of contractors. That’s because buying leads is just renting someone else’s reputation.

When I was an in-house marketing manager for a construction company, I was contacted by a fellow marketer at another local home improvement company. As we talked about the things we were doing and the results we were getting, I could tell he was getting frustrated. He finally told me, “Everything you showed me, we’re already doing, but it’s not working as well. What are you doing that I’m not?”

I told him, “This company has been doing good work in the community for 25 years. That makes my job way easier.”

Yes, we had Google Ad campaigns that were landing us projects. Yes, we were spending money to show up in front of new buyers. But in the background, most of our website traffic was coming from people who knew about us.

The most effective marketing is also the hardest to measure and track. There’s not a spot in Google Analytics that tells you someone heard about you through word of mouth. But by building a strong reputation for being the best in the region, you can reduce your calculated cost per lead significantly.

The Role of Customer Reviews and Testimonials

In a time when everybody uses their phone to find service providers, reviews are a critical part of a solid reputation. Reviews build trust. They signal to your clients (and to Google) that other people will vouch for you. If you’ve been in business for a year and you aren’t getting at least one review per month, you’re probably missing out on a bunch of leads.

At a bare minimum, build it into your process to ask happy customers to leave testimonials on Google, your website, or social media. It’s a simple question, and many people are happy to do it for you. Don’t wait for them to bring it up: just ask when you send the invoice or you’re wrapping up the project.

If you want to fully automate your review collection process, I recommend using a tool like NiceJob. These review automation tools do all of the manual work for you; sending emails, text messages, and follow-ups to every prospect as soon as they submit the web form. You can connect this directly to a CRM like Housecall Pro, and review requests will go out automatically as soon as a job is marked complete.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to get leads for your home improvement company, you can create a steady stream of potential customers. Remember to track your efforts, stay engaged with past clients, and adapt your approach based on what’s working. You’ve got this!