Managing Expectations: What to Expect When Buying Leads
Due to the nature of the restoration industry, it’s impossible to predict when you’ll get a lead. This goes for buying leads as well as for generating your own leads through marketing and advertising. Depending on your industry and service area, the volume of leads you get will vary depending on the season, the weather, and even the time of day. We look at some of the common expectations and misconceptions about lead generation as well as explain what you can expect when buying leads.
What to Expect When Buying Leads
Not Every Lead Will Turn Into a Job
The biggest misconception about buying leads and lead generation is that every lead is a guaranteed job. It doesn’t matter whether you paid a company to send you that lead or you generated it through your own marketing, every lead is just an opportunity for a job. Regardless of the source of the lead, you will need to work with the customer and convert them into a job.
Every Lead Has a Cost and Requires Effort
With few exceptions, you are paying for every lead you get. It doesn’t matter if it’s coming through your marketing efforts, paid search campaigns, or you’re paying per lead. If you’re generating your own leads, you need to put in all the work to make that happen. When you’re buying leads, you have a team working to get you those leads.
Be Realistic About How Many Leads You’ll Get
Whether you’re buying leads directly or generating them through your own marketing or advertising, you need to be realistic about how many leads you are going to get. Optimally, each of your channels for getting jobs should produce one or two quality opportunities for jobs each week. Your performance will vary by the services you offer, the area you’re in, and external factors like the weather and season.
What You Should Expect When Buying Leads From 33 Mile Radius
There are a lot of misconceptions about what to expect when buying leads. We demystify lead generation and explain how our system will get you more leads and jobs.
Easily Identify and Track Our Leads
We make it extremely easy to identify and track all of the leads we send you. You get a dashboard that contains all of the leads we send you where you can add notes and file disputes. Our phone leads will play a whisper file identifying 33 Mile Radius as the source before we connect you to the customer. With our text leads, you’ll get a link to the lead in your dashboard.
A Few High-Quality Leads Each Week
We strive to generate the highest quality leads. While we cannot guarantee exactly how many leads you’ll get, we send 1 or 2 leads to each contractor each week on average. Most of our contractors will convert 7 or 8 out of every 10 leads into jobs. Additionally, the actual number of leads and your conversion rate will vary depending on factors like your area, the weather, and the services you offer.
Cost-Effect Way to Get More Jobs
Our leads are a cost-effective way to get more jobs. First, you only pay a flat rate for valid leads. Those are leads from the homeowner or decision-maker requesting a service that you are signed up for in your agreed-upon area. We offer the most fair and flexible billing practices in the industry and you are never billed for wrong numbers, spam or fraudulent leads.
Measuring Your Performance to Ensure Your Lead Channels Are Effective
Whether you’re buying leads from us, running your own campaigns, or using one of our competitors, you should measure the performance of each of lead generation channels. You can track your leads in a spreadsheet, in a call-tracking system, or on a piece of paper. However, you can’t determine what works and what doesn’t unless you look at the data.
1. Source
Most importantly, you need to know the source of each lead. Without knowing the source, all of the other data for measuring leads is useless. While you can ask your customer how they found you, they only remember about half the time.
The easiest way to track the source is by using a call tracking system. This allows you to put unique phone numbers on each of your lead generation channels. Call tracking ensures you know exactly where that lead came from.
Another option is to use an offer code, like mention a specific word for a free estimate. Even though you may always offer a free estimate, unique offer codes for each channel will help ensure you can track the source of each lead.
2. Cost
While you may think you aren’t paying for most of your leads, you probably are. Even if you don’t run print ads or paid search ads, you are spending time and effort to maintain your advertising and marketing campaigns.
Plus, you need to factor in the cost of your marketing materials like business cards, magnets, flyers, and truck wraps. When you buy leads, you get the expertise of a marketing agency at a flat-rate.
3. Quality
Another important measurement to track is the overall quality of the leads. While every lead is just an opportunity and not every one will convert, some channels may send more spam than the others.
Ideally, you’re looking for leads that are from the homeowner or decision-maker calling about a service you offer in your area. Once those criteria are met, it’s up to you to close the job.
You should also factor in wrong numbers, fraudulent or spam calls, and customers calling for services you don’t provide. While you may think customers asking for another company are spam, you should always try to convert those leads as long as you offer similar services.
4. Quantity
The quantity of leads you get from each source is worth tracking. Some lead generation channels will produce at a higher rate than others. While it’s easy to assume that there is a direct relation between cost, quality, and quantity, we find this is rarely true. Measuring by quantity is best if you need to cut your overall lead generation budget and are looking at two similarly performing channels.
5. Time
If you’re a one-person business, you probably know that time is one of your most valuable resources. From responding to leads to completing jobs, everything falls on your shoulders. In this case, it’s important to know how much time you spend on generating leads.
Paid search and social media are often effective at creating leads, but they require you to constantly maintain those campaigns. Conversely, print ads or buying flat-rate leads takes less time but may cost a little more.
6. Skill Level
From designing billboards to writing SEO content, different channels require certain skills to be effective. While many marketing and adverting channels are getting easier to use each day, you need to decide what skills you are willing to invest your time in learning. Plus, it’s not just learning these skills once. Website design, paid search, and many other channels are constantly evolving and you will need to stay up on current trends.
Adjust Your Strategy to Get More Leads When Necessary
Unfortunately, some contractors take a “set it and forget it” attitude when it comes to generating leads. However, the days of listing your company in the phone book and waiting for the phone to ring are long gone.
Once you start tracking the data, you can begin making adjustments to your lead strategy. Ideally, you should wait for at least 10 valid leads that converted into jobs before making changes.
Common changes include bidding up or down on your paid search campaigns or expanding into new service areas with your lead generating company. However, it may also mean shifting more of your lead generation budget to a specific channel.
The biggest mistake you can make is to adjust your strategy without looking at the data. You may think one channel isn’t performing, but without having the data you’re just guessing. You could end up losing out on one of your top performers.
How to Ensure You Close the Job
Since you can’t predict when you’ll get leads, it’s important that you close those jobs when you get them. The key to closing jobs is answering your phone and responding to the text lead immediately. If you don’t respond right away, your customer will contact a competitor within minutes.
When you answer the call, strive to make a good first impression and treat every customer with compassion and respect. Once you book the appointment, offer a detailed estimate and outline how long the job will take. With text leads, introduce yourself and follow up on the service they requested.
3 Easy Ways to Get More Leads
Regardless of whether you’re buying lead from us or managing your own advertising and marketing, here are three easy ways to generate more leads during slower periods.
Expand Your Coverage Area
Expanding your service area is one of the most effective ways to get more leads, especially during slower times. Once the volume of leads starts to pick back up, you can pause the campaigns for more remote portions of your service area.
Add More Channels For Generating More Leads
While more difficult than expanding your service area, adding additional marketing and advertising channels for leads will help year-round. Some of the most effective methods to consider are paid search, social media, search engine optimization, reviews, and referrals. The more channels you use, the more opportunities you’ll get.
Offer Additional Services
Obviously adding additional services does require additional skills and possible even certifications. However, expanding the services you offer should also increase the number of leads you get. Start by expanding into similar industries like adding carpet cleaning or mold removal if you already offer water damage restoration.
Start Getting More Conversion Ready Leads Today
If you’re ready to get more leads, sign up with 33 Mile Radius now. Whether you’re getting your marketing setup or looking to supplement your business with a few extra jobs, we offer exclusive leads. To get started, fill out the form below. One of our business development managers will contact you in less than 1 business day to explain our system and answer your questions. Ready to get started today? Call 888-594-8381 to secure your service area for plumbing leads.