How to generate leads online

Generate More Leads Online

The future success of your business depends on its own ability to generate high-quality and low-cost leads without relying on buying leads from 3rd-party sources.

Let’s take a look at 10 online lead generation methods your company should consider using and optimizing to grow more business.

We’ll start with growing more leads and business from internal sources that have a low cost to execute and we’ll work our way up to paid sources to generate consistent lead flow.

The absolute best new leads are those that come recommended from your existing customers.

1. A Referral Program

Turn your customers into fans and motivate them by making it rewarding, easy, and fun to recommend your company.

Today there are amazing automated referral programs that make it rewarding, easy, and fun for your existing customer to recommend your company to their family, friends, associates, and social media followers and benefit from doing so.

Let them choose from coupons, cash, or gift cards from dozens of brand-name stores.

These referral systems offer personalized dashboards for your customers that keep track of all their referrals and make it easy for them to share your company with the click of a button.

Check out systems like:

• Referral Rock
• Referral Candy
• Ambassador

2. Start an Email Newsletter

But don’t make it all about you; instead, give them real reasons to open it and pay attention. Nobody wants your promotional email, so keep that junk to yourself.

If you want to grow more leads from your email newsletter, make it about them, and use content they’ll enjoy checking out.

Highlight fun places to go around town, your team’s favorite places to eat, and special events around town.

Include surveys and contests. Ask them to send photos of the best or ugliest particular item around the house.

Ask what their favorite places around town are.

Then repurpose that content for future newsletters.

Highlight a product of the week. It doesn’t have to be related to your business, your client’s own homes, so make it about cool products for around the home.

Offer How-To guides or a tip-of-the-month to help save them money.

Promote by showing providing case studies of how other people achieved a result they may desire also.

Share a video of your company story.

Include job postings when positions open up.

Highlight another local business of the week by interviewing with the owners of places you know and respect.

Add social sharing buttons to every email to make it easy for them to share the ones they like with their online friends.

Provide motivational quotes.

Highlight a local non-profit that could use their help.

Show off that little league team you’re sponsoring.

And so much more you can do with an email newsletter and motivate them to share it with their online community.

3. Optimize your website for lead generation

Get more leads from the traffic you already have.

Be sure you have good calls to action on every page. Add a click-to-call phone number they can see at the top.

Add a contact form on the home page, contact us page, and on every service page.

Add an email newsletter opt-in on every thank you page.

Add a video on every thank you page with a short intro on what to expect from the request they just made.

Add a live-chat option if you have the personnel to respond immediately.

If not, consider adding a chatbot that answers your FAQs and gives them an option to request a text or call back.

Be sure to write good headlines and motivating calls to action.

Invest in good books on copywriting. Check out The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy and Breakthrough Advertising from the legend Gene Schwartz.

Plug your headlines into the free headliner analyzer from Coschedule.com.

Offer free downloadable consumer guides to the products and services that people require the most education about before they’ll decide to buy.

Use email opt-ins to access your consumer guides or other lead magnets and then send out short automated drip campaigns that provide additional value.

Deploy good SEO tactics to ensure your site and its content are optimized to rank well in search engines.

Ensure the site and its pages load fast, are visually attractive, and easily navigate for a superuser experience.

4. Content Marketing

Yesterday’s podcast episode and blog post were all about using content marketing to attract more prospects to your website and generate more leads.

Meet people where they are in the buying cycle – inform, educate, and be helpful and prospects will come to know, like, and trust your company and choose you over those that didn’t provide that guidance along their journey.

Unless it’s an emergency, most prospects don’t start ready to buy your services right away. They need to learn about their problem or desire and the various available solutions to it.

Those who provide the best-unbiased content to help them along that journey will usually win the business.

Be that company.

If you don’t have a writer on staff, you probably don’t, then consider hiring it out in places like Writer’s Access or ProBlogger.

If you have someone on staff who can write for you, consider using Artificial Intelligence to help them create awesome sales copy that propels more people to engage and take action.

We’ve recently discovered Jasper AI and have begun using it every day to help our team write better blog posts, ad copy, replies to customer reviews, and so much more.

It requires human guidance and editing, but the content it puts out is truly incredible and does so better and faster than even our own best writers.

Here’s our affiliate link to the Jasper AI content writing tool.

5. Grow Customer Reviews

Nearly every potential prospect for your business will go looking for online reviews of your company from past customers.

The more you have and the better the rating, the greater chance you have of motivating prospects to call you instead of a competitor.

Video testimonials provide even more social proof that your company is a great one to work with.

Case studies of the successes you provided to pass customers are also a great tool to show off the excellent work you and your team do for homeowners and businesses.

Ask for video testimonials from your customers and embed them on your website. Prospects love to see past customers raving about your services.

We use the GatherUp automated reputation management system to grow online reviews for our home service clients.

We use Magnfy to get video testimonials for ourselves and our clients.

6. Optimize your Google Maps – Google My Business listing

Every local service search on Google includes the top three listings in their Google Map.

This is truly priceless real estate for every local company that can get into those top three listings.

This listing is free and so too are the top three listings if you can get yourself there.

These listings can generate several dozen free leads every month to your business.

Optimizing it should be a top priority of your company’s marketing strategy.

We have an entire free guide on our website on how to optimize your GMB listing. I highly recommend you check that out and start making it a daily priority.

You’ll want to keep adding reviews to this listing, replying to all reviews, keep adding job and team photos and GMB posts within it every week or better.

Make sure you have all your services listed and add your products to the product section also.

You’ll also need to watch out for competitors spamming the Map with multiple listings, keywords in their business name, and fake reviews. Report all violations to Google using their GMB redressal form.

Now you can even pay for a GMB consult with their team to ask questions and bring up any competitor violations.

You’ll also want to link your Google Ads account to your GMB account with a “location extension” and get the opportunity to run an ad listing in the Map.

7. Social Media

First, you should have branded accounts on all social media channels to protect and promote your brand.

Use social media to promote and syndicate your blog content.

Use it to highlight completed jobs and discuss the project along the way.

Share case studies on your social channels.

Get into the local town groups and be helpful. Even more than your email newsletters, don’t promote here; no one is there for promotions.

Use these channels to help, inform, educate, and show off your work projects.

Like email, you can use surveys and contests to promote engagement.

Provide links to how-to and consumer guides.

Social media takes time and effort so consider having an in-house dedicated social media manager to promote your brand and engage with the local community.

This is a job best done in-house and not outsourced.

Consider using Facebook ads to drive low-cost traffic to consumer guides that help and inform.

Use infographics to attract and engage prospects and get them to share your content.

Seek out local influencers in your area to collaborate with.

8. Google’s Local Service Ads

These ads are at the top of local service searches and get about 14% of all search clicks.

Earn consumer’s trust with Google’s Guarantee available exclusively through Google’s Local Service Ads.

This is available for many home service companies in many but not all markets.

Google guarantees your work for the consumer up to $ 2,000-lifetime amount.

You apply through Google and provide proof of license, insurance, and background checks on all employees to get approved.

You can dominate the search results pages for your services, starting with these ads at the top of the page.

9. Google Search Ads

Next up on the search results page for your home services are usually Google search ads.

You can zero in on your exact services and service area using Google search ads and target homeowners who are actively in the market for your type of services.

Ideally, you’ll have a unique landing page for each ad group with compelling headlines and body copy and a special offer.

Track conversions using Google Analytics and Tag Manager and a call tracking service like Call Rail.

Check out our podcast episode #12, which provides 15 rules for running great Google Ads campaigns, and episode #42, which details the dangers of Google search ads.

10. Use the Power of Video & YouTube

Create a branded YouTube channel and post DIY tips, show off before and after jobs, demonstrate products, introduce your team, show off special events long after the events are over, and much more.

A video is a powerful tool for growing online leads. Get started taking advantage of it today.

Bonus #1 – Guest Post on Other Local Blogs

Drive traffic and get valuable links from local blogs in your area by offering to write a blog post or do an interview for their website.

Keep it local, so the traffic from these sites has the true potential of becoming a customer of yours.

Many local bloggers would welcome content written especially for their audience. Search for bloggers in your area related to your industry or are generalists about the local area and have a great local following.

Bonus #2 – Don’t forget to optimize each platform for greater traffic to lead conversions.

Step #1 is to measure lead conversions – use call & form tracking, Google Analytics, and Tag Manager. Use Facebook analytics if you’re running FB ads.

Use attractive color combinations on landing pages and test different ones.

Test changes in headlines and body copy.

Test different lead magnets and offers on your website and in your ads.

Tell stories wherever possible. People can relate better when it’s wrapped in a story.

Test differences in landing page designs, colors, and copy for your ads, and test both small and wholesale changes to each.