As an electrical business owner or an independent electrical contractor, have you considered investing in marketing to increase your inbound leads?
Maybe not. You might be thinking that word-of-mouth referrals (WOM) are giving you all the leads you need there is no reason to spend additional money on paid ads. If this is what you are thinking, you are wrong. While it is true that WOM marketing is a cheap and effective way to get you started, it is not sustainable if you want to generate consistent revenue.
Also, the cost of marketing online is not necessarily as expensive as you might think. In fact, we have a few ideas for marketing your electrical business online. Adopting a successful strategy will help secure a variety of leads online—simple projects like changing a light fixture, but also elaborate wiring jobs.
There is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to lead generation. Nearly 61% of marketers feel that lead generation is the hardest challenge ahead of them. Why? Because there are a ton of moving parts in creating a successful lead generation campaign and often, it is challenging to identify what needs fine-tuning and what is working well.
In this article, we will discuss five electrical business lead generation ideas that can help you win more electrical jobs and increase revenue.
Optimize your website
Your website is the most powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. However, many electrical businesses or contractors fail to optimize their sites for lead generation. If your website lacks content or is slow to load your lead generation is going to take a huge hit. Fix your site immediately. Find what is impacting your load times—fix it. Work on generating usable content—do not just post to take up space; Google hates that. Your customers will not like it either.
If you have not already created a site that is mobile-friendly, you need to do that now. Currently, 60.43% of the total website visits are mobile, when compared to that 39.57% coming from desktops. Desktops are on their way out, so it is imperative you focus your website on mobile users. In addition to a mobile-first philosophy, consider the following suggestions to help turn your website into a lead-generation machine:
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- Have powerful visuals: A picture is worth a thousand words. And, powerful visuals can quickly grab the attention of your customers and explain your services. Did you know that you can increase your conversion rate to a whopping 86% by embedding relevant videos on your landing page?
‍ - Display trust signals: Trust signals can be anything from your Google My Business and Yelp reviews to the total number of clients you have served. While numbers can emphasize the value of your services subtly, customer testimonials can offer social proof of your quality services.
‍ - Provide clear CTAs: Although a well-designed homepage can grab your customer’s attention, a well-placed call-to-action (CTA) keeps it. The key to successful conversion is keeping it simple. Homepages sit at the top of the marketing funnel, so having a basic CTA like “Book an appointment” will do wonders for your conversion rate.
‍ - Add forms to high-performing pages: Some pages or blogs in your site may be generating a considerable amount of traffic already. These high-performing pages and blogs are potential lead generators. Take the time and effort to engage with visitors who land on these pages. You can make the content longer, gate it, or offer downloadable templates that visitors can access after submitting forms which request their contact information.
‍ - Offer a “click-to-call” option: Often, electrical contractors highlight their phone number on their website, but only a handful of them add a direct calling option. However, there are several benefits to adding a click-to-call option to the website:
a. It can save your customer’s time by eliminating the need to type in a phone number
b. It can increase customer satisfaction by making it easier to reach you directly
c. It can improve your company’s bottom line by reducing the costs associated with misdialed calls
6. Improve your website’s speed: Your customers will not wait around if your site is unresponsive or does not deliver the information they are looking for quickly. In fact, around 83% of users expect websites to load in under three seconds. Worse, 53% of mobile users will abandon a site that does not load in three seconds or less. When you create your site, prioritize page and site speed. Keep an eye on loading speed by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, it will help you diagnose where your site is doing okay and where it needs improvement.
7. Incorporate chatbots: Are you tired of playing phone tag with your customers? Streamline the process by implementing a chatbot on your site. You will find there are a number of benefits to utilizing chatbots, including:
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a. Chatbots can provide 24/7 customer service, assisting visitors with inquiries about your services
b. They can also help to generate leads, by passively engaging with website visitors and collecting information such as contact           details
c. They can help boost conversion rates by guiding visitors through the buyer journey and making personalized           recommendations along the way
Embrace local SEO
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your electrical business’ online presence. It will help attract more customers who are searching for electrical contractors in their area. This helps ensure that your Google My Business profile appears when people in your area search for an electrical contractor using the terms, “electrical contractor near me” or “best electrical contractor in [your city].”
Out of all Google searches, nearly 46% of them are looking for local information, which clearly indicates the importance of being visible in local search results. You can begin optimizing the business for local SEO in a number of ways:
- Claiming your Google My Business listing
- Optimizing your site for local keywords
- Listing your services in local directories
- Publishing high-quality local content
- Promoting area-specific offers and deals
Leverage social media channels
Creating and managing your brand channels on social media is vital. It is not only because buyers turn to social networks when researching a contractor’s quality and reputation, though you certainly should not overlook that. With a little careful planning, you can leverage your social media channels in a way that shared content helps to build trust with your audience.
First, find out where your potential customers are and make meaningful connections with them. You can either join groups or send out personalized connection requests. Once you form a connection, share quality content and valuable insights regularly. Building your network in this way will help create strong ties. Later, you can use these relationships to influence your network through shared content, sometimes turning followers into customers.
Monitoring forums is another good strategy. By keeping an eye out for people searching for your services, you have the opportunity to catch people early in their research. If someone has an active need, it is unlikely they will frown on your reaching out with a sales pitch or connection request.
To find new opportunities monitor keyword phrases like “I’m looking for” and other long-tail keywords. Use keyword phrases like “best electrical contractors” or “electrician recommendations” to find customer inquiries. Just providing information or highlighting your credentials may be enough to turn someone from a potential lead into a paying customer.
Nurture with email marketing
Email marketing is a great lead generation tool. Listed below are some ways you can use emails to generate more qualified leads:
Stick to an opt-in strategy:Â While buying email lists and sending cold emails may sound like the right move, it will likely only end up annoying your prospects. The result can be having your account blocked for spamming people who never subscribed to you in the first place. Hardly an optimal outcome.
But, if you offer email newsletter subscriptions on your blogs and website, you are more likely to have happy subscribers who enjoy receiving emails from you. And with a little nudge, you may convert them to a paid customer.
Send irresistible offers: Offers are one of the most powerful persuaders. And, the core of marketing is making people say “yes” to your offers. Offers need not necessarily be discounts or sales promotions.
You can even offer downloads, educational content, or even insider news which will help your leads overcome their inherent doubt or concern. How do you make your offer the most desirable? When your offer is exclusive, scarce, or in high demand, your customers will find it irresistible.
Encourage recipients to share: Do you remember the saying “snowballs start with a snowflake”? It applies to newsletter subscribers too. So, don’t forget to include social sharing options in your emails which will help your prospects easily share your content and offers with their friends and family. By adding a “forward to a friend” link in your emails, you can subtly encourage your prospects to pass it on.
Attract more customers with online ads
Online ads are an important part of the lead generation process. By targeting potential customers with relevant ads, electrical businesses can increase their leads and conversions. Listed below are some steps involved in creating a catchy online ad.
Understand your audience:Â The first step in creating a successful ad is making sure your ad is relevant to your target audience. What are their interests? What problems are they trying to solve? Your ad should be able to answer these questions and speak to their needs.
Include a call to action:Â What do you want your prospects to do after they see your ad? Do you want them to call you directly or book an appointment? Whatever action you want them to take, make it easy for them to take the next step with a clear CTA.
Track your results:Â Careful analysis of your click-through and conversion rates is an important step in any campaign. Without following up on your most significant statistics you have no real awareness of your ROI and it was a reasonable expenditure of resources. Tracking your results is necessary to judge what works and what needs to change.
When investing in paid advertising, there are three main types of pay-per-click ads—social media ads, paid search ads, and display ads. Advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is different from the display and paid search ads.
Each ad type is found in different places, allowing you to target a different type of traffic. Social media ads are shown to users on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, display ads are shown on websites that users visit (outside of social media), and paid searches are shown on search engine results pages.
While both display and paid search ads are designed to blend in with surrounding content, social media ads are distinct in that they typically try to be more eye-catching and attention-grabbing. Social media tend to be the least expensive of the three, however, they may not reach as wide an audience.
On the other hand, social media ads allow you to target very specific audiences using targeting options like interests, demographics and behavior. With respect to the ads themselves, social media ads allow for more creative options in how to tell your story. Videos and image carousels are commonplace in social media ads which might be welcome news, depending on your goals for the presentation. If you are looking to target a very specific audience, social media is a great option for your advertising dollar.
Conclusion
Optimizing your marketing strategy for lead generation may look simple, but there is more to it than just making sure you have working forms with an exciting CTA. Leads are not going to pour in until you do the work to clean up your website and social media presence.
For most electricians, a more strategic approach may be appropriate when tweaking their lead generation process. While this article discussed the role that website optimization can play, we talked about using email and social media as touch points as well. Do not underestimate email, but avoid abusing it.
When engaging in a social media strategy make sure you are checking your most valuable statistics and revising based on the results. Hopefully, you now have a better sense of lead generation and how it can apply to your electrical business. Get started with your lead generation process and let us know if you run into any hiccups!
If you are an electrical business enthusiast, keep an eye out for our electrical blogs.
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