Being able to generate leads is vital for any kind of company, and that includes a carpentry business.
Carpentry leads are invaluable for gathering up potential clients and growing your business, but generating leads from scratch can be tough. If you are not prepared, you might not even know how to get sales leads worth using.
Good qualified leads for your carpentry services will make a massive difference to any small business – but how do you generate leads for carpentry businesses effectively?
What are Carpentry Leads?
Carpentry leads are any kind of business connection related to potential customers.
In simple terms, sales leads are the contact you are having with somebody who could become a future customer. They are the initial step of a sales funnel and something that small businesses really need to focus on.
A carpentry business lead could be anything from a follow-up email from a possible client to a customer who is in the market for your services, even if they have not heard of your business before.
How to Generate Leads
There is only one consistent way to generate leads quickly – establish more connections and contact with potential customers.
The more possible clients you can create, the easier it becomes to drum up new business and keep making sales. If you can turn even a small portion of new leads into an immediate sale, then you can walk away with more new clients than you might expect.
The hard part is knowing how to generate leads consistently. Any company can secure a few job leads through an online platform, but it takes a careful small business owner to get carpentry leads on a consistent, stable basis.
Common Ways of Generating Leads
If you want more leads, then there are some effective ways to do it. Many of these offer an excellent way to create more clients, but you need to use them effectively to get the best results.
Whatever strategy you end up using, remember that your company is going to be different from all other companies. No two businesses use the exact same strategy or offer the same services, and that means that the best leads are the ones you earn yourself.
SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of making your carpentry business website more suitable for the ranking systems used in search engines.
Doing this – through a combination of website changes, additional content, careful keyword choices, and multiple other tweaks – can be an incredibly powerful option. Not only does it make your site appear more often, but it allows you to target relevant search terms very effectively.
Using SEO for lead generation can drive traffic to your site and expose more leads to your brand name. This makes it even easier to gather up job leads quickly.
Paid Advertising
Small businesses can sometimes branch into paid advertising to capture leads. This strategy is a very common one, but most companies see great success with paid marketing.
While it is hardly one of the foolproof ways to get more job leads, being able to pay for direct marketing to possible customers has many advantages. In a highly competitive industry, getting more potential customers is always going to make a huge difference.
By advertising your website, you can draw in more customers from relevant audiences to increase your chances of short-term success. With careful adjustments, this can then snowball into a more permanent source of long-term lead generation.
Social Media Platforms
Social media is a great way to communicate with existing clients, but it also gives you a brand-new avenue for lead generation.
Not only can social media be a great marketing platform, but it can be an effective place to gain trust and employ a range of marketing strategies. Even just posting pictures of your own high-quality work can be enough to entice certain new customers.
Beyond that, social media is the ideal platform to respond quickly to questions from your target audience. If you want to get your site out in front of more possible customers, then this can be the ideal way to make it happen.
Email Marketing
While not always used by other professionals, email marketing can be a legitimate strategy. Emails allow you to focus on creating personalized emails to each possible customer as long as you have their email address, giving you a more direct marketing option.
Everybody who gives you their email is a lead, whether they signed up to your site or just registered for a newsletter. However, email marketing only works if you are using good emails.
It is very easy to accidentally annoy customers by filling their inbox with messages that all say the same thing, so you need to keep everything varied. Treat your carpentry leads well – promote a new service or update them on changes to the industry that impact your business, rather than trying to strong-arm them to complete a purchase process.
Word-of-Mouth
Gossip and chatter can be very effective options for spreading the word about your business, but this is not something that you can easily control. Getting satisfied clients to recommend you to their friends and family is not easy on its own.
The best way to make this possible is to offer some reason for them to share your business around. This could be a referrals scheme with a small discount, some kind of benefit for repeated services within the same family, or whatever else you can create.
Negative Responses
Spreading the word is not always a good thing, though. If you have had a job go badly recently, then you want to make sure that nothing about that situation goes too viral – apologize, find a compromise, and use any strategies you can to keep your business perceived in a positive light.
A good example might be if your company accidentally damages a piece of wall in a client’s home. If you pay the cost of having it repaired, you can avoid them deciding to create bad press and spreading the word of your mistake to their friends, family, or even online platforms.
Reviews
Reviews can be a very interesting part of your online presence, as well as a unique method of lead generation. Good reviews build trust, and bad reviews lose you customers – if you are not careful, it is entirely possible for bad reviews to slash your amount of available jobs in half.
Reviews are effectively word-of-mouth but semi-permanent. They provide an example of the services you offer and the experience customers, or website visitors had with you.
Positive
Positive reviews are extremely important, and they provide a lot of leverage over people who would otherwise turn to other companies.
A lot of potential customers base their choice of carpentry business on the reviews – anything below four stars is usually considered to be a bad option.
Negative
If you get negative reviews, then you need to turn them into positive ones.
A review acts as a mini “thought leader,” and you do not want annoyed customers chasing away valuable business because of one small mistake that your company has never repeated since.
The best strategy is to turn that upset customer into a satisfied customer. Offer them something to either remove or improve the review – another free service, a partial or full refund, or whatever else you need to get that review gone.
Site Improvements
Sometimes it is your own website that is the problem. People only trust services if they look trustworthy.
One of the biggest lead generation mistakes you can make is to not update your website. If your other social media channels are all great but your website looks old and barely maintained, potential customers, are going to be turned away.
Customer satisfaction, or even the number of satisfied customers praising your work, does not matter if your site looks awful. A bad website can drive away all kinds of leads before they even form, especially if they suspect your site of being unsecured or full of viruses.
Appropriate Target Audiences
It would be best if you chose the right target audiences for the leads you want – and the areas you operate. It is far too risky to chase leads that are out of your league anyway, especially if they are leads that you literally would not be able to work with.
Location
It is easy to forget that most businesses have a maximum service area, a vague range where their services meet a limit. If your service area is only within part of your state, then you might not want to generate leads based on the other side of the country.
This makes local SEO and local search results important. Marketing toward a local area is very effective, so a small business owner might choose to focus on their immediate area.
Services
If you do not offer a certain service, don’t try to build leads related to it. You will set a bad example, bring irrelevant traffic to your website, and potentially get penalized in terms of SEO for misleading customers.
Marketing your website to leads that you are not even able to satisfy is also going to give you a bad name.
Beyond that, it could even be illegal. If somebody requires crown molding and your ads specifically market that you do crown molding, then you’d better actually be able to offer crown molding if they get in touch with you.
Job Scale
Not all carpentry companies are able to tackle the same scale of job, and that is an important detail to remember.
You do not want to take on leads from major companies if you are not capable of supporting that workload. On the other hand, your company may also want to avoid leads that are too small-scale: a simple job could cost some businesses more than they would be paid.
A Lead Generation Company
A third-party lead generation company can be a great way to gather up more leads passively. While it can cost more than some other options, in theory, it is often cheaper than doing your own lead generation work since you are not responsible for any mistakes you might make.
These companies are often far more experienced in a huge range of strategies, allowing them to promote your website and generate lead opportunities much more effectively.
While doing it all yourself and following expert tips might seem more appealing, it can also be much riskier. If you just want to rank higher and achieve more leads, then going with the professionals is always a better option.
What Next?
With so many strategies and tips out there to follow, as well as a huge range of tools that all offer a new door into countless lead opportunities, it can be hard to know exactly how to keep your business growing.
The important thing is to take your time and plan out your own strategy. There is no ultimate guide to building leads and earning referrals – you just have to see what works for your business and what does not.
The way you proceed with your link generation work depends on what you are looking for, as well as the kind of services your company can offer. No two companies are going to be identical, and that means that their lead strategies will not be either.
Moving Forward
Generating new leads is easy, at least in theory. As you can probably tell, there are a lot of factors that make it tougher in practice, especially if you are attempting it for the first time and do not fully know how it all fits together yet.
A business is always going to change as you find new strategies that work for you, and that includes strategies relating to leads. You should never feel comfortable with the number of leads that you have – always push for more if a good opportunity presents itself.
Whatever you are planning to aim for in terms of leads, you should always consider all of your options before you push for a particular solution. The more you plan ahead, the easier it becomes to make sure that you are finding the right leads at the right time.
Useful Guides
Please see some useful guides related to generating more business leads.
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