As a local, small business, it’s easy to see all of the competition around you, all vying for the same leads. It’s quite common for small business owners to deal with inconsistent or unreliable lead generation from their online marketing that simply does not help them grow their business. If you are not getting enough local leads to support the growth of your company (not just to break even) we strongly encourage you to seek out help from our team.
Consistent leads for local service businesses are critical. Without reliable leads, you cannot count on having enough work to meet your obligations or to grow and scale your company. You may not be able to build your employee base without knowing you’ll get reliable leads.
Understanding the Causes of Inconsistent Leads
Before you can develop a solution to create more consistent leads for local small businesses, you need to find out what could be going wrong and limiting your success. If you are using online marketing strategies and not getting leads, there’s likely a flaw within that strategy that could be costing you money and opportunities. Consider the following common reasons why leads are not as consistent as you need or want them to be.
Poor Lead Generation Strategy
It helps to have a strong, well-defined, and tested lead generation strategy. If you haven’t created one, that may mean you are missing target customers, not addressing the problems your customers have, or you’re not competing with the right keywords.
Targeting Issues
It’s quite common for small businesses to know their customer base well, but that doesn’t mean you’re reaching the right people with your ads. If your targeting is off, such as not using the right demographics, location factors, or geo targets, that’s leading to costly loss of leads as well.
Marketing Channel Effectiveness
Another factor to think about is the marketing channel you’re using. If you are not using the right one – at the right time – that could lead to a lack of leads, especially inconsistent leads over time. You need to create a more robust omnichannel strategy that addresses all of your target customer needs across all platforms.
Lead Quality vs. Quantity
Perhaps you’re getting leads, but they don’t turn into paying customers. This is another common problem and could be due to a number of factors, including poor targeting or an ineffective sales journey.
Tips to Achieve Consistent Lead Generation
How do you improve your lead generation, then? There are several steps you can take right away to start seeing improvements.
1. Develop a Clear Lead Generation Strategy
It’s more than just placing and paying for ads. Work to develop a clear lead generation strategy that offers:
- Clearly defined goals that are measurable and objective
- A well-defined and structured funnel that helps move leads through from being aware of your company to converting to a buyer
- Test your strategy and make improvements over time
2. Refine Your Targeting and Segmentation
By working to improve your overall targeting, you make any money you invest in your lead generation go further. To do this, consider these specific steps that help you to target the people who are most likely to buy from you as well as to provide you with insight into the right language to use based on who those leads are:
- Identify who the ideal customer is. This is not just a customer who could use your service but the ideal, most likely person to invest in your service.
- Segment your audience by what makes them unique. This could be related to pricing, problem/solutions, or even where they live.
- Work to refine your targeting over time to improve your efforts. Your customers could change over time, and you want to adapt to them.
3. Optimize Your Marketing Channels
Advertising where your customers are really makes a difference. You have to have a good idea of what your customers need from you, what they are searching for, and where they are online. How are they finding the services you offer even if it is not from you? Consider these strategies to help refine and optimize your marketing channels.
- Evaluate channel performance. Make a list of all the channels you currently use to generate leads. Determine which are the top performers. Remember that this could change as you improve your marketing strategy.
- Diversify your channels. Even though you may want to put more of your time and effort into a specific channel, always invest the time in diversifying and branching out.
- Come back and evaluate your channel performance often, even every quarter, especially as your target market changes or your messaging updates.
4. Implement Lead Nurturing Tactics
Not every lead makes a purchase the first time they come into contact with you, even if you have the best service for them. You need to have a method in place to draw them in, encourage them, educate them, and become the industry leader they need. To do this, consider these strategies:
- Invest in email marketing. It is one of the most effective and automated ways to bring your customers back to you time and time again. Email campaigns allow you to educate, inform, support, and guide your customers back to your website, where they can become leads.
- Content marketing is necessary. It allows you to improve your search engine optimization, target specific customer needs, and become an authority in the industry.
- Find out what your customers need and want. Consider a survey or talk to your customers to find out what they need to know from you to make the decision to buy.
5. Leverage Data and Analytics
Data and analytics are powerful resources that provide a window into what your customers need and will react to (and what could be costing you too much money). As you work to build your marketing strategy, it becomes critical to have a way to gather this data and apply it. Consider these tactics:
- Track metrics on a routine basis. Metrics are key performance indicators that help you see what people respond to. This could include metrics on open rates in your email campaign as well as how many clicks ads get and what type of keywords are performing for you. Create some metrics and then track them over time.
- Analyze trends on a routine basis. The best way to reach your audience is to adapt and grow with them. To do that, you need to have a way to use analytics to identify patterns that you can then optimize to further improve your lead generation.
- Update your metrics over time to focus on what is most important. The more you learn and track, the better every lead generation campaign can get for you over time.
6. Regularly Review and Adjust Your Strategy
There is no simple process that works every time without fail. In fact, if you want to build a consistent pipeline for your small business, you absolutely need to refine your process often. These strategies can help you to do that:
- Conduct audits every quarter or more often. Audits provide you with a way to better analyze what happened with each of your leads. This can help you to identify key areas that could be improved upon, perhaps be better strategies or more specific targeted methods.
- Adapt to changes. Marketing strategies change over time, and that means you need to be willing to adjust your strategy to help grow your leads on a more consistent basis.
- Watch your competitors, too. As you begin to see results with your lead generation, that is going to pull more leads from your competitors. The best way to get around this is to monitor what your competitors are doing so you can adjust your own strategies to fill in the gaps.
Each one of these strategies allows you to build consistent leads for local service businesses. The most important part of this process is to constantly work to improve. The internet changes often, so do your customers, their needs, their expectations, and how well your competitors are meeting their goals.
Making the Process of Consistent Leads for Local Service Businesses Easier
This is a lot of work. It takes time away from the tasks you need to do to build your customer satisfaction. Each of these steps helps you to bring in leads, though and can help you develop the consistency that allows your business to continue to grow.
The key is to take action and start working towards your growth. Take a few minutes now to consider where you stand in these particular areas. If you are not hitting your objectives just yet, it may be time to learn about some help that can make that possible.
Take a Surefire Local demo. With our tools, you can accomplish each of the tasks listed here with consistency and with less demand for your time. You’ll get better insight and outstanding results every time you launch a campaign. Attend a Surefire Local demo now to learn more.