Securing a steady stream of high-quality leads is essential for any home improvement business. By implementing the right strategies, such as SEO optimization, engaging social media campaigns, and targeted paid advertising, you can effectively connect with homeowners seeking renovation or repair services.
In this article, we’ll explore seven proven methods to help you attract qualified leads and convert leads into loyal clients.
Understanding Home Improvement Lead Generation
In the home improvement sector, lead generation identifies potential customers, driving business growth and ensuring a steady stream of prospects. Generating home improvement leads involves tailored strategies to connect with homeowners seeking renovation or repair services.
Effective lead generation techniques create a consistent influx of prospects, maintaining and expanding your business. If you are the owner of a remodeling company and have ever tried to buy home improvement leads yourself, you have probably discovered that the quality of the leads you get can be quite low. That’s why I always recommend trying to earn leads naturally through your own website and other marketing channels.
Paid advertising, specifically search ads on sites like Google, can also play a pivotal role in efficiently reaching potential customers and increasing lead generation for home improvement businesses. Paid advertising enhances visibility and attracts the right audience, significantly boosting your chances of converting prospects into clients.
These foundational aspects set the stage. Now let’s dive into the details of how you as a remodeling or other home improvement contractor or services provider can get enough leads to fill your sales pipeline and meet your revenue goals!
Building a Strong Online Presence
A robust online presence is the cornerstone of modern lead generation. With 87% of consumers seeking home services online, establishing a well-managed digital footprint is imperative for attracting potential new customers. Engaging online through various platforms not only enhances brand visibility but also helps in building customer loyalty and community.
Building a strong online presence involves optimizing your website for SEO and leveraging social media platforms. These strategies ensure your marketing generates high-quality home improvement leads and drive organic traffic to your site.
Explore these tactics in more detail below.
Optimize Your Website for SEO
SEO optimization is a critical component of any digital marketing strategy. Using relevant keywords and high-quality backlinks can significantly improve your search engine rankings, driving more organic traffic to your site. Regularly publishing blog posts on relevant topics not only improves website visibility but also increases the chances of lead conversion.
Conducting an audit of your website can help identify areas for improvement and enhance overall SEO performance. Additionally, ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly is essential, as search engines prioritize mobile-optimized sites in their rankings.
It’s important to note that SEO is not something you do once and then forget. It’s an ongoing and, frankly, time-consuming task that requires care and attention. I recommend that if you want to pursue this strategy you find an SEO provider who specializes in working with home improvement companies.
Leverage Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms offer a unique opportunity to directly interact with potential clients and reinforce your brand’s credibility, but you have to have the right approach. Active engagement on platforms like Facebook and Instagram boosts interactions with potential clients and facilitates lead generation, but the key word here is engagement. You can’t just post updates and never interact with your followers and others. Unless you have a big social media ad budget, you have to be social on these platforms, responding to comments, interacting with influencers in your industry, engaging with service providers, and helpfully answering questions.
Photo Collage from Hazley Builders’ Instagram Page
That all takes a lot of time, so many home improvement companies experiment with lead generation ads on social media. This can indeed streamline the process of capturing user information directly on these platforms, but, again, the quality of leads is not always the best.
If you are going to pay for a lead-gen campaign on social media, I recommend a mixed approach, which combines that with organic interactions and perhaps paying to boost your most popular posts.
Utilizing Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a powerful tool for driving targeted traffic to your home improvement business. Platforms like Google Ads can significantly enhance lead generation by reaching specific audiences interested in home improvement services.
In 2024, search and social media ads are projected to be the leading channels for lead generation, with 85% of businesses using them.
I would forget banner ads and other forms of display ads altogether and focus your marketing budget on search campaigns optimized for key conversion actions on your own website: the filling out of your contact form or some other form to download a content offer. Campaigns optimized for web traffic or other interactions just won’t bring you the results you want and are a waste of budget in my experience.
Google Ads for Generating Leads for Home Improvement
Google operates on a pay-per-click model, allowing advertisers to only pay when users click on their ads, which is effective for targeting specific home improvement audiences. Setting a daily budget helps maintain control over spending while optimizing for lead generation.
As I mentioned above, set the campaign objective to lead generation, which will significantly improve ad spend efficiency and effectiveness.
Keywords
SEMrush Keyword Tool Displaying Home Improvement Keywords
Utilizing targeted keywords is crucial as they improve ad visibility and conversion rates, helping you reach homeowners looking for improvement services. I recommend making sure your campaigns are not set to apply “broad match” to all your keywords, as it’s better to get specific to keep your costs under control.
Search terms
A big part of optimizing your campaigns is to look at the Search Terms report in Google Ads and see what users actually typed into the search box in Google that triggered your ad to be shown. Often you’ll find that broad match keywords are triggering your ads on search terms that have nothing to do with what you’re offering. Mark all these terms and set them as negative keywords so they won’t trigger your ad to be shown or you to pay for a click in the future.
Content Marketing Strategies
Content marketing is a powerful strategy for enhancing lead generation by establishing authority through valuable information.
Effective content marketing techniques can significantly boost lead generation by providing valuable information that attracts potential customers. Engaging content captures the attention of potential customers on social media and other platforms.
Local content marketing can also establish you as a thought leader, enhancing community engagement and brand loyalty. To maximize the impact of your content marketing, focus on producing high-quality content that addresses audience pain points and leverages various formats like blogs and videos.
Blogging for Organic Traffic
Blogging is still a highly effective way to drive organic traffic and generate home improvement leads. Producing high-quality, valuable content that answers your audience’s questions can significantly enhance lead generation efforts. A good lead-to-visit conversion rate for blogs typically falls between 2% to 5%, though it can vary based on specific business goals.
Integrating lead magnets, such as downloadable resources offered in exchange for email addresses, is a proven method for generating leads. Additionally, compelling calls to action (CTAs) within blog posts can significantly enhance the likelihood of readers sharing their information.
These strategies create a steady flow of organic traffic and high-quality home improvement leads.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is an increasingly popular and effective way to engage potential customers and generate leads. Incorporating video content can significantly boost engagement, providing a dynamic way to showcase home improvement services and connect with potential leads.
Videos can captivate audiences more effectively than text alone, leading to increased engagement and higher chances of generating home improvement leads.
Incorporating videos into your marketing strategies can help explain complex home improvement services, making it easier for potential customers to understand your offerings.
I’ve found that videos can be a great way to generate ideas for other forms of content. Get a good camera setup and record yourself talking about a topic that’s of interest to homeowners shopping for your services. Then use that recording as a jumping off point to write a blog post, social media posts, or other forms of content. Many people find it easier to get their creative juices flowing by talking than by staring at a blank page and a blinking cursor. You can even use AI tools, like Video to Blog, to generate the outline of a blog post from the video you’ve recorded.
Leveraging Local SEO and Google Business Profile
Google Map Showing Local Searches For Home Improvement Services New York
Local SEO is a critical strategy for enhancing your business’s visibility in search results and attracting local customers. Consumers are increasingly favoring local businesses, making local SEO a crucial tactic to capture this market shift. Targeted web traffic from local SEO strategies helps filter out irrelevant visitors, focusing on those likely to convert.
An optimized Google Business Profile improves visibility on Google Maps, facilitating more phone calls and visits to your location. Using geo-targeting helps home improvement businesses reach local clients searching for their specific services.
Compelling Homes’ Google Business Profile
At Electromagnetic Web, we use local SEO tools like SEMrush to monitor our clients’ rankings for certain keywords at the hyper-local or neighborhood level. We then generate heat maps showing how these rankings change over time. This can help with the targeting of certain areas for certain services and can help guide you in your SEO and content marketing efforts.
Make Sure You’re Listed in Directories
Another local SEO service we provide is to get our clients listed in all the major (an minor) online directories and monitor those listings to make sure they all match and are up to date. It’s amazing how many duplicates and outdated listings are out there, which can harm a local business’s rankings in search engines. Keeping this all up to date is virtually impossible without the help of tools, like Semrush or Moz Local.
Building Referral Programs
Referral programs are an effective way to generate high-quality leads by leveraging satisfied customers. Identifying satisfied customers through surveys is crucial. Creating a seamless experience with clear instructions and mobile-friendly design is essential for the success of referral programs.
I recommend tracking referrals right in your CRM. Create a process to send some sort of gift or handwritten thank-you to the referrer, and be sure to reward your biggest referrers with something special.
Should You Purchase Leads?
If you’re the owner of a home improvement business, no doubt you’ve been contacted (perhaps multiple times per day) by people claiming that they have X number of hot new home improvement leads that are ready for you to call today! Be wary. These leads, if they exist at all, are usually very low quality.
A slightly more updated take on this idea are the big online lead-generation sites, like Angi and Houzz. Sometimes these leads can pan out, and some of these sites do grab some of the top spots in the search results, but you often run into the same issues of the quality of the leads. You can end up spending too much of your time following up with folks whose budget for a home improvement project is way less than what reality dictates.
Who Should Buy Home Improvement Contractor Leads?
I recommend buying leads outright only for the more productized home improvement providers, like window replacement or kitchen cabinet refacing companies. For custom remodelers or design-build firms, you probably want your leads to first visit your website and get a sense of your quality and level of service before filling out your contact form.
Partnering with a Marketing Agency for Lead Generation
Partnering with a marketing agency can significantly enhance your business’s ability to reach homeowners interested in your services.
As the founder of Electromagnetic Web, where our focus is helping clients generate home improvement leads, I will readily admit that none of the above is rocket science. If you are diligent and put in the hours to learn and implement the right strategies, you could implement most of these tactics yourself.
However, most owners of home improvement businesses do not have the time or inclination to take the DIY approach. In fact, most remodeling and other home improvement firms that have a marketer or even a marketing team on staff still partner with a marketing agency to consult and carry out their strategy.
When Is the Right Time to Utilize the Services of Marketing Agency?
I would say that most clients come to us when they have exhausted traditional methods to generate home improvement leads; i.e. word of mouth, mass market advertising, direct mail, sponsorships, local events, and other methods. In other words, they have the capacity to service additional clients and the sales team to close deals, but they simply need more leads. For home improvement companies that have reached this stage, a marketing agency can help bring them into the digital era and generate the home improvement leads they need.
Ready to Get Started?
At Electromagnetic Web, we are experts at implementing lead generation strategies for home improvement brands. We are happy to help you pick out the right tools for your business and set them up correctly for the best results. Please feel free to get in touch if you would like to discuss your options.