Which Lead Services Are Best for Your Painting Business?

Lead generation can be a major component to the growth and success of your painting business. However, there are so many different lead generation companies and there are many that fail to deliver quality leads. If all you’re receiving is low-quality leads, you’re wasting valuable time and resources selling to people that rarely convert. Working with the right lead generation service can deliver what you need to make your painting business thrive, so I thought I’d take a moment to talk about these lead services and which ones are best for your company.

Now you’re likely familiar with a lot of these, HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List, Houzz, Thumbtack. There are a number of other ones. So, there are a number of questions that I would ask you regarding where you are in your painting business to get you a good match, and then talk about some things you need to look for.

Is Lead Generation Right for Your Painting Company

First off, you need to ask yourself how mature is your painting business? If your painting business is relatively mature, you’ve been in business three or four years or longer, you really should not be addicted to clinging to lead services to the degree you did when you first started your painting business. Lead services are a great place to start, they are a poor place to finish.

Number two, are you executing your own marketing plans, right? A lot of people get addicted to lead services, and the costs go up and up and up, the quality goes down, and they don’t have a customer reactivation system, a customer retention system. They’re not doing radius marketing, referral route marketing, they’re not going after B2B referral sources and they’re not investing in their own SEO online like they should be.

Because if you think about it, lead services, they just do the marketing. They get the lead, then they mark it up and then they sell it to you, and sometimes two or three other people. So the first thing is, how good have you been at communicating with your past clients, your unconverted leads, and your prospects that you really want? How old is your painting business? And are you doing other things that the lead services are doing that you could do and just directly get the lead instead of going through a middleman?

Make Sure You Can Measure Performance

Now, once all that is out of the way and you’ve really covered the basics and you’ve made sure that you’re blocking and tackling well, you got to ask yourself, if I’m going to use a lead service, how am I going to evaluate it? So first off, make sure that you’re using direct tracking numbers and that you’re using direct tracking, not only phone numbers, but websites. I prefer vanity URLs versus a slash. People end up going to the main homepage, and you don’t really know if that lead was generated by the service.

So number one, you want to be able to track it. If you can’t track it, don’t spend it. Number two, what’s your cost of sale? Is it acceptable? You should be running a 30% cash flow to the owner of the business. So if the leads are getting into 10%, 15% of the cost of the project, you really have to reevaluate. Then finally, are they pitting you against other contractors? Meaning, not only are you paying for this lead that’s expensive, and often the show-up rates are terrible, are they pitting you against someone else? If the answer is, yes, I’d reevaluate that and try to find services that don’t do that so that you have a better chance of really standing out and you’re not competing with low price, cheap painters.

Putting It All Together

So, I hope that helps with lead services. Number one, get your act together in-house, make sure you’re blocking and tackling on everything that’s important there. Then finally, as you do evaluate lead services that you’re going to use, make sure the ROI is there, and if possible, track everything and not get in a competitive situation with five, six, seven painting contractors.

If we can help you with online marketing, traditional marketing, business coaching, just call me, shoot me an email, be happy to help in any way I can.