Branded lead generation results in free, high quality leads through brand searches and referrals.
The smaller your business, the more likely you’re relying on purchased leads, rather than creating your own leads.
You’ve most likely bought “shared” leads from all the big lead providers—the ones that send your leads to 4 – 5 of your competitors simultaneously. But these are a waste of money, as you already know.
The next logical step is to buy exclusive leads only, and stop buying shared leads…
Now you’re spending all kinds of time searching the vast reaches of the internet for exclusive/pay per call lead providers, but most of them only produce a slow trickle of calls, if any at all. Or they only produce leads for a handful of service markets—which doesn’t include yours.
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
The goal of this article is to present a better approach, so those of you subsisting on purchased leads can get off the hamster wheel and finally create a breakthrough in your business.
Buying leads as your only way to get customers is a race to the bottom and can kill your business.
The biggest problem with buying leads (and this is huge) is that your sales positioning is so weak.
Customers view you as “just another company”. You’re just a price quote. Your positioning can’t get much worse than that!
Here are some more consequences of relying solely on purchased leads, just to name a few:
- You’re constantly price shopped, causing anxiety and hope for call backs
- You have to work too hard to close customers
- You lose customers to inferior competitors that do poor work
- Lower closing rates
- Lower profit margins
- Lost time
After speaking to thousands of contractors and home service business owners, my experience is that most of you are wasting a ton of money on very low quality, bottom feeder leads.
And exclusive, pay per call leads cost twice as much as they would if you had your own branded lead generation systems in place. Fact is, buying good leads from outside vendors is getting more and more expensive. And that’s not changing anytime soon.
That’s why you should never put your business in the hands of third party lead providers.
You need a way to produce your own leads.
But at the same time, very few of you have the marketing chops to build effective, profitable lead generation campaigns.
The ideal scenario is to work with a cost effective lead generation expert.
My large franchise clients like Servepro, Mr Rooter, and Rooter Hero (along with my very successful single location clients), all focus on creating their own leads through branded lead generation.
In fact, established franchises cost so much to buy because they have established marketing systems and brand awareness.
The benefits of well executed branded lead generation (which I’ve detailed on my services page) are undeniable in terms of lead quality, conversions and any other marketing success metric.
If you’ve managed to produce any leads through your own website you know this is true, because your lead to appointment conversion ratio is much higher than even your best purchased leads.
This is because when you create a lead through your own website or other branded marketing assets (that you’ve put some effort into), your unique business identity and vibe shines through. This creates a much more responsive, receptive lead than what lead companies can produce through generic/unbranded marketing.
Good sales and marketing is about the relationship between a business and it’s prospects and customers over any other variable.
Think about when you buy a local service of any kind. You want to know about the owner and the people behind the business—especially how much they care about their customers and their work before you contact them.
Bottom line—it doesn’t make sense to buy generic leads as a primary source of building your business!
Leads have their place for large, growth hungry businesses that already have their own marketing in place. But if you’re not there yet, you should strongly consider building your own marketing systems.
That being said, if you don’t have the time or mindshare and just want fast, guaranteed results, contact me below.
