Don’t worry; the point of this blog post won’t be to sell you a playbook that promises 10x returns if you just spend tens of thousands and refer to me as a marketing guru from here on out. Rather, my point in writing this is to share the same process our team goes through when devising a lead generation strategy for a B2C service-based business. I’ll present things from a marketing perspective and then allow you to do what you will with that information after weighing it against your particular industry or goals.

Step 1: Reflect and Define Success

First, we need to get oriented. If I’m the Founder of a residential remodeling company and I want to grow my customer base in my existing community or branch out to surrounding areas, I’m going to start by reflecting on what got me to this point. Word of mouth referrals? Knocking on doors? Nextdoor posts? Google? I need to conduct a bit of a cost-benefit analysis and be sure to factor my own time in that “cost,” and not just literal spend. Growth can be the goal, but not by any means necessary. In order to get off the feast or famine wheel, I have to be intentional about where my resources go and have a clearer definition of success. After all, achieving any amount in revenue is only impressive if you made a profit AND don’t burn out trying to do it again next month.

Exercise: List the tactics that have been the most impactful up to this point. Of them, which are scalable? Which can you delegate? Which can you retire? 

Step 2: Customer Research

So you’ve taken the time to reflect on past growth tactics, pulled together some historical data, and are able to communicate what success looks like in the financial sense — here’s when you’re most susceptible to marketing and sales people making big promises if you just try X. And they could be right (I would say “we” but we don’t believe in overpromising and underdelivering), but the real answers at this stage lie with your existing customer base.

Exercise: If you don’t already have this information, it’s time to create and send a simple survey to your customers asking: how they found you, why they chose to work with you, and how they felt about their experience.

Step 3: Devise Your Strategy

We’re confident that the above exercise will yield some excellent insights and may differ from your initial assumptions. Perhaps you’ll find that your team’s performance wasn’t as great as you would have liked, and there’s an opportunity to improve both repeat business and customer referrals by focusing more on operations. Maybe you’ll learn your most profitable customers all stemmed from a specific campaign, or the inverse could be true, and you’ll stop running Facebook ads.

Step 3 is the ideal point to engage with us. We love when business owners are able to recount their journey through the lens of where you’ve been, where you want to go, and why your customers love you. We can take all of the information gathered from steps 1 + 2 and build a plan of action that doesn’t include throwing things at the wall to see what sticks or reporting on Instagram likes when you clearly stated that success looks like 7 new customers each month.

Exercise: Schedule an exploratory with me to get an idea of what this process looks like!

Step 4: Implementation & Refinement

Business ownership can be a lonely road — but it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to do it all yourself out of fear that others just won’t get it right or care like you do. There is a middle ground where you own the role where you have the most impact and entrust other aspects to those who have a solid record of success. Also, so long as you’re in talks with strategic service providers, then hiring a marketing partner shouldn’t feel like a “put everything on the line” type of investment. It’s a process that involves assessing what resources you have (time, talent, money, energy) vs. what needs to get done (list dependent on step 3) and having a frank discussion about what’s achievable.

Bonus Step: Immediate Action

If you were hoping I’d tell you the lead generation strategies to implement without receiving any of the outcomes from Steps 1 & 2, I’d remind you that we don’t believe in overpromising and underdelivering!

However, I can give you a few “if/then” statements as examples that you can apply based on your findings.

1. If the service you offer is more often a need vs. a want, then focus the majority of your marketing resources on tactics that require intent rather than general brand awareness. Examples for plumbers, roofers, electricians, etc: optimizing your Google Business Profile and website for terms that people actively search when the need arises and running Google Search campaigns for those looking for an urgent solution.
   1. *Emphasis on “majority of your marketing resources” in the above example as it doesn’t hurt to provide value to those who aren’t actively looking to buy. In terms of digital plays, consider creating educational content for the homeowners that are preventative-minded. Answer frequently asked questions in details or record a how-to Youtube video. They’ll remember your name for when the need eventually arises.
2. If you received great feedback from your customer survey, then follow up to ask them to leave it as a Google review. Even better, develop a referral program that incentivizes your customer to share your information with their own network. It can be as simple as a 10% discount or a free HVAC tune-up. Create an email campaign that details this information, to be sent upon project completion.
3. If the service you offer is visual aka has an aesthetic before and after, then consider treating social media as your portfolio. Your website may include a gallery or portfolio functionality, but more often than not, shares happen on social media. My husband has received his fair share of “Look at this” messages on Instagram. You can then use a tool to embed your existing content on your website — two birds, one stone.
4. If you find that the majority of your leads stem from a third-party platform (Nextdoor, Houzz, Angie’s List, Facebook groups), then it’s time to prioritize your website. Being reliant on a platform where you do not own the audience is risky business. We’d suggest requesting an SEO audit of your website to see what improvements should be made.

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