DON’T GET BURIED IN BAD LEADS
Avoid Spending Your Marketing Dollars On People Who Won’t Buy
By Jeremy Huffman
Do you get the leads asking for an estimate and then don’t sign up because you’re “too expensive” or they were “only shopping around”?
Most of us do. These people suck your time and money dry. They keep you stuck in your current profit and revenue pattern with small margins.
If you entertain these leads too long, you get buried with no way out.
Thankfully, a simple paradigm shift is all you need to crawl out and stay out.
Let’s Do Some Math
Let’s say you have 20 leads reach out to you in one month. If you spend 1.5 hours on average per lead traveling to their home and working up an estimate, that’s 30 hours. If two of those leads turn into projects with an average project size of 6K, that’s 12K of revenue. Add in the cost of getting those leads, and you’re somewhere around 11K of revenue from those 20 leads.
If you’ve taken the time to find the right customer, you’ll be getting around 10 instead of 20. But now, you’ve got 4 people who sign up AND their projects close to double the previous average at 10K. The cost of the leads was about 2K and 15 hours on estimates.
20 leads, 30 hours, 11K revenue
OR
10 leads, 15 hours, 38K revenue.
Do you see how this kind of revenue over the building season can sustain your business through the slow season?
We’ve seen this work time and time again with our clientele.
Axioms To Grind
Take a look at a couple of our most helpful axioms regarding your ideal customer.
#1. Axiom To Remember
The better you know your ideal customer, the better you can advertise to them.
To be clear, advertising in this way isn’t about tricking people, catching them off guard, or violating their privacy. It’s the opposite. It’s focus. It’s intentionality. It’s getting your message to the right people at the right time so you can solve their real problems.
So how do you discover your ideal customer?
Find your effusive customers whose projects fit fantastically with your company. Not those projects where you had to do something way out of your wheelhouse or made very little profit. These are projects where both you and your customer looked forward to working together again.
2. With your ideal customer in mind, get curious.
Ask ALL the questions. Ask observational and philosophical questions. Determine their pain points and why they exist.
Determine your ideal customer by using our checklist of the most important identifiers for advertising. Click the button to subscribe and get the checklist.
As you record these specifics about your ideal customer, you’ll discover who’s qualified to work with you and who’s not right from the beginning.
When you know how your ideal customer thinks, acts, talks, and how they’re motivated, you can start advertising to them convincingly.
#2. Axiom To Remember
You get what you ask for.
For example, if you’re a pool builder in Michigan, and you want larger projects, you need to promote photos of your work similar to what you want. Instead of the project with only a pool, you’re going to show photos of a water feature, paver deck, and pergola alongside the pool.
Instead of copy saying. “Are you looking for a last minute upgrade to your outdoor space? Call us!” You would call out the ideal customer who’s been planning their project for a couple of years: “If you’re ready to put your ideas into action for a spectacular outdoor oasis, you owe it to yourself to give us a call.”
Two Summary Points
1. Target your ideal customer. Determine who that is by looking in your past and asking the important questions. Don’t forget that there’s a checklist of the relevant questions by clicking on the button in the post.
2. Ask for the kind of customer you want.
Targeting your ideal customer will bring your marketing dollars in laser focus. You can save your limited time for those select people ready to take action.
Now that you know your ideal customer, find out how to get your ideal customer’s attention.