The most important thing is going to be consistently maintaining high quality service no matter how big you get and establishing a well known brand. Word of mouth/referrals will spread like wildfire if you do that.
Stickers on your trucks, employees looking professional in uniforms, put your company name on stuff and give to clients (like refrigerator magnets). There is a lot you can do to establish a well known brand in your area. I offer a free service of some kind every time a customer refers someone to us and they commit to our services.
I'm friends with handymen, landscapers, pest control people, and we all refer each other to our clients and we give referral money to each other for the new clients they bring us.
The next thing I would focus on is your reviews. Are you on homeadvisor, facebook, google, etc? Being highly rated with a lot of reviews on these channels gives you a lot of organic traffic (less homeadvisor as it's paid traffic, but still a great channel to use). When my company hit 20 5 star reviews on google, I really noticed a spike in new clients without an increase in my adspend.
I have a "review us" link in my signature for every email that I send out to clients, I give my employees free lunches/dinners and sometimes bonuses for every 5 star review they get from a client, we always ask for a review with an easy to click link when people say nice things to us about our service. I have scripts that I send out to my long term clients offering them a gift card/free stuff and if they would like to leave us a review.
We are always doing jobs with dramatic differences before and after. We have our employees take a lot of before and after pictures everyday. Anytime you do a job and it looked horrible before you started and looked great once you finished, post it up. Shoveling that content out consistently on your google/social media pages is something else I would highly recommend. Not only will it attract cold leads, but it will also convert warm leads to phone calls.
Advertising on google is my preferred over all other channels for local service businesses. Google gets you warm leads calling you right now. Knowing your average cost for each new client you get and your average return on each new client is important though. Tweak ads until your return on your advertising is at least 5x. Once I hit above that 5x mark, I keep tweaking it to be better, but I can scale that ad dramatically to increase sales.
Stickers on your trucks, employees looking professional in uniforms, put your company name on stuff and give to clients (like refrigerator magnets). There is a lot you can do to establish a well known brand in your area. I offer a free service of some kind every time a customer refers someone to us and they commit to our services.
I'm friends with handymen, landscapers, pest control people, and we all refer each other to our clients and we give referral money to each other for the new clients they bring us.
The next thing I would focus on is your reviews. Are you on homeadvisor, facebook, google, etc? Being highly rated with a lot of reviews on these channels gives you a lot of organic traffic (less homeadvisor as it's paid traffic, but still a great channel to use). When my company hit 20 5 star reviews on google, I really noticed a spike in new clients without an increase in my adspend.
I have a "review us" link in my signature for every email that I send out to clients, I give my employees free lunches/dinners and sometimes bonuses for every 5 star review they get from a client, we always ask for a review with an easy to click link when people say nice things to us about our service. I have scripts that I send out to my long term clients offering them a gift card/free stuff and if they would like to leave us a review.
We are always doing jobs with dramatic differences before and after. We have our employees take a lot of before and after pictures everyday. Anytime you do a job and it looked horrible before you started and looked great once you finished, post it up. Shoveling that content out consistently on your google/social media pages is something else I would highly recommend. Not only will it attract cold leads, but it will also convert warm leads to phone calls.
Advertising on google is my preferred over all other channels for local service businesses. Google gets you warm leads calling you right now. Knowing your average cost for each new client you get and your average return on each new client is important though. Tweak ads until your return on your advertising is at least 5x. Once I hit above that 5x mark, I keep tweaking it to be better, but I can scale that ad dramatically to increase sales.
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