Effective lead generation tactics for small businesses

Every small business has its own set of difficulties. The limited budget and the cut-throat competition usually mean that you have to be extra crafty when making decisions and putting them into practice. This is especially true for customer management, marketing and lead generation. So, to help you out, we’ve come up with effective lead generation tactics for small businesses. And to help you understand them, we will go over lead generations in general, and what it usually entails for small businesses.

Small businesses and lead generation

The most straightforward way to consider lead generation is that it is acquiring potential customers. Some of your leads will become actual customers, also known as conversions. Out of those customers, some will come back to do business with you, if they need further moving service. The percentage of customers that do come back is called the retention rate (the number of customers you are able to retain). As you can imagine, you want both the number of leads, the number of conversions, and your retention rate to be as high as possible. But, unfortunately, this is easier said than done. As a small business, there are a couple of major obstacles you will likely run into.

Small budget

All small businesses have a humble marketing budget. This is not to say that they don’t want to invest in marketing or that they don’t understand the value of it. It’s simply that they cannot commit half of their budget (as large companies do) to marketing. This puts them in a difficult situation where they need to find non-mainstream ways to market their business and gain traction with their audience.

Strong competition

While before small businesses could hope to only focus on their local area and avoid competition, this is simply no longer the case. Large moving companies have a substantial reach. Therefore, they can easily provide service to a distant area, and market themselves for being able to do so. As you can imagine, this influx of competition doesn’t bode well for small businesses as it can be difficult to fight with the big guys. But, fortunately, there are certain tactics you can use to beat the odds.

Lack of experience

And, finally, one of the main obstacles for small moving companies is that they have little to no marketing experience. Most company managers are former movers who decided to set up their own company. And, as such, they probably have little idea of how to tackle clients or marketing. This is why there are companies like MoversTech offer client relationship management software for movers. But, even with the right software, you still need to do a bit of research and gain experience as you go along.

Lead generation tactics for small businesses

So, with that in mind, how are you as a small business supposed to generate leads? Well, there is no magic solution. There are only tactics that may or may not work on your customer base. So, to help pick the right ones, we suggest that you study your customers and see what they need out of your moving company.

Focus on your customers

This is, actually, the first tactic that you should apply for lead generation. Namely, only large moving can afford to market their business to anyone. Due to their budget, they can create a ton of marketing content and promote it to anyone who sees them. So, instead of competing with them, you need to ensure that your company has a more personal touch. Using CRM email marketing for moving companies does wonders here. By studying your customers you can grow to understand them and their needs. Once you do that, you can orient your marketing to address their needs specifically. This marketing will be far more effective in lead generation than broad-topic marketing that large companies usually utilize.

Make full use of social media

In the modern online climate, you’d be a fool not to use social media for marketing your company. No matter who your audience is, they likely spend a considerable amount of time on one social media platform. While it can take a bit more research to determine which social media platform is most in use, the rough grouping is:

• Facebook – Young and middle-aged parents.
• Instagram – Young professionals and college graduates.
• TikTok – Colledge students.
• LinkedIn – Business owners.

You can, and should, use multiple social medial platforms to promote your business. But, if you plan to only focus on one, make sure that you choose the right one.

Offer seasonal discounts

When you compare your prices to the prices of the big companies, you are likely to come out as more expensive. Due to their size and overall bottom line, they can afford to offer cheaper moving services (or at least services that seem cheaper). But, there is a way to beat them at their game. Namely, what you can do is to use your understanding of your customer base to offer seasonal discounts. All customer bases usually have a period where their need for moving services increases. If you offer seasonal promotions or discounts during that time, you are likely to gain much more leads than your large-scale competition.

Work on your local SEO

The last of our lead generation tactics for small businesses is to simply work on your local SEO. Upon hearing the word “SEO” most company managers recoil. After all, it is a complex, expensive and time-consuming problem that usually involves months of hard work. And while there is moving leads software that can help you, you still need to work on your SEO rating. If your leads are to find you in Google Search results, you need to have a noteworthy SEO presence. So, do yourself a favour and invest in it, even if it doesn’t bring results right off the bat.