You’re a pro at tackling dirt and grime—and you know how important it is to keep properties in great condition. But even if your power washing services speak for themselves, you won’t be able to close any sales if you’re not actively marketing your business.
After all, new leads are the lifeblood of your business. Without a constant stream of new leads, your business is a sitting duck. Your revenue and growth will rely on the whims of a target audience that may or may not know you exist. You don’t have any “leads” for sales to go to. So, what do you do?
The answer is simple: You build a lead generation strategy. Lead generation builds visibility, credibility, trust, and interest from your target audience. It’s all about warming up potential customers to your business and getting them on the path to eventually make a purchase.
With the right power washing marketing strategies in place, you’ll be able to spend more time in the field while your lead generation strategy does the hard work for you. Here’s how to get pressure washing jobs and turn them into a constant stream of customers so you can keep doing what you do best.
In today’s digital age, consumers have everything they want at their fingertips. In fact, 93 percent of consumers used the internet to find a local business in 2020—up from 90 percent in 2019. As more younger generations become homeowners, experts predict that the digital landscape will become even more critical for the customer journey.
To get new leads, you’ll need to capitalize on local searches. Most customers don’t have a specific company in mind when they start their search, making top search results prime candidates for their selection. And if a local homeowner clicks onto your website, they’re likely to convert—78 percent of local searches on a mobile device lead to a purchase, and as much as 88 percent of consumers who search for a local business on a mobile device will reach out to that business within 24 hours.
How can you get your business to show up in local searches? To harness the power of SEO, you’ll need to create a plan to target the terms they use while searching. Start doing keyword research to discover the phrases your target audience searches for at the top of the sales funnel. Then, target those keywords throughout your web content by:
For pressure washing companies, using the combination of “keyword + city” is a common practice. For example, if you’re a Denver contractor trying to drive organic traffic to your window cleaning landing page, “window cleaning Denver” is a good place to start.
Basically, you’re doing keyword research to find terms that customers will use to search for your business. If you’re not sure how to start—or you don’t have time to spend at a desk sorting through keywords—working with an experienced marketing partner can help you start optimizing your marketing efforts.
Regardless of your business goals, make sure you’re staying up-to-date with SEO best practices and algorithm changes. SEO isn’t a short-term fix—it’s a long-term strategy that you’ll continually need to update to stay at the top.
Search engines regularly “crawl” websites to evaluate their content, so your goal is to create more valuable content than the competition for specific searches. By regularly repurposing your content and sticking to a content calendar, you’ll bring your business one step closer to the top of Google’s search engine results.
Sometimes, your SEO efforts just won’t be enough to generate new leads. You can work on SEO for months, and your pressure washing website still might not get the organic traffic you want. SEM, on the other hand, is more within your control because you’re choosing the keywords and paying for the ads.
The best part? SEM is just one of the few areas where finishing in second or third can be just as impactful as finishing first. Even if you’re not landing in the top spot, most search engine users are considering second- and third-place position PPC ads just as seriously as they would first-position ads. It all boils down to well-written ad copy and a compelling CTA.
Regardless of your marketing budget, here’s how to start generating more qualified leads with paid search.
No paid search campaign can succeed without the right keywords. In a saturated market, you need to constantly refine your keyword strategy to make the most of your marketing budget. Starting small—with a list of keywords more likely to convert—might be the smartest move depending on your budget and search volume.
Then, you have to consider the math: How competitive is this term? How much are you paying per click?
Generally, keywords with higher CPCs are more competitive. To lower PPC costs, you can improve your quality score at the keyword level, refresh your ad copy, or target more affordable keywords.
We know—it’s tempting to write ads for the highest CTR possible, but you need ad copy that will drive potential leads to your website. You want to qualify each lead before they even click. This way, every click you pay for will be more interested in your power washing services. The ideal ad features text and headlines similar to the landing page it leads to.
Of course, qualifying leads requires understanding what calls to action and offers your ideal leads really want. When you tweak ads to the point where only ideal leads are clicking, you’re significantly boosting your lead quality. Just don’t forget to refresh your landing pages with great copy to back up your ads.
Our clients love programmatic advertising because it helps them hit the ground running in the primary seasons for their business. With programmatic, you can tweak your ad campaign when the weather is cold and rainy. Then, when the forecast calls for warm temperatures, you can ramp your ad campaign up to start targeting local homeowners.
For example, The Gutter Boys and Pristine Clean—both owned and operated by the same management company in Northeast Ohio—utilized programmatic media to respond to the current weather in their service areas. They took their pressure washing expertise—that less people schedule appointments during colder seasons—and used it to their advantage, focusing their ad spending on the warmer season.
Programmatic ads are a great way to extend your reach. Because you can create them quickly, it’s easy to optimize your PPC campaign based on upcoming weather conditions. If it’s going to snow next week, put your campaign on pause. Is the forecast calling for warm, sunny weather? Turn your campaign back on at a specific date and time and watch the calls pour in.
To understand how your paid search campaigns are performing, you’ll need to track performance all the way through the sales funnel—and we’re not just talking about Google Ads and Google Analytics. When you integrate Google Ads with your CRM, you can start tracking exactly which keywords generate leads and which keywords spend without performing.
With over 2 billion active users on Facebook, 1 billion on Instagram, and 330 million on Twitter each month worldwide, you really can’t go wrong with social media marketing. In the United States alone, 82 percent of the population uses social media. Your customers are already scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—you just need to find the right strategy to reach them.
Social media is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience, engage with potential leads, build credibility, and drive conversions. Marketing on social media isn’t just a trend anymore—it’s a proven pressure washing industry technique. Your competitors are already doing it, so what’s stopping you?
Whether you abandoned your Facebook page a few years ago or you’re struggling with engagement, here are some tips for generating qualified leads on social media.
Before building your social media strategy, take a step back and see what your competitors are doing. Are your biggest competitors running successful social media accounts? What kind of engagement are they getting? What types of content are they posting?
By asking yourself these questions, you’ll get a better picture of what’s working—and what’s not working—in the power washing industry. Then, you can figure out where your competitors’ strategies are lacking. In turn, you’ll be able to create a powerful, value-oriented lead generation strategy that sets your business apart from the competition.
Who are you trying to reach? If you’re not targeting the right people, you risk wasting valuable time, money, and resources on social media posts and ads that aren’t going to generate any results. Identifying your target audience is a critical step for any marketing campaign, because without a target audience, you won’t be able to create relevant content for them.
Throughout every stage of your social media campaign, your number one priority should be targeting your content and messaging to your target audience. So, start brainstorming about your target demographics. What does your ideal customer look like? Get as specific as possible by narrowing your ideal customer by their age, gender, income levels, location, and interests.
It’s not enough to just target the right people. You’re going to need to capture their attention with compelling, engaging content. How can you cut through the noise and get noticed by local homeowners?
When it comes to lead generation, your website is the homebase of your power washing business. Even if you’re just starting to build your power washing website from the ground up, you’re going to need to invest in your website to guide potential leads down the sales funnel and encourage them to take action.
After all, your social media posts should be redirecting users to your website. Your PPC ads and SEO efforts are hard at work to drive organic web traffic. Your website is the home of your blog posts, landing pages, FAQ page, and contact page. So, how can you use your website to start generating leads?
With so many local homeowners searching for businesses on their smartphones, a mobile-optimized website is non-negotiable. If a potential lead lands on your website via mobile, you need to create a seamless experience from start to finish. And if you’re making customers work too hard to navigate your website on mobile, you’re driving them straight toward the competition.
After potential leads click onto your website, they’ll take note of your web design, how easy your website is to navigate, and how detailed your landing pages are. Your website impacts consumers’ perception of your pressure washing business, so you want to impress them with a thoughtful website design.
Think of your website as a strategic tool to tell your brand story, highlight your expertise, and stand out from the competition. This was the approach we took for the website design for Pristine Clean, a regional power washing company in Northeast Ohio. A professional website will help guide leads through the sales funnel, encouraging them to book an appointment or contact your business.
Prospects expect your website to load quickly so they can find the information they’re looking for without wasting any time. According to 2019 marketing statistics, the first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. So, whether you’ve captured their attention through PPC ads, SEO, or social media, you need to take full advantage of every second of it.
Page speed is essential to keep potential leads from clicking away, but it’s also a great way to boost your SEO. Google’s SEO algorithms use site speed (and, correspondingly, page speed) to rank pages. If your pages take a while to load, search engines will crawl fewer pages, which can take a toll on your search engine rankings.
We get it: you want to fill your sales funnel—and you want to fill it fast. So, why invest your precious time into lead generation when you can just spend more money to buy leads through lead generation websites?
Sure, using lead gen sites like HomeAdvisor and Nextdoor might score you some quality leads, but that’s not going to be enough to sustain your business. First, any leads you’re buying don’t actually know your business. Sometimes, those leads have “opted in” when signing up for something else, and they haven’t actually opted-in to receive marketing messages from your company.
If the leads you’re buying have never visited your website, then your efforts are going to be a waste of time, money, and resources. Chances are, they’re not interested in pressure washing services, and you’re going to spend even more money trying to convert them (hint: it’s not going to happen).
But not all lead gen sites are bad. You might even book some of your biggest projects on them. And if you want to dip your toes in, we’ve compiled the best lead generation sites for contractors so you choose the best options for your budget.
With that said, you shouldn’t solely rely on lead gen sites for every single lead. You need long-term, sustainable methods to streamline your power washing lead generation strategy and keep growing your business.
So, you’re getting web traffic and generating more leads. Congratulations! But it’s not time to relax just yet. Lead generation is only one piece of the marketing puzzle. If you want to get the most bang out of your marketing budget, you’re going to need an effective lead recapturing strategy to stop leads from slipping out of your sales funnel.
In a perfect world, your marketing efforts would generate leads, and each and every one of those leads would become a paying customer. But we don’t live in a perfect world—and a lot can happen from the top of your sales funnel to the bottom.
Lost lead recapturing is all about building relationships with leads, adding value to their lives, and showing them why you’re worth hiring over the competition. From retargeting ads to email nurturing, discover the most effective power washing lost leads recapturing strategies here.
As a power washing expert, nothing beats spending time in the field and pressure washing everything in your path. At the end of the day, there’s nothing more satisfying than blasting away dirt and grime. And the last thing you want to do is sacrifice your time—or other team members’ time—in the field to sit at a desk and work on your marketing strategy.
To craft a powerful lead generation strategy without sacrificing any time in the field, reach out to our team. We’ve partnered with pressure washing companies across the country to achieve their business goals. We have a strong understanding of the challenges you face in generating new leads and finding the time to market your power washing business—and we’re here to help.
