The New New Step – 5 Tips for Improving the Leap From Offline Marketing to the Web

Lead generation used to be a much simpler world for home improvement dealers. When homeowners saw an ad for windows in the newspaper, they tore the ad out and called the phone number. If they got a direct mail piece, they returned a reply card. Or if they heard a radio ad, they probably went t the yellow pages to find out how to contact you.

Then the Internet ’happened’ and turned the whole model on its ear.

5 Lies the Yellow Pages Tell About Online Home Improvement Lead Generation

As I listen to home improvement dealers across the country talk about the Internet, one of the most consistent questions I get is about online marketing programs from yellow page directories.  So here is the list of the 5 biggest lies I’ve heard the online yellow page directories tell about home improvement lead generation:

1) We Get More Traffic than Google!
This one always makes me laugh.  Through either extreme contortion, the twisting of the facts or just plain ignorance, sales reps will claim that “We get more traffic than Google!”

Home Improvement Leads: Starting with the End in Mind Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, I told you about one of the unwittingly smart things that we did as a new home improvement lead generation company.  We chose to provide branded, exclusive leads to our home improvement clients.

The 2nd unwittingly smart thing was did was to totally and completely ignore our competitors.  What? Ignore your competitors? Isn’t that the dumbest thing to do when you’re starting a new business?

Blind, Non-Exclusive Leads

Maybe. But it wasn’t in our case. Why? Because as it turned out, most of our competitors didn’t sell branded leads, or exclusive leads. They sold what I call “blind, non-exclusive leads”