The Best Way To Get Leads
The best way to get leads starting out when nobody knows who you are or what your business does, is to first evaluate these two things:
Do you have money to use on marketing?
Do you know any high income neighborhoods in your area?
If you don’t have any money for any marketing whatsoever. You’re going to either have to post in local Facebook community groups or go door to door knocking in nice neighborhoods.
If you don’t know where the mid-high income neighborhoods are in your area, I made this video showing you how to use the United States Postal Service’s EDDM map tool to find the average household income of certain areas.
Once you know the nice areas, hit the pavement and start knocking. You’ll primarily want to knock on doors of clean homes as opposed to dirty homes. I know it doesn’t make sense but there’s a reason the dirty homes are dirty. Usually they aren’t your ideal customers and don’t really take care of their properties.
If you land a few jobs and start stacking some cash, the next step is to pay for some marketing. The BEST form of marketing for local service based businesses is YARD SIGNS. You can usually get 100 yard signs for ~$300 from the website I linked. They come out to $3 a piece.
My first yard sign I ever put out landed me a $378 back patio cleaning job which paid for all 100 of my initial yard signs, which were $324 taxes + shipped. Usually you can get an immediate return on them from one job and make massive amounts of profit.
THE YARD SIGN GOLDEN RULE: Use a simple design that reads in big thick font “PRESSURE WASHING” and your number underneath “(XXX) XXX-XXXX”.
I see so many yard signs with crazy designs that look great but I can’t read a single thing on them. All you want as big as possible is your service you offer and a phone number you can be reached at. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. These signs will get picked up and thrown away every single week by code enforcers for the city you’re in. That’s the game you play. Do not go crazy with the design.
The best day to put them out is either Thursday or Friday night that way they get the maximum amount of eyes over the weekend. They will usually get picked up by Tuesday. I know a lot of guys think it’s a waste of money if they’re going to get picked up anyway BUT if one job can pay for them all, anything you get after is pure profit!
That’s the power that yard signs have. They’re direct to market because the people calling you have money in hand ready to buy. The customer will also be in your target area where you have the yard sign placed. Facebook Ads had an update where you can no longer target people living in an area and now its everyone traveling through an area. This is why you’ll see companies in the next state over showing up on your newsfeed if you or your friends have traveled within the last year. This is why in my opinion Facebook is not as good as it used to be for local paid advertising.
My strategy for yard signs is consistently put them out every single week. For me it’s every Thursday, at least 25 out in a certain city, the next Thursday I’ll go to the next city over, and repeat. I usually will drive up to an hour for a job. If you want more jobs, do this every day of the week, each day go to a different city if you aren’t busy. A lot of people worry about getting fined but usually you will not. If the city does call you, just apologize and say you hired a someone who went crazy with the signs. Ask them where the signs are that they want removed and go pick them up. It usually wont be all the signs just certain ones that either homeowners or businesses complained about. Not as big of a deal as you think. Just don’t put any in the area they complained about.
The best colors for signs based on actual research and data is yellow background with black lettering. The next best is pink background with white lettering. These colors really pop out of the greenery behind them and grab the driver’s attention. You’ll want 18x24 in size minimum.
