Conventional wisdom says that if you want more leads from your contractor marketing efforts, all you have to do is increase your budget.
And although that works, most times it’s possible to squeeze out more leads from the same budget just by making a few changes to your overall strategy.
That’s exactly what we did for one of our customers in the roofing industry, and the results were staggering: an average increase of 63 roofing leads each month from the same budget!
So if you’re currently investing money in Google & Facebook ads and want to learn how you can get more bang for your buck, then keep reading…
Note: This strategy works for all trades, not just roofing.
How we leveled up one contractor’s roofing marketing strategy
First, a bit of context…
A little over 8 years ago, a roofing contractor found us online and hired us as their roofing marketing agency after liking our approach to pay per click.
This roofing contractor specializes in metal roof installation, operates in 3 states, and is not your average contractor.
They’re well organized, have aggressive growth goals, and know how to turn leads into sales.
They gave us a modest ad budget to start, but as soon as the results started to come in, that budget quickly doubled, then tripled, and today we manage a significant amount of money each month for them across all the major advertising networks.
And no, I can’t tell you exactly how much we’re spending.
Now here’s where things get interesting…
With a decent budget, we knew that driving traffic to their website wasn’t going to be an issue.
What really mattered was:
- The cost of that traffic
- The rate at which that traffic turned into new roofing leads for their business (ie: the conversion rate)
From experience, we knew that improving account structure and ad rank scores would take care of the first point.
As for the second point, it became clear to us that if we wanted to improve the rate at which traffic turned into leads, we would have to stop sending traffic to our customer’s website and start building out dedicated landing pages in order to run ongoing conversion rate tests.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Are landing pages really that effective?
Wouldn’t a full-blown website do a better job of converting traffic into leads?
Glad you asked…
The benefits of dedicated landing pages vs. full-blown websites
The main reason for using landing pages over a full-blown website is because they focus on one single objective that matches the intent of the ad visitors clicked on to reach your page.
Also, contrary to a website, every single link on a landing page does one thing and one thing only—get visitors to do what you want them to (fill out a form, click to call, start a chat session, etc.).
With landing pages, you can take the concept of message match (the ability of your landing page to reflect the messaging presented in your ad) to a whole other level.
For instance, take this example of message match:
An example of bad message match
Ad copy: “Save 1,000$ on a New Metal Roof”
Landing page message: “Welcome to ACME Roofing”
An example of good message match
Ad copy: Save “1,000$ on a New Metal Roof”
Landing page message: “Save 1,000$ on New Metal Roof Installs by ACME Roofing”
The second example is much more likely to turn visitors into leads than the first because it delivers the information that piqued the visitor’s curiosity in the first place.
But aside from all these benefits, there’s an even greater reason to use landing pages—the ability to test!
Using a landing page tool like Unbounce or Instapage, we can automatically split up the traffic we generate and send it to different page variations, allowing us to determine which page elements convert a higher percentage of visitors into leads.
Here’s an example of this in action from a roofing contractor we’re generating leads for:
Now if all of that geek speak went over your head, just know that the benefits of landing pages—a single objective, no distractions, better message match, and the ability to test—gradually increase conversion rates and decrease cost per lead over time.
By how much, you ask?
Well, it depends on many factors.
Let’s take a look.
The results: sending pay per click traffic to landing pages instead of a website
Here’s what our results looked like after running traffic to both our customer’s website and the dedicated landing pages we built for them.
Sending traffic to their website:
- Conversion rate: 3.56%
- Cost per lead: $196
Those numbers aren’t bad at all, and in more competitive markets, they would be considered amazing (some contractors are willing to pay $400+ for an exclusive, qualified lead).
Note: Keep in mind these are exclusive leads, which means they aren’t being sold 5+ times as is the case with lead generation websites for contractors.
But even so, we knew our landing pages would do a much better job at turning traffic into leads. And after a few months of testing and optimizing, our hunch was confirmed:
After switching to landing pages:
- Conversion rate 5.77%
- Cost per lead: $121
Now I’m no mathemagician, but I can do basic math.
The use of landing pages ended up reducing their cost per lead by $75.
That means we’re now able to generate an additional 63 leads for our customer each month…from the same budget!
And these extra leads go on to add an additional six figures per month, and seven figures per year in revenue for our customer.
In other words, it pays to test.
And the best part is the optimization process never ends. There are always new headlines to try, content to mix in, offers to run, and page elements to shuffle around in order to continue moving the needle.
Our current conversion rate of 5.77% is the new benchmark, but with a few more tests we should be able to increase it further (which happens fairly often when you have a whole department dedicated to testing).
Over time, we’ll be able to drive even more leads from the same marketing budget, essentially reducing their cost of marketing and helping them grow faster.
That’s the beauty of ongoing landing page conversion rate optimization, and it’s a crucial part of our contractor marketing strategy.
It’s time for you to use landing pages!
From our experience, using landing pages over websites as the destination for pay per click traffic is the right move 95% of the time. There are of course exceptions to the rule, but they are few and far between.
And the more money you spend each month on pay per click to send traffic to your landing pages, the more tests you can run, and the faster you can make significant improvements to your conversion rates (and thus, get more leads for your money!)
Bottom line: If you’re not using high-converting landing pages in tandem with your Google, Bing, and Facebook campaigns, you’re missing out on a ton of additional leads for your business!
