Too many contractors and home improvement websites focus exclusively on the bottom of the sales funnel. Don’t let the need for short-term leads hurt your long-term lead generation and growth strategy.
If your home improvement website is totally focused on bottom-of-the-funnel lead generation offers, you might be hurting your long-term goal of consistent, qualified web traffic that feeds the top of your sales funnel.
Many of the contractor sites we see these days focus exclusively on special offers targeted to prospects that are ready to buy now. But, there’s literally no useful content targeted to someone looking to buy next quarter, or next year.
Not only is this a short-sighted strategy, I suspect it may cost these contracting companies more money in pay-per-click advertising than necessary.
Home Improvement Contractors that focus solely on the bottom are missing out
If your website is solely focused on short-term lead generation, it lacks the depth of quality informational content needed to attract high volumes of high-quality traffic. In other words, your website isn’t interesting enough to generate organic (free) traffic, so you must pay for clicks and then bribe them to fill out forms with discounts and limited time offers.
Aside from hurting your SEO strategy, I believe this short-term approach also hurts how you position your company in the marketplace. When you ignore the rest of your discovery and decision-making prospects, you limit all the ways you can compete for their business. It forces you to position your company as the “cheaper” or “faster” option.
What if, instead, you had nurtured a buyer from the very first day they started thinking about their dream bath or kitchen? By the time they’re ready to meet with your sales rep, your whole digital marketing strategy has been working hard to establish your company as the expert and the premier option.
These well-nurtured prospects have watched your videos, received your emails, downloaded tip sheets and lusted over your online before and after gallery for months. Now, in their mind, you’re the vendor to beat. And for many of those prospects, price is not their primary motivating factor. Doesn’t that sound like a better lead?
Yes, it takes a lot of effort to create great content and set up automated drip cycles to follow up with those long-term leads. But, when your digital sales strategy supports your entire sales cycle, you can be confident that your marketing program is designed to produce leads today, tomorrow, next month and next year.
By focusing only on lead-gen content, the site may be missing a huge opportunity to provide helpful information designed to drive interest, increase awareness and educate prospects. Non-gated assets, general information and educational content help these top-of-funnel visitors. These people now know your brand and your website, and they are likely to return as they continue their journey.
Furthermore, general content is required to support a robust SEO program — a program that reaches prospects across all phases of their research and buying process.
