Whether you’re running ads on Facebook or a local billboard, the success of any electrician advertising campaign is measured by how many new clients it brings in. In 2019 alone, electrical services companies spent over $62 billion on advertising to get their company seen by potential customers.
But not all your campaigns will perform equally. While your competitors are still guessing which of their marketing efforts work best, you can see which ads drive the most calls and clicks and use that data to optimize future ads to bring in more customers and generate more electrical leads.
Speak your customers’ language thanks to Conversation Intelligence
One of the simplest ways to engage potential customers is to describe your services the way they would — not how you’d describe them in technical terms. CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence can help you do this. It works by recording and transcribing your phone calls and then uses artificial intelligence to analyze them and identify relevant keywords related to your service. It shows you the words and phrases your current and potential customers use to describe their electrical needs and home improvement projects.
For example, if a customer has a faulty light switch or power outlet, they’ll tell you they’ve seen “sparks,” “flickering lights,” or heard a “popping noise.” If you’re using Conversation Intelligence, you can pick up on these nuances to create more targeted messaging to use in your ads or on your website to describe your service offerings.
And it doesn’t stop there. Insights from Conversation Intelligence can also help guide your marketing strategy, enabling you to create ads and landing pages that are relevant to your target audience. With more targeted language, current and potential customers are more encouraged to click on your digital ads or pick up the phone when they get your flyer in the mail.
Conversation Intelligence can also help you make the most of your advertising spend by improving keyword bidding strategies for your pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Rather than scrolling through endless call transcripts to see how customers describe your service, Conversation Intelligence generates a word cloud report to help you visualize the words and phrases they use most often.
Use CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence to generate a word cloud report to see how customers talk about your business.
This is your secret weapon for making the most of your paid ads: You can more accurately predict what potential clients will search for online, so your ads show up in their Google search results or on social media when they’re looking for an electrical contractor.
Follow-up faster with Automated Responses
If you miss a call, rather than leaving potential customers hanging, you can set up Automated Responses to keep new leads warm while they wait for you to follow up and book an appointment or provide a quote for their job.
If someone contacts a company by telephone, 64% of people expect an instant response, and 31% expect a response in less than 24 hours. But if your ads are generating lots of clicks to your website and encouraging potential customers to get in touch, you’ll likely get most of your incoming emails and phone calls during business hours. Unfortunately, that’s when you’re most likely to be in the middle of a job, and it’s hard for you to drop everything and pick up the phone.
This can be frustrating for potential customers: they’ve taken the time to do their research, read customer reviews and testimonials, and ask friends and family for referrals to help them find a good local electrician. If you don’t answer the phone, they are likely to try a different contractor until they find someone who responds quickly.
Setting up Automated Responses can beat that frustration by sending a text message automatically: if you don’t pick up the phone, customers receive a text message to let them know you’ve seen their call and will call back soon. You can also set up automated responses when someone fills out a contact form on your website to help your customers understand when they can expect to hear back from you.
Use CallRail’s Form Tracking to set up automated responses to missed calls, so when your adverts bring in new leads, they’re not kept waiting to hear back from you.
So when someone sees your ad on Facebook and clicks the “call now” button, you don’t need to worry about stopping in the middle of a rewiring job to answer the call because you know they’ll automatically get a message letting them know you’ll call back later.
You can also make sure customers are getting a prompt response by setting up Call Flows. If you’ve got several team members with different specialties, you can set up call routing so that calls about particular types of job go through to the best person, or if you’ve got an admin team back in the office, you can send calls through to your office team when you’re out on a job.
See where your customers come from with source-level tracking
If you’re running multiple campaigns to generate new leads, you can use source-level tracking to see which advertising campaigns drive the most calls for your business. Source-level tracking is a type of call tracking that works by adding unique phone numbers to your electrician advertising campaigns and then forwarding the calls to each number to your main business number.
This works for online and offline channels — everything from Facebook ads and Google My Business listings to billboards and flyers sent out as a direct mail campaign. For example, you could put a custom phone number on a billboard ad to see how many calls that advert brings in.
Electrical company billboard from 99designs to help the company attract new customers.
You can run reports on your electrician advertising campaigns to see exactly which channels bring in new leads and what those leads are worth:
Call Tracking’s source-level tracking reports show you which advertising channels bring in the most leads.
If you advertise across various channels, you might be spending advertising dollars in places that don’t actually bring in any leads without realizing it. For example, OEO Energy Solutions provides LED lighting solutions for industrial warehouses, universities, sporting arenas, and other commercial applications. When they started using CallRail’s Call Tracking, they were surprised to see which channels were — and weren’t — bringing in new leads:
“For some time, OEO thought leads were sourcing from certain media channels, however since using CallRail, we quickly learned otherwise. ... When analyzing metrics, CallRail told us which sources were working and which were not. Since then, we’ve literally saved more than $100,000 by no longer placing advertisements in the channel we thought was a huge market driver for us.”
With source-level tracking reports, you can take the guesswork out of your digital marketing strategy because you can see which channels bring in the best leads and, therefore, make the most sense to invest more of your electrician advertising budget in.
Keep optimizing your electrician advertising campaigns
Even with all of the tools available to help you make the most of your advertising campaigns, you should remember to review your advertising data every month or two to make sure they’re still performing well and bringing in new leads.
Source-level tracking, automated responses, and Conversation Intelligence work together to help you generate more leads and find more customers from your ad campaigns by creating more targeted and relevant ads and following up faster with new leads. For a closer look at how these tools work together to optimize your advertising and improve your return on investment, get a free demo to learn more about using CallRail for your electrical contractor business.
