Electricians: Your Cost Per Lead Is Too High (Fix This Now)

Destiny Marketing Solutions specializes in marketing for electricians. Trusted by electrical contractors across the U.S., we help electricians grow through digital marketing—local SEO, local service ads, Google Ads, content, and automation.

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Transcript

Leonard Parker's video recording-1: 0:00

Hey there. My electrician family, Leonard Parker here from Destiny Marketing Solutions. You know what's funny? Most electricians I talk to can tell me exactly what they pay for their truck to the penny, but ask them what they're paying for each lead that comes in. Blank stares. If you're running an electrical contracting business making$200,000 or more annually, but you're still watching your marketing budget go up in smoke. with little to show for it. Stick around because today I'm going to show you exactly why your cost per lead is draining your profits and how to fix it. And I promise by the end of this video, I'll share one expert tip about lowering your cost per lead that most marketing agencies won't tell you because it's too simple. So make sure you watch until the end. Let's be honest about what's happening in the industry right now. Electricians are spending heavily with little return. I've seen contractors burning through thousands on Google ads, pay per lead platforms, and boosted Facebook posts with barely enough quality leads to keep the schedule full. Low quality leads are draining both your time and profitability. Every hour spent chasing down a lead that goes nowhere is an hour you could have spent on a paying job. Meanwhile, rising ad costs make trial and error marketing incredibly expensive. What worked last year at$20 per lead might cost$40 today. And here's the truth. Cost per lead is often a first warning sign in your marketing. By the time you notice a drop in jobs, you've already wasted thousands. The key takeaway here, if you don't control your CPL, your margins and schedule both suffer. So what's actually causing this problem? Four Big culprits I see all the time. First, generic targeting that attracts unqualified leads. You know the type, the want, free advice, three different quotes, and they ghost you. Second low performing channels. Eating up your ad spend that boosted Facebook posts might get you 500 likes, but when was the last time a like paid your bills? Third, no tracking means no optimization. If you can't measure which marketing efforts are working, you're just throwing darts in the dark. And finally, ad copy that fails to connect with buying intent. When someone searches emergency electrician near me, they don't want to see your company history. They want to know you can fix their problem. Now, the key takeaway, most high CPLs are caused by unclear targeting and lack of visibility into what's actually working. Most electricians fall into what I call the quick fix trap. They jump from tactic to tactic, trying the latest marketing flavor of the month. Boost their posts rarely bring serious leads. They might drive engagement, but engagement doesn't keep your crews busy. Pay per lead platforms promise volume, but rarely deliver quality. You're competing with five other electricians for the same low intent prospect. Many agencies sell cookie cutter strategies to sign for any home service business, not specifically for electrical contractors. With your unique services and margins short-term hacks can actually cost your long-term. ROI. By training customers to only respond to deals and discounts. The key takeaway here, lowering your cost per lead requires strategy, not shortcuts. Let's start with proper channel prioritization. Focus on intent driven platforms where people are actively searching for electrical services. So this includes Google Ads. Local service ads or LSAs and local SEO, these should be your primary areas of focus. Social media still has a part in this. You can use social media for retargeting people who've already visited your site, but these are typically not your best channels for first touch lead generation. Because just think about it, if someone is on Facebook or Instagram, they're browsing, they're looking at pictures, catching up with family and friends. They're not really looking for electrician, and so if they see your ad or post there, great, but you're not going to be top of mind unless they see you several times. If you really want to go to where people are searching, search engine marketing via SEO or local service ads or Google Ads is the way to go. Be ruthless about eliminating underperforming vendors and marketing channels that aren't delivering results and reinvesting what's proven to convert for your specific business. You don't need to be everywhere, just where your best leads are actually looking. Next is time to dominate local search. This is where the money is for electrical contractors. Optimize your Google business profile completely. This is the fastest, cheapest way to show up when someone searches for an electrician in your area. So some things that you can do to optimize your Google business profile include. Making sure you have high quality photos uploaded to the profile making sure in those photos you include yourself, your team, and you also include some form of branding. So that could include branding on your, work trucks or work vans. Also, if you have the office space, include the signage on your office, and then of course you wanna make sure that you are optimizing for reviews. So have a regular review system so that you are getting those reviews and uploaded to your Google business profile. Getting into the map pack with consistent reviews and regularly updated content. Run local service ads to get that Google guarantee badge at the top of the search results. If someone is searching and they look at the Google Map results, they'll see your ad there on top of the organic search results. So that's another way you can get that high visibility, especially if you're starting a new with your online marketing strategy. When you're targeting keywords. Focus on location based service specific terms like. Panel upgrade Dallas or Emergency Electrician Phoenix. The key takeaway, the right local strategy puts your business exactly where urgent buyers are looking when they need you most. You need to use data to drive decisions. No more guessing implement. Call tracking with unique phone numbers for each marketing channel and use UTM parameters on all of your links. Track cost per lead by job type not just an aggregate because. What could be a$100 lead for a$500 job is very different from a$100 lead. For a$5,000 job. Identify which ad creatives and messaging resonates best with your ideal customers. Use those more, and then use them on across different channels. Be quick to pause or revise low converting campaigns. Before they drain your budget. If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And with that, I'm gonna take a quick detour here. I mentioned UTMs. These are a you sometimes you might hear this referred to as tracking parameters. This is a way to use different versions of your website, URL, across different channels so that it'll feed all of this data into Google Analytics. So before I get into this quick demo, why is this important? Well, let's say you're running a campaign. It's April at the time that I'm recording this, and let's say you're running a campaign for the spring and you're running campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, you have an email marketing campaign going you're also doing some things offline. Maybe for your offline initiatives, you're using a QR code to get back to your website. Well, fast forward to when these campaigns have run their course. How would you know which performed best if people aren't calling you but they're just going to your website? Well, this is where these UTM parameters can be handy, and there is a free tool. I'll link to it in the description. It's called the campaign, URL Builder, and what you can do here. Is actually create different versions of your URLs and it'll add on a special parameter depending on the marketing channel. I have here a. Dummy website h town electrician.com. Don't go there. I just made that up. Campaign id. This is only relevant if you are running a paid campaign. But for this demo, I'm gonna skip past it. Campaign source, this is what you want to use as the source or whatever is the source of that traffic. So let's say it's a Google Ads campaign. You would use Google here as your campaign source. Let's say it's a email newsletter here instead of Google. You can use newsletter and I. Let's go back to Google. I, I recommend that you use lowercase. These make for friendly URLs. From there go to campaign medium. I. So on Google, you can have different types of campaigns. You can have your Google Ads, you can have an organic search campaign, and you can even have links coming from your Google Business profile. For this demo, I'm going to focus on a Google Ads campaign, and the medium in that case would be CPC or cost per click. It. But let's say if you're running a Google display ad campaign, maybe you are remarketing to people who have been to your website before, but they didn't call for service or call for a quote. In that case, you would use display, but for this memo, I'll use CPC. Moving further down, you have campaign name and the important thing here is that you name this something to where you're. You can do something like spring discount campaign, pretty much the campaign name. You might have multiple campaigns running all at once. Instead of having to figure out which campaign is which, which one is driving the most traffic, the most. Conversions calls form fills on your website. You can also just look at the campaigns. Then you have campaign terms. So again, since this is just a demo, I won't fill in this field and you notice that this isn't required. You can also fill in the campaign content field. So if you are running different versions of your Google ad copy, or if you're doing display and you're running different versions of your creative, you can put something here that will differentiate. Those different copies and creatives. So you can do something like spring copy V one. Only the source medium and name only, these fields are required. You can fill in the additional fields, but those are the only three fields along with your website, URL, that's required. So once you scroll further down, you'll see as you are filling out those fields. This URL builder, it's building A URL that you can use. How will we use this? Well, you can copy and paste that URL, and since we created this for our Google ads, we can copy and paste this and add it to a Google ad destination URL field. And this way, once that campaign starts running. You can use Google Analytics to go in and see how that campaign is performing. And what I like about this is you can look at campaigns across different channels. Sometimes when you're running campaigns on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, if you're in a commercial space, Google and these third party platforms don't, always communicate well. By using this approach, you can get accurate data and you can do a apples to apples comparison between these different campaigns, so you'll know which campaigns are driving and which channels are driving the most traffic. Which are driving the most engaged users. They're spending time on your site, they're looking through your different service pages and which are driving the most conversion. Form fills calls, and if you are set up with a CRM, then you can even track there what's happening. What are the outcomes of these different. Campaigns and channels once someone from your team gets in contact with them. I won't go too much further there because I can, we can talk more about CRMs, but I do wanna shift back here to the, the content. And if you have any questions about that, feel free to leave it as a comment here on the video or feel free to reach out to us and we can assist you with that setup. Going back here to the content. Next, you want to focus on improving conversion rates, not just improving traffic. It's great if a campaign or a marketing channel is driving traffic. But who cares if it's not leading to any good outcome for your business. You wanna make sure that on your landing pages and across your website, your call to actions are clear and friction free. This is something that I see many electricians miss. Reducing cost per lead is not always about getting cheaper clicks. It's about converting more of the clicks, the traffic that you already have. Just think about it. Let's say if the average conversion rate for a electrician website is 1%, that means that out of 100 people that visit your website one of those visitors is going to call or fill out a form to get more information or to request a quote. If you were to triple your conversion rate to 3%, so instead of one person. Calling three people call that can really have an impact on your your bottom line, your revenue and you didn't have to drive more traffic to your website. You just took the traffic you already had and you made tweaks optimize your website for conversions and were able to take more advantage of the traffic. You also wanna make sure that your call to action are clear and friction free. Don't make people hunt for your phone number or fill out complicated forms. So best practice there. Have your phone number big and bold in the top right of your website, and have that visible on every page. This way it's going to follow the typical line of sight when someone lands on a website page. Usually people are going to. Read the content on the page in an F shaped pattern. By you having that phone number in your top right that's gonna be the first line of sight for that website visitor. Use trust elements prominently so your license information. Your reviews, your certifications, and any guarantees that you offer should be easy to find. One thing I see regularly on electrician's website where you might include the license, your license information in the footer at the very bottom of the site, have that more prominent. Ensure your website works perfectly on mobile since that's where most emergency searches happen. Just look at your site on your mobile phone. If you have some friends or family or employees and especially if they have different types of mobile phones have a look on their phones to see how your website renders or displays on these different screen resolutions and devices. Run ab tests regularly on your headlines and call to action to continually improve performance. AB testing, let's just say you have one version of the ad. So that could be your version A. You have version B of an ad. Maybe in those ads you're using two different pictures. Run ab tests or run a test on those to see which version outperforms the other. There's always something to test but you wanna make sure that you are receiving enough traffic or giving that test enough time to produce data that you can actually take action on. Reducing cost per lead isn't always about cheaper clicks. It's about better conversion of the clicks that you're already getting. That's the key takeaway here. You don't wanna just generate leads, you want to convert them as well, obviously. Even the best lead generation system is worthless if you don't convert those leads into jobs. Make it a practice, make it a habit. Respond to lead requests in minutes, not hours. If you have a team, make sure that you train your team. To ask the right questions fast, quickly, qualify that lead so that you can continue to nurture and communicate if it's a qualified lead, or you can direct them to a better fit maybe on a referral basis if you're not able to address their need. Train your staff to ask those questions as quickly as possible, they should be answering that call or responding to emails within minutes. Use automated follow-up sequences to stay top of mind with leads who aren't ready to buy immediately. And you wanna create a seamless path from that first call or touch point all the way to the quote and booking. So, and this is something where you can test it, you can have mystery callers call in and see. How your team is answering the phone. Are they answering the questions as you would like them to? And are they directing that caller to the best next step? It never fails to amaze me that I've worked with clients where we're generating calls, we're generating, you know, traffic and form fills, but. Initially, we are not able to connect those calls to book jobs or even jobs that go into the next stage where. They are being requested a quote. And usually what we find is that it's how the team member is answering a phone. Maybe they're not in a good mood. Maybe they are taking too long to answer. This can be an opportunity to train your team so that you are making best use of those leads. The fortune isn't in the follow up, it's in how fast and how well you do it. So remember that. This systematic approach is what we call the full circuit growth method. If your cost per lead feels unpredictable, bloated, or just plain frustrating, then It's time for a smarter approach. We offer a full circuit growth audit, and it shows you exactly what's working, what's wasting your budget, and where you're leaving money on the table. In just 30 minutes, you'll walk away with a clear plan to lower your cost per lead and start generating higher quality leads without the guesswork. This method takes you from a lack of qualified leads all the way to your dream outcome during a proven. Step-by-step process. Getting found by the right clients, converting more leads into projects, knowing what's working, and ultimately reaching your business goals. As I mentioned I'm the founder of Destiny Marketing Solutions. Our goal is to help electricians cut waste, attract better leads, and build marketing systems that scale. If you're an electrical contractor doing at least$200,000 in revenue annually, and you're serious about cutting waste while growing smarter. Book your full circuit growth audit today. You can visit us here at our website, destiny marketing solutions.com. The link will also be here in the description or if you prefer to talk to a real person right away. Call us at(888) 846-4937. We're based in Houston, Texas. However we serve electricians nationwide. Remember, you don't need more marketing noise. You need a system that works. Now let's build that system together. As I promised, I want to leave you with an expert tip, and that tip is cost per lead is more about, is about more than just ads. It does, has nothing to do with ad platforms or keywords. Before you even get to that point, you want to analyze your different jobs, the different services that you offer, the service mix and close rate, and this can, these can all dramatically affect your true cost per leap if you're selling the wrong services, or better yet, if you're promoting with ads, the wrong services. Maybe those services that you rarely close or where you have razor thin margins, even great ads won't save you. In fact, ads will just add to the expense and cut into that margin even more. The fastest way to lower your costly sell more of what you already close best, the most scalable campaigns are built around what already works in your business, not what some marketing agency thinks might work. You know, in electrical work, we always say the best solution is often the simplest one, and it turns out marketing works the same way. Again, I'm Leonard Parker from Destiny Marketing Solutions. If this video help you, give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more practical marketing tips for electrical contractors, and drop a comment below, letting me know what is your biggest cost per lead challenge. I personally respond to every comment. See you in the next video.