You’ve worked hard to build one of the best moving and storage companies in your area. You went out and hired an experienced crew of drivers. You got the trucks. You got the ramps. And you have more duct tape in your offices than most people have ever seen in their lives.
There’s just one thing missing: The moving company leads. And without those moving leads, keeping the lights on can become a real struggle.
For many moving company owners, marketing their business lately has been difficult. Market watchers have been worrying about inflation. Interest rates are higher. And convincing people to part with their hard-earned money has never been more difficult.
That’s why we’ve put together this epic list of tips and tricks that you can use to start drumming up more business today. Keep reading to learn more about how you can get more moving leads, more customers, and more money in your business accounts.
Tips for Getting Quick, Fast, and Simple Wins
When you’re struggling to get more appointments in the calendar and you’re not sure where your next leads are coming from, it’s not enough to say, “We’ll get people through the door in a few years.”. You need to get leads as soon as possible. Here are some tips, tricks, and strategies that you can start applying to your marketing efforts within the next hour if you’re that type of go-getter.
1. Target Your Audience
It used to be the case that marketers wanted to get their products and services in front of as many customers as possible. After all, the reasoning went, if advertising is a numbers game then the marketing team that gets the most eyeballs wins.
While general awareness can be useful in some contexts, the trend in marketing has been to focus on niching down. Why? Because it’s often cheaper, faster, and more effective to look at the needs of specific buyers instead of trying to appeal to everyone.
Here’s an example of what we’re talking about. Imagine that your company is selling chairs instead of moving and relocation services. Although nearly every household and office in America has a chair or a stool of some sort in it, marketing to a demographic that includes “the whole country” makes it harder to put together a campaign that makes sense.
On the other hand, when your buyer persona is “trendy but minimalist-oriented homeowner who loves buying cheap modern furniture” it becomes a lot easier to design and market your product accordingly. This would be in stark contrast to a company with a target demographic that’s oriented towards selling office chairs to traditional law firms.
As a moving company, chances are that you’ve got a fairly refined list of services as it stands. What you need to do next is drill down on who could use your services. Corporate America, with its sensitive data and its need to transport equipment safely, will likely have different concerns from the nice family that’s moving to a bigger house across town.
When you have a clear idea of who will be using your services, putting together ads and marketing materials quickly becomes second nature.
2. Create Profiles on Listing Sites
Unless they already have a specific company in mind, chances are that most of your prospects are going to spend some time browsing around before they commit to an official moving company. If you want to position your company, listing sites and directories are your best friend.
Here’s why:
Businesses with unclaimed listings or no listings are often missing out on high-quality moving leads. People usually don’t spend time googling things like “moving company reviews” or searching through listings in Bing unless they’re fairly committed to the prospect of moving. But if they happen to stumble upon your business and you’ve left your profile blank or they’re not able to see you, they’re going to click on the next entry until they find a company that seems like it’s up for the job.
These listings are often locally targetted and on sites that have the potential to push you all the way to the top of the search engine rankings. And with 25 percent of people clicking on Google’s top search results, that type of visibility can only help you generate more leads. All you have to do is take a few minutes to upload your logo, write up a nice description, and put together a list of sites that will make people say, “Wow! This company is serious about what it does!”.
3. Partner With Industry-Adjacent Businesses in Your Area
Do you have a certain dish in your household that you never buy ingredients for separately? Some people wouldn’t be caught dead buying peanut butter without jelly and a loaf of bread. While others are all about having sugar and creamer to go with their coffee.
Believe it or not, moving is the same way.
When people go to the trouble of finding and hiring local movers, chances are that the moving company isn’t the only company that’s profiting off of the transaction. People have to purchase duct tape, bubble wrap, boxes, and other tools just to move. And that’s before you factor in the renovations and deep cleaning that often go into selling a house or leaving a building.
Are there residential and commercial real estate agents that you can connect with? Does your area have any commercial building owners or property management companies that you can work out an exclusive offer with?
You might have to think outside the box for this one. And the whole idea of pounding the pavement and making phone calls can seem daunting if you’re not used to it. But if you can identify businesses that are in the sweet spot of selling to your ideal customers without being outright competitors, you can quickly acquire leads through the strength of your referral network.
Tips for More Passive Marketing Methods
As a business owner, your time is precious. You’ve got people to manage, customers to deal with, and books to balance. But what if there were marketing methods you could set up once and continue reaping the benefits of indefinitely? What if that initial setup was the only thing you had to do? Here’s our list of top tips for moving and relocating companies who want to take a more passive approach to their marketing efforts:
4. Launch a New Website
Whether you’ve been in business for a few months or a few decades, trust is essential. Why? Because your future leads don’t know you. How do they know that you and your crew will show up on time? If you’re transporting valuables and important items, why should they count on you to handle their family heirlooms and antiques?
In the past, Freelancing Digest has talked a bit about trust markers, or features that are designed to convince your moving leads that they can trust you to help them relocate. For some companies, this may look like testimonials and awards. Meanwhile, other businesses may talk about how they’re fully insured or will showcase their fleet of moving vehicles.
But alongside all of these smaller details, your company website can do a lot to sell people on your services as well.
Think about the last time you’ve purchased a product or a service. If you had stumbled across a site that was full of grammatical errors or that looked like it wasn’t updated, you’d probably need one heck of a testimonial to overcome that first impression. It’s the same deal for your clients.
Your website is your ultimate trust marker. Aside from occasional site updates, you only need to put in the work once. But even as the years go by, your well-designed site will continue to draw people in and convince them that you’re serious about turning your business into a success.
5. Use Branded Images
In some regards, the internet is like a giant game of telephone. A picture or a quote might start off in one place and through the power of virality and social media, suddenly the same image might be posted on a few dozen sites throughout the internet.
And that’s before you also consider the fact that people who are saying things like, “I’m going to move in a few months so let me do my research.” aren’t necessarily going to land directly on your website if they don’t know you. But they might click through and see what you’re about if they’re hanging out on Pinterest or looking through a Google image search and finding your well-constructed infographics or seeing a picture that you’ve posted with a blog post.
If you’re using generic, non-branded images, even if prospects are seeing your pictures and saying, “Wow. This infographic was incredibly helpful.”, they won’t know where to go in order to find you. On the other hand, making a habit of using branded images is the digital equivalent of handing your future clients a map and saying, “Whenever you’re ready, you can find me here.”.
6. Create Strong Content and Have a Blog
When you get right down to it, every moving company under the sun will describe themselves as “moving experts”. But while there are a number of ways in which professionals like yourself can dig into the nuances of assisting with a corporate relocation or with an interstate move, there aren’t as many avenues that you can use to demonstrate your expertise.
After all, the local news may occasionally want to talk about changing locations. And people may be searching for information. But the issue you’re up against is the reality that with a service as time-sensitive as moving and relocation, you’re often relying on luck to reach prospects at just the right moment.
This is where setting up a company blog just might come in handy.
Put yourself in the shoes of your prospect. Maybe they’re in charge of managing the company’s relocation. Or maybe they’ve accepted a job on the other side of the country and they’re looking to bring as much stuff over as possible.
That incredibly relevant blog post you wrote up three years ago is still going to be useful to this person. And in a world where even the very best long distance moving companies don’t always get a legitimate chance to demonstrate their levels of expertise, your company blog is a legitimate opportunity to showcase your knowledge without having to wait for random news cycles or a real estate boom to bring the logistics of moving to everyone’s attention.
Crafting the kind of content that will get people reading, nodding along, and finally saying, “I need to hire this company.” isn’t always easy. It takes skill and expertise to consistently pump out that type of post. But if you take your time and set a sustainable publication schedule, the posts you published last week can pull in leads for years on end. And this is doubly true if you’ve chosen to blend your content strategy with local SEO.
7. Email Marketing
If you were to ask a dozen marketers about their most profitable advertising networks, email marketing would have to be somewhere near the top. If you want to get more bang for your buck, you can’t go wrong with an email list. And as experts in all things about moving, there are plenty of opportunities here for you to transform that ultra-helpful series of blog posts into a lead-generating email sequence.
For instance, what are some of the problems that your customers often complain to you about when you’re loading up the truck? Do you find that a disproportionate amount of your clients are packing items that they should be replacing? Is there a moving checklist that every company ought to have multiple copies of?
Because the window of opportunity for a moving company is often quite narrow, your email sequences are going to have to be quick and to the point. But once you’ve perfected your publication schedule and you’ve weeded out your underperforming headlines, email is a quick and simple way to put your services in front of more customers. And once you’ve found something that works, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Plus, if you offer any additional services or if you expand your operations down the line, you can periodically let your email list know what’s happening or even recruit these folks into giving you referrals. But at the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie. Email marketing gives you a means of contacting leads and customers that you may not have otherwise.
Tips for Active Marketing Methods
Okay. You’ve put your profiles up, you’ve reworked your website, and your pay-per-click campaigns are rocking and rolling. But now that you’ve got a little more bandwidth, you want to have a few more hands-on marketing strategies in your campaign Rolodex. We’ve got you covered. Here are some active yet rewarding tips that moving companies can use to attract more moving leads:
8. Get on Social Media
According to Pew Research, 72 percent of the American public uses social media in 2021. If you’re looking for home buyers, job seekers, and corporate executives, chances are that you’ll find them hanging out on social media. And in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to get people to stay in the same room for more than ten minutes at a time, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make it easier for moving companies to reach multiple people at once.
In light of the fact that social media posts are notorious for their ridiculously short lifespans, it’s not always easy for business owners to see the value of running all of these accounts. But think about it from the perspective of your potential customers.
They’re not professional movers. And they don’t know the industry to the same degree that you do. But if every time they open their Facebook feed they’re seeing you and your company around, guess who they’ll be calling when they need help with their long-distance move?
Plus, posting a short video on Instagram or publishing a tweet isn’t going to cost you anything. All you have to do is be consistent.
9. Respond to Reviews
In 2014, it was estimated that word-of-mouth marketing drove $6 trillion in sales. But in the absence of a friend or a loved one sitting you down, looking you in the eye, and saying, “You would be crazy not to try this!”, most people turn to the next-closest thing:
Customer reviews.
And while nobody reads the reviews expecting to see nothing but five-star reviews and gushing amounts of praise, you can tell a lot about a company from the way that it responds to its previous customers. Case in point, if you’re scrolling through a site like Yelp and you see that the company isn’t responding at all, or worse, is leaving rude and unprofessional responses, you’re a little less likely to hire them.
Conversely, however, if potential customers are scrolling through your listings and seeing empathy, politeness, and a willingness to make things right where possible, the whole “Who would be best to work with?” question becomes significantly easier to answer.
10. Local Ads
It used to be the case that anyone who wanted to be informed about a subject would read the local paper to find out the latest news. With the advent of the internet and the explosion in digital marketing, it’s easy for businesses to forget about the value of placing local ads. However, when you get right down to it, if you’re not pursuing local customers, you could be leaving a substantial amount of money on the table.
We’re surrounded by major corporations at every turn. If you’ve had a soda recently or you’ve bought a new pair of shoes or some ketchup, chances are that you’ve had multiple interactions with Big Business within the past week.
And while there’s something to be said for the effectiveness of major enterprises when it comes to pushing product, statistics show that people like dealing with local businesses. And on an intuitive level, this makes sense. When there’s a renovation or a construction job that needs to be done and you have a choice between the top-shelf general contractor that lives down the street and who understands your local zoning laws and the MegaCorp from out of town, it’s only natural to gravitate towards the person who seems like they’re more likely to “get you” at the end of the day.
Major moves have a way of totally disrupting your whole life. Until the day you’re fully unpacked and settled in, every second of free time is spent on figuring out the best way to pack up your bedroom. As a professional moving company, you probably see this all the time. That’s why every opportunity to build trust counts.
If you can pepper your ads with little signals that let leads see that you understand their concerns and challenge and that you’re a local fixture within the community, it can give you an advantage over your less local competition.
11. Paid Ads
If you have the budget and the capacity to deal with a sudden influx of new customers, paid ads are yet another way that you can pretty much opt for a largely set-it-and-forget-it marketing solution. As long as the ads are paid for, the traffic to your website will keep coming.
Why? Because even if your future customers are in the market for a moving company right now, sometimes you need to bluntly let them know that you’re there, you’re local, and you’re ready to do business.
Depending on who you ask, Google processes over 3 billion searches every day. Although SEO is an extremely effective means of getting organic traffic and attention, Google Ads make it possible for you to pay your way to the top.
Much like writing blog posts or creating a website, you may have to use a little elbow grease to get your campaigns to perform at an optimal level. It takes time to get the ad copy and landing pages right. But once you get the ball rolling, it’s just a matter of watching your expenditures and making sure that your ads stay profitable.
Here’s How You Can Follow-Up With Your Campaign
Fast forward a few months from now. You’ve picked your marketing methods. You’ve found a few strategies that seem to be working for you. And your moving business has picked up quite a bit as a result. Even if you’re thrilled with the output of your marketing campaigns, that doesn’t mean that your job is done.
Marketing is like planting a garden. No self-respecting gardener is going to watch their roses bloom and then say, “My work here is done.”. There are weeds to pull, rows to till, and more plants to water. Here are some tips that you can use to make sure that your marketing campaign is able to keep its momentum going:
12. Always Measure Your Results
This part of marketing isn’t always as fun as the excitement of penning an email and watching the appointments roll in. But if you’re planning to make advertising a key part of your day-to-day operations, it’s important that you take a step back and ask yourself what’s working and what isn’t. And the reasons for this are twofold.
For one, because when you know what’s working and what isn’t, you can make better decisions for your business. If listing sites and directories aren’t resulting in a major lift, that might be okay because you’re not putting hours of your workweek into them. But if you’ve been posting on social media for a while and you’re not seeing much of a return, that’s valuable information to know so that you’re not pulling the plug on the Google ads that were actually bringing in more customers.
Secondly, having a clear idea of what’s working for you and what isn’t makes it easier for you to figure out what topics are resonating with your leads. Maybe your leads can’t get enough of your Moving Must-Have Checklist but they’re not as interested in your long-running YouTube series on protecting floors during a move. Or maybe people are finding your blog post on evaluating interstate moving companies to be very instructive but you’re not getting as many phone calls from your Yelp reviews. When you’re measuring your results, you can focus on creating more content around the things that your customers care about.
Whether the assumptions you’ve made about your campaign are right or wrong, having objective data can help you make more profitable decisions.
13. Be Ready to Make Changes
Marketing campaigns can be surprisingly fickle. One day, your social media feed is driving more business than you know what to do with. And the next day, your posts are barely making a dent in the algorithm.
When you love an ad or you feel like you’ve put your whole body and soul into launching a specific campaign, it’s easy to get super attached to the campaign that’s in front of you. Some people have compared writing blog posts to having children. There’s so much care and energy that goes into the process, that it can be hard to let go when you see that a campaign is dragging you down.
The beauty of advertising, however, is that it’s often easy to pivot. You can always delete those underwhelming tweets and take a new approach. That Facebook ad can always be targeted more precisely. And those blog post titles can be tweaked and re-worked to sound more punchy. But you have to be willing to take the first step.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that not every marketing effort is going to be a major success. The key to making sure that advertising stays profitable for your business is to know when it’s time to cut your losses or try something different.
If you’re already measuring your results, then you shouldn’t have any issues with spotting potential problem areas or places where your campaign might be running into resistance. Sometimes you’ll be able to do some troubleshooting. And other times, the whole ad concept needs to be tossed out in favor of something else.
There’s an element of judgment involved here. But when you think about the amount of ad spend and labor that goes into certain types of advertising, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
14. Keep Telling Your Story
You’ve worked out your marketing and you’re happy with the uptick you’ve been seeing. Maybe you opted to post on listing sites and to put some money into local ads and Google ads. Or perhaps you went for a different combination of advertising techniques and it gave you some serious momentum.
Regardless, just because it seems like everything has worked out, that doesn’t mean that you can’t improve upon your results.
Have you added another state to your service area lately? Have you purchased a new set of moving trucks that are capable of transporting twice as much as the old ones? Is there a unique angle around your recycling and sustainability practices that your prospects would love to hear about?
You might want to consider updating your listings or putting more of your story up on social media in order to let the public know what’s happening. And as long as new things are happening inside and outside of your company, you’ll always have more opportunities to keep telling your story in a way that sells moving leads on what you and your business have to offer.
Moving Company Leads Might Be Easier to Find Than You Think
When you’re listening to marketers talk about ROAS and brand positioning, the process of getting moving company leads to go from “I’m kind of interested.” to “I need to book a consultation now!” can seem almost mystical.
However, when you look under the hood, it quickly becomes clear that the key to filling up your pipeline with future customers is to have a system.
Once you have a strategy for systematically getting people through your sales funnel, finding customers for your moving company becomes easy. Are you ready to start getting high-quality leads for your business? Contact us today to learn more!
