How To Generate Leads For Your Moving Company

Generating leads for your moving company is one of the most important things you can do for your business. After all, the success of your business depends on a solid customer base and a steady stream of new and returning revenue.

Still, you’re not alone if you’re feeling frustrated over your lead quantity (or quality). While lead generation – identifying and marketing to your target audience – is pretty straightforward, where you focus your effort matters. It’s one thing to offer a discount on your website and see a temporary influx in interest, but building a consistent pipeline of engaged leads takes energy and planning!

A lead is someone who has expressed an interest in your services but hasn’t purchased anything (yet). Leads can come from a variety of sources! They may have called your office, filled out a form on your website, or heard about your company from a friend. Here are several common lead sources:

• Reviews
• Your Local Community
• Social Media
• Referral Websites
• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
• Direct Mail and Marketing Swag

The marketing budget and effort you spend advertising your business through your lead sources to acquire potential customers for your business is referred to as lead generation.

In this article, we’ll share smart strategies for generating leads, building your customer base, and increasing your moving company’s revenue. Let’s dive in!

It is important for moving businesses to have quality leads in their pipeline, which can provide work for the next two weeks. Successful moving businesses are booked for months in advance – not because of their competitive pricing but because of their strong online presence and marketing strategies that fetch them high-quality leads month over month. Having qualified leads for long distance or local moving allows you to make suitable arrangements in advance so that everything goes according to the plan on the day of the move.  

Pop quiz: when was the last time you reviewed another company?

Positive testimonials are a valuable lead source for any company: they bring awareness to your brand and help generate more leads and sales for your moving business. One of the most impactful actions you can take as an independent business owner is to ask your customers for reviews – and make it easy for them to submit a review! But how do you ask people to write reviews?

Here are some tips:

Use email follow-ups

After you’ve moved someone, send them an email asking about their experience with your team! Following up with your customers after a successful move is a great way to build a relationship and an ideal opportunity to politely request a review of your services. Keep your message short and sincere, and include a link to your review site so they can easily add their testimonial!

Post on social media

Customer reviews make excellent content for social media because they’re short, to the point, and highlight your moving company’s strengths. Repurpose reviews by creating bite-sized posts for social channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Encourage engagement with your post by asking folks a fun question or sharing how much reviews and testimonials help your business. If you’re just starting or need to build up your review “bank,” you can simply ask your followers to leave a review for your moving business based on their experience.

Limit Review Requests

We recommend keeping requests like these to once a month to avoid overload, and pairing them with a small incentive (like a raffle drawing or a percentage off a future job) to attract recently converted customers.

Invest in Reputation Monitoring

Reputation monitoring is a critical part of your lead generation strategy. It helps you understand how potential customers perceive your brand online, and can identify any issues that might be stalling your lead generation efforts or revenue growth.

As a business owner, you’re aware that perception is everything. How your customers feel about their experience with your company, and where they share those experiences, can have a major impact on your ability to generate new business.

Reputation monitoring is a consistent practice of learning how the public feels about your company, promptly addressing service-related concerns, and responding to customer feedback. Interested in learning more about how implementing this can impact your business? Check out this overview of the top reputation monitoring tools in the industry.

Tap Into Your Local Realtor Network

Networking opportunities are always worth pursuing. You’re looking for people who are moving. Who knows people that are moving? Realtors! The real estate market is full of well-connected professional realtors.

Connecting with a local real estate office or independent realtor to establish a referral partnership is a simple, no-cost way to increase your moving company’s exposure and positive reputation.

Tips for networking with real estate professionals:

Say Hello

Drop by their office, send a quick email, or make a call to introduce yourself to the top three realtors in your area. Be prepared to introduce your services briefly, and inquire about the possibility of partnering with them for referral opportunities.

Be Helpful

Do you offer storage? Realtors may need additional services, and your business might be the ideal provider!

Don’t Pester

Persistence is a virtue, but a no is a no! You won’t connect with every realtor you reach out to, and that’s okay. Focus on building strong relationships with a few key players in your area.

Build Local Relationships

Another avenue for generating moving leads is reaching out to local apartments and asking them to set you up as a preferred vendor. It’s helpful if you reach out to complexes you’ve moved in before or those with many tenants. Tenants moving in and out will automatically be referred to you and encouraged to use you for moving services. Ease of use for the customer means an easy win for you. Customers are already sold on your moving company before they even contact you.

Moving companies can leverage their social media networks to help create more leads on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

Social media is a great way for moving companies to build relationships with potential customers and establish themselves as a premier provider in the moving industry. It’s also a great way to generate new business. Here are a few ways to market your moving company on social media:

Post photos of your crew in action

Snap a picture of your team hard at work, or of your fully-loaded moving truck, along with a caption describing how your services are helping movers in your area. “Day-in-the-life” style posts like these effectively promote your company and your team culture.

Add value with educational resources

Your email newsletters or company blog are a valuable resource for educating leads, but getting the right eyes on your content takes a bit of practice. Increase the visibility of your rich content by teasing it on your social media feed! Use the comments section to link to your website for a simple way to add value for your followers and help them learn more about what you do!

Share customer reviews and posts

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the simplest ways to build awareness and generate leads for your business. Just click share/repost then add a comment, and you’ve got a bite-sized piece of customer praise to share with the world! Learn how to ask for reviews on social media here.

Engage with followers and users

Social media is a great way to connect with your customers and network within your community, but it’s a two-way street! A surefire way to generate more engagement with your posts (and encourage more conversations!) is to contribute your point of view or support on another person’s post.

LinkedIn is a great platform to test this out: the next time you post on LinkedIn, immediately turn to your feed, find three posts from folks you follow, and reach out! This could be as easy as liking a post, adding a comment that adds to the conversation, or sharing the content.

Consider joining a Facebook group

Start by browsing relevant Facebook groups and responding to content where you can add value. If someone asks for a recommendation or shares a story, you can comment on that post. When you comment, your face and name are visible to a whole community of people every time. Over time, people will get to know you and your company.

When appropriate, a brief direct message to a group member can be a great way to build professional relationships! Just remember to focus on networking, rather than where your next lead is coming from.

Don’t just promote your company or its services, as most groups or communities will either ignore or ban you. Be helpful, genuine, and provide value where you can.

Like reviews, referrals are an important aspect of lead generation for your moving company. Encourage referrals by signing up for leading websites like Google My Business (GMB), as well as these leading referral websites:

Thumbtack: Millions of customers use Thumbtack every day to find and hire small businesses across the country. Thumbtack receives thousands of daily inquiries, and an estimated 30,000 move requests each month!

Yelp: A strong Yelp presence is important as potential customers may go directly to Yelp to find a moving company.

Quick replies get you more booked jobs and increase your rank on Thumbtack and Yelp. With our integrations, you can capture Thumbtack and Yelp leads in Oncue and send an auto-response to incoming leads. This means you’ll be the first to reach out giving you the best chance of winning each customer. Customers using our Yelp & Thumbtack integrations have seen their conversion rates triple on both platforms!

Stop losing jobs, book a free demo today to see how Oncue can help you.

Angi: Set up an account on Angi to improve your brand reputation and online business presence. You’re able to request feedback from customers and establish credibility quickly!

Home Advisor: Get more leads through Home Advisor. It’s powered by Angi, so all the work you put into your brand will pay off on both websites.

Review sites can be an incredible lead source, but it’s important to remember that your review profiles don’t run on auto-pilot! If you’re serious about generating more leads and increasing sales, you should monitor and manage your business’s online reviews daily.

We recommend responding to reviews promptly and courteously, working with unhappy customers to improve their experience, and fixing problems quickly. When formulating your replies to unhappy customers, consider sharing how you’ll remedy any issues that impacted their experience. This context helps rebuild trust in your company, and demonstrates that you’re taking actionable steps to improve the customer experience.

Why is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) important for moving companies?

Picture this: You own a San Francisco-based moving company. Someone needing a mover searches for “moving companies San Francisco”. Can they find your business?

Your goal is for your company to rank close to the top of a search engine’s organic search results. Ideally, your website and content offerings are optimized to make them more attractive to search engines like Google, Bing, etc.

An SEO expert is a great resource and will work with you to ensure your website is optimized to generate new leads. However, it can be helpful to understand SEO basics before you seek help.

If you want to understand more about SEO, you can use a resource like the Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO or SEM Rush’s SEO Basics course to get a high-level overview of what SEO is and why it is important.

With over 2 billion monthly users, paying to find new customers through Facebook can be very lucrative. Watch this video to learn how to set up your first Facebook Ad campaign.

When creating a Facebook Ad, make sure you:

• Clearly state the benefits of your services to your customer
• Include a clear call to action directing them to your website or landing page

Whether you want to learn how to do this yourself or enlist the help of an agency, advertising on major search engines like Google and Bing enables you to target potential customers in your local area. A great way to learn the basics of paid advertising (PPC) on Google is to complete Google’s free certification in Google Ads.

Don’t forget print marketing and promo products! Traditional marketing materials like flyers, business cards, brochures, magnets, and small items like stickers and pens with your logo all work to keep your company top-of-mind.

Here are a few ways to put these marketing products to work for you:

• Consider sponsoring a booth at a local event and handing out small giveaways with your logo
• Add your flyer or business card to local bulletin boards
• Work with a direct-mail provider to help advertise services to your local community

We’ve covered a lot of ground! Hopefully, this article has helped you familiarize yourself with common lead sources and approaches and provided some ideas for generating leads for your moving company. Now it’s time to put those ideas in motion – go out there and get those leads!

Contact us now for more information on the services that Oncue provides moving companies just like yours: