Lead generation is a critical aspect of achieving growth and success. While Angie’s List has been a popular choice for businesses seeking leads, most business owners think they kinda suck. That being said, it’s essential to explore alternative options that can deliver better results. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the realm of superior alternatives to Angie’s List leads. By embracing these alternatives, you can find new avenues for growth.
Angie's List vs Social Media for Lead Generation
Social media platforms offer unparalleled opportunities to generate high-quality leads because with them you can build your brand and establish a person behind the logo. By strategically leveraging the idea of humanization, social media content will deliver much higher-quality leads. Let’s dive deeper inside each social platform so you can ditch Angi and find something that’ll work far better than Angie’s List leads:
Facebook: Authority and Play
Did you know in some countries they think Facebook is the Internet? Point is, Facebook has established itself as a secondary website. Even as they struggle to stay relevant in the USA, for local businesses it’s fairly essential for you to have your Facebook page up-to-date. And look, it’s not like if you have a Facebook page people are gonna be calling you… BUT without one, people won’t be calling. That’s the necessary evil people talk about.
Make sure all your URLs and phone numbers are right because it can hurt your SEO if your contact information doesn’t sync up across social media platforms. And Facebook gets crawled pretty thoroughly. Here’s the trick with Facebook: don’t be serious. Make people laugh, and post informative information. It’s really just meant to build your retargeting audience so that you can run paid ads to those engaging with you (or not completely ignoring you) to get appointments scheduled.
Instagram: Reel 'em In!
Here’s where you can build your brand and reel people in faster than Angie’s List Leads can move on a motorcycle. Who do you call when you want your grass cut? The company you like. How do you become a company people like? Create videos showing them who you are. That’s the only way. No matter how captivating your website is, nobody knows who you are till you get behind a camera.
If you can get behind a camera and let people get to know you, they’ll be more likely to call you when they need something done. You’ll also be, simultaneously, building your retargeting list for the *reel* magic to happen. Notice the use of reel everywhere.
That’s cause Instagram Reels are where you get the visibility. Don’t post posts, only post reels.
LinkedIn: Professional Networking for B2B Leads
Probably not gonna win over much business on LinkedIn. Homeowners don’t really give a shit about your professional credentials they way you wished they did, but what you can use your LinkedIn for is generating leads for partnerships, and business expansion. This is a great place to chat with manufacturers, or influential community leaders that can put you on the map in a way you can’t do on your own. Angie’s List Leads don’t fall into this category so it’s untapped territory that you can dip your toes into.
LinkedIn is a long-term play, so go for it.
Angie's List Leads vs Leads from Organic Traffic
Your website isn’t amazing at anything other than acting as a central hub for the organic traffic that stumbles on you in their quest for a solution. Since search-users have intent it’s essential to rope them in on your website with a marketing funnel. By capturing valuable prospects and adding them to your funnel, you can nurture them into leads (or close them on the spot). By implementing effective SEO strategies, you can amplify your online visibility and drive targeted traffic. Let’s explore alternatives to Angie’s List leads through website optimization:
Comprehensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategies
We have some extensive articles on SEO so we won’t dive super deep here, but rather we’ll cover what makes a great search strategy and how you can head in the right direction.
- Make a list of the top-visited pages of all your competitors.
- Write better posts than each of the posts your competition is posting by writing more in-depth, adding some personality, utilizing videos, charts, and finally downloads.
- Use an AI tool to incorporate meta tags, categories, slugs, page titles, and headings.
- Use a featured image that’ll grab more attention than your competitor, and make sure you add “alt text” so the search engines can crawl your images.
- Optimize your website’s technical aspects, including site speed, mobile responsiveness, and user-friendly navigation, to improve the overall user experience.
- Create landing pages tailored to specific alternative lead generation methods, providing in-depth information and enticing calls-to-action.
If you do all those things you’ll have a better SEO strategy than most of the companies in your state.
Content Marketing: Teach & Tell Stories
Okay so check it out. If you want to get better leads you need to make sure that your social content educational (not trying to “explain” though) and you also want to make sure you add some humor. As my advertising professor once said:
If you can make them laugh, the sale is half done. A good way to do this and avoid Angie’s List Leads altogether? Go look at what your competitors are doing.
- Which posts get the most engagement?
- Do they have followers that you should engage with?
- What topics do they spend the most time on?
By reverse engineering what successful campaigns are focused on you can save yourself the headache of failing over and over. Just look at what’s working, and make better content than whatever is working.
Amplify Referrals and Leverage Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Question: when you go to a customer’s house, are you leaving a trail of commerce behind? Do you drop off a “catalog” of all the home services your offer? Are you repurposing what you do to cater to what people want? Remember, people don’t want to pay for what they need. They only buy something they want. Instead of leaving a coupon behind, design a brochure of all the luxury air conditioning they can install, all the wireless thermostats they can easily utilize, the touchless faucets that’ll save them all those drips on their backsplash.
Get the point? Word of mouth travels when you drop breadcrumbs behind you everywhere you go. You see a lot of contractors using signs outside homes they’ve worked on. That’s the right idea, but it’s quite boring and 1999. Ramp up your ideation and think outside of the box here. Get creative and the referrals will follow.
Send us a text for referral ideas here.
Establish a Referral Program
The only way to fight a war is to build an army. That’s a bad metaphor, but you get the point. When people have skin in the game they act faster. You don’t need people on Elm Street to be promoting your business though. Instead, establish relationships with tastemakers in your community. Work out deals with journalists. Go on TV and build relationships with producers and segment bookers. Host contests and leak the story to the press.
Provide what your competition hasn’t even thought of.
Foster Strategic Partnerships
If you’re a plumbing company work out a deal with the roofing company, the HVAC company, the fencing company, the chimney sweeper, the landscaping company, the realtors, the mortgage brokers, the local Facebook group.
Who runs that group btw? There’s absolutely a Facebook group for your town or city, and some angry man or woman runs it. Find out who that is and become “friends” with that person. Offer deals to their family. Think baby, think!
Embrace Influencer Collaborations for Expanded Reach
Angie’s List is an online platform that provides reviews and ratings of local service providers across various industries. It allows users to search for and hire professionals such as plumbers, electricians, and other contractors based on the feedback and recommendations of other users. The platform aims to help individuals make informed decisions when selecting service providers for their specific needs.
But what about countering that bohemoth site with micro-influencers all around your town? You won’t have to worry about Angie’s List ever again. They can go take out the trash. Nobody reads that site, but everyone is always on social media. So go there. But where do you start?
Identify Influential Personalities in Your Niche
If you’re a national company, reach out to reality TV producers. Local businesses should make friends with the cafe owners on Main Street, the art centers around the corner, and all the other hubs of your town. Go out and politic a bit and establish a spider-web network that reaches far beyond your limitations.
In-person networking will take you much farther than superficial relationships built online. If someone has a memory of meeting you, they’re more likely to recommend you.
Tap into Local Directories for Targeted Lead Generation
If you search for the best local business directories in your town, you’ll find many people anxious to take your fifty dollars for a premium listing. These small expenses yield massive results sometimes and if you buy ten listings, one will deliver and it’s not much out of your pocket. Some of the directories are totally free, but take a thousand bucks and get listed in every single directory in your town or city and negotiate on the phone (most of them have actual phone numbers and real people) and get yourself a sponsored listing. Even if it only brings in a couple calls a month, at the end of the year twenty directories might give you a 5,000% return on your money.
Prominence in Local Directories
So where do you find these gems of directories? Well many of them you’ve heard of, and some you’ll never hear of unless you go looking for them. But remember the coupon shoppers at the supermarket? Well they still exist but now they’re shopping directories that nobody has heard of other than them. First do the majors:
- Ensure your business is listed on prominent local directories, such as Yelp, Google My Business (we could write an entire book on this, you can read more about that in other posts), and industry-specific directories relevant to your services. And don’t protest Angie’s Leads… go ahead and make it 1/1000th of your strategy.
- Remember to optimize your directory listings with accurate business information, compelling descriptions, and relevant keywords (just research what people are searching for using free SEO tools).
- And have a workflow that automates the review and testimonial-collecting process on all these directories. Make sure you offer incentives for people to review in more than one place and also make sure to solve any problems that disgruntled customers are having before shooting them a link to give you a review.
All this takes some work but it pays off in dividends and compounds in growth.
Final Thoughts
We’re a big fan of following the money and thinking critically. If people give business to people they like, become likeable. Out of sight, out of mind, so make sure people see you over and over again. Who remembers someone they’ve only seen once? Put a person behind the logo, that’s how you establish a solid local business brand. And stop buying leads or depending on sources like Angie’s List for leads. Do your own marketing, or hire a company (like us) to do it for you.
