UK Lead Generation Podcast

James Dooley:
If you are an AV hire company and you're looking for a consistent flow of inquiries all year round for your business, this video is for you. Myself and James, we've worked with a lot of different AV hire companies throughout the UK, and we know exactly which type of marketing strategies work and which type of marketing strategies you should also avoid and not burn any money on. So, in this video, we're going to be breaking it all down. So, James, take it on to step number one.

Kasra Dash:
So step number one, what I'd be looking to do to grow is a Google business profile. If you already have one, I'd be making certain that I would be reaching out to all my existing clients to try to get me as many five-star reviews as possible. It's a great way of Google business profile to generate more leads. There's obviously getting citations and doing Google business profile posts and uploading photos on there. So that's definitely step one that I would be doing to try to generate more local leads.

James Dooley:
So step number two, this is kind of to bolster onto your actual Google business profile is I would be creating dedicated service pages for each of your individual services as SEO optimised pages on your website. Now, the good thing is when you start doing that, it's also going to help first of all rank your actual SEO optimised page, but there's also more likeliness chance of your Google business profile ranking and showing up for those keywords as well. So, you're indirectly going to get more phone calls as well.

Kasra Dash:
Yeah, for sure. And if you are looking for more local leads, another option that you could be doing is PPC lead generation. That's pay-per-click within Google or within Bing where you're trying to target the bottom of the funnel keywords that can try to generate you some more inquiries. The difficult part to this is you need to make certain you do team up with a good pay-per-click agency because there is click fraud and there's also needing to build up like a negative keyword list. So, it's not people applying for jobs like a careers kind of job. So PPC can work well but in the wrong hands you can waste a lot of money but it's another way of generating local leads.

James Dooley:
Yeah. And then after that you've also got like meta ads as well. So like Facebook Instagram where the next time when somebody goes on to Facebook they might be scrolling they might see your ad. Now there's a few different ways that you can set up Facebook ads. You've obviously got option A which is like lead forms which is really easy to do. They don't even leave the Facebook platform, like they never click onto your actual website. Now, the issue with lead forms is that the quality might not be great, but you can obviously add more questions in to try and up that quality of the actual lead. Then you've also got conversion ads as well where that actually gets sent through to your website and then they fill out the contact form to you or on your website as well. So, you've got a couple different options there that you can do.

Kasra Dash:
Yeah, for sure. And then another way to grow more local leads could be organic social media. So, posting regularly on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, on Pinterest, on Instagram. There's lots of different platforms out there that you can be trying to get there. Reddit's quite big nowadays. Quora, it's quite big. If people have got questions and you can answer it. So organic social media is another great way to be generating more local leads for your business.

James Dooley:
With organic social media, I would say that it's more of like a volumes game. So you want to try and make certain that you're constantly uploading whether it's for example a daily schedule or a weekly schedule. You might say, "Okay, I want to try and upload five videos a week." And you should just try and stick to that, especially when it comes to like algorithms like YouTube and Twitter and stuff.

Kasra Dash:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, what's your thoughts on using any sort of AI agents if they can try to team up with someone to get use like N8N to kind of automate and schedule posts on social media? Like what's your thoughts on that of using trying to leverage artificial intelligence? It's all the rage nowadays for trying to generate more leads. Would you try to team up with like an AI consultant to set that up?

James Dooley:
Yeah. So, I mean, you can definitely go down that route where you're setting up AI agents to potentially crop up some videos and autopublish to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and stuff. But another thing that I would also be focusing on is AI search. So, a lot of people have started to kind of move away from Google. Not everyone because there's billions of people still using it every single day. But there are slowly people starting to search in engines such as like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok and if your brand isn't actually showing up in any of those you will have a little bit of an issue showing up and generating leads on those search engines as well. So that's another thing that I would be focusing on as a company.

Kasra Dash:
Yeah. And also, if you're looking for more business leads in the local area, something else that I would definitely be looking to do is team up with some of the trades people websites. So, you've got certain ones like Checkatrade, you've got Bark, you've got Builderbuilder, you've got Trust a Trader, you've got Rated People. All these different platforms can generate you more local leads. What I would say is making certain you're tracking your KPIs to see what return on investment that you're getting. You should be tracking not only the cost per lead but the cost per acquisition and how much is that getting you on a return on investment. But trades people websites like those platforms can work very well. I would say make certain you check out the links in the description because we do quite a lot of different videos in comparing Checkatrade with Fat Rank or Bark with Fat Rank, Rated People with Fat Rank, Builderbuilder with Fat Rank. So now obviously I've mentioned Fat Rank a few times Kasra like what's your thoughts on lead generation companies as opposed to trades people companies?

James Dooley:
Yeah. So with lead generation companies I would almost say that every single lead generation company you want to try and do your due diligence. So make certain that if you are in a specific niche that lead generation company has actually generated leads in that industry before. I would also maybe even have like a strategy call with them and say like okay this is my budget this is how many leads I ideally want etc to make certain that if your actual KPIs do align with that lead generation company you also want to make certain that what type of leads are there are they exclusive leads or the leads only going through to yourself or are they for example shared leads which that's what a lot of other lead generation tools and lead generation companies do like for example, Bark and Checkatrade and stuff. Whenever we, myself and James have spoke to company owners that have used those services, that's one of their biggest pain points where they say, "Yeah, it's a shared lead and it's kind of a rat race down to the bottom of who's the cheapest basically." So, that's a couple things I would be asking lead generation companies before partnering up with them.

Kasra Dash:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, if anyone is interested in generating more local leads, I strongly recommend heading over to fatrank.com where we have a commission-based lead generation service. That means you only pay a finders fee on converted jobs. You've nothing to pay on the per lead. You have nothing to pay until you get paid until you convert that job on a per sale basis and you've got done completed the job and been paid. That's when you only have to pay fatrank.com. So head on over to fatrank.com to see whether you qualify. But I want to kind of expand a little bit further. Right. So what is your thoughts on inbound lead generation versus outbound lead generation?

James Dooley:
So, I always prefer inbound. The conversion rate of not just getting the lead, but the lead actually converting into a paying customer into money coming into your business bank account is a lot higher. The last stat that I saw for that was something like 16.1% end up converting into a paying customer as opposed to 1.4% when it's an outbound lead.

Kasra Dash:
Yeah, that's pretty crazy. That's like 12. Well, yeah. It's 10, 12 times more conversion.

James Dooley:
Yeah. Like it's crazy how much more conversion that is. You need to do a lot of volume for kind of outbound whether it's cold calling or cold email or like LinkedIn sales navigator and stuff like that. And sometimes you just need a lot more staff to do it as well. And people sometimes don't they're looking at the cost going I want to generate free leads and they're like generate they think they're generating free leads but they still cost of like the email sending still cost of then the sales team try to convert them and stuff like that. So yeah, I completely agree with you that inbound leads is so much better than kind of outbound leads. But when what's your thoughts then on some people ask the question that come through that want local leads and then they talk about are these real time leads like is real time leads very important to get so soon as they inquire it comes through to you straight away.

James Dooley:
Yeah, it's very important. I think the last stat that obviously we this was internally that we saw was if you are able to get a real-time lead it converts 60% higher than was it 60 or 65% I think I think 63% higher and when we came and got the KPIs down it was like trying to respond within under a minute and it was like what we used to think 5 minutes was good and then when people respond in under a minute so inquiry comes in can you either ring them or email them back saying thanks a lot for the inquiry and then getting more information. Yeah, it was so I mean I'm not saying that every company needs to respond in under a minute. There are certain things that we obviously look at at Fat Rank when we're looking to partner up with businesses. That's one of the things that a lot of businesses they kind of fall short on where they might be away for 5 days on holiday and they don't have somebody to pick up the leads and we're still providing the leads. So there's all these little different nuances that we look at when we are partnering up with companies. But the best thing that I would recommend to anyone that's looking to scale their business, that's looking to get a consistent flow of high quality leads is just fill out the form at Fat Rank. The team will tell you if you're the right fit or if you're not, and we'll also tell you and give you feedback why you're not the right fit and what you should do as your next steps. So, I hope you like the different strategies there that we've been through for lead generation for an AV hire company. So, with regards to an audio visual hire company, there's lots of different types of leads from staging and lighting and surround sound that could be used at conferences, could be corporate events. So, make sure you're heading over to fatrank.com if you are serious about trying to generate more AV higher leads.