Getting moving leads is a matter of presence and timing. You want to be seen by your potential customers when they are ready to move. There are two main ways to do that:
- Outbound marketing
- Inbound marketing
With outbound marketing, you are reaching out to your target audience to propose your moving services. Timing is key to generating a positive ROI with outbound marketing. Outreach campaigns can be one-to-one (phone calls) or one-to-many (direct mail). More about this later.
With inbound marketing, YOUR AUDIENCE is reaching out to you to ask for your moving services. They choose when the timing is right for them. The key here is to be present where potential moving leads search for your services.
In this article, I will share with you the most suited marketing channels you can use to generate moving leads. I will cover both outbound and inbound marketing, so you can choose which suits better your skillset.
Track the source of your moving leads
Before generating moving leads, you need to be able to track where they will come from.
When you run several marketing channels at a time, you need to know which one provides you with most of the leads.
When a lead transforms into a paid customer, you need to link the sale back to the exact channel, campaign, ad, and keyword that generated the lead.
As a result, you can optimize your marketing strategies by:
- Disregarding the marketing channels, ads, and keywords that generate leads who don’t buy from you
- Promoting the marketing channels, ads, and keywords that generate the leads that transform into sales
Leadsources allows you to do that. It captures the source of your leads directly into your contact form.
It works for all marketing channels, both paid and organic, even when no UTM parameters are used.
Leadsources collects up to 7 lead source data: channel, source, campaign, content, term, landing page, and landing page subfolder.
To see it into action, select the different traffic sources below, and visualize how Leadsources populates your contact form with the lead source data of your leads:
Start your free trial today: leadsources.io
Moving leads: 8 lead sources
1. Strategic partnerships
📢 Type: Outbound marketing
🎚️ Level: Intermediate
⏱️ Time to results: Long-term
💸 Return on investment: High
“Your network is your net worth”. This famous quote applies for moving companies. Creating strategic partnerships with a few key persons will skyrocket your moving business.
Apartment managers and real estate agents know when a resident puts in their notice. The timing is right for you to advertise your moving services.
The advantage of strategic partnerships is that trust is already built between your moving lead and the real estate agent, increasing your chances of closing the deal.
To create these strategic partnerships, the key is to build the relationships first. Good strategic partnerships are organically created from a strong relationship. Focus on creating bonds with potential strategic partners by simply sharing about your respective industries, and sharing tips with each other as business owners. Only then, you can find the partners that fit with your work ethic.
You can then think about the commission model. I am personally a fan of flat fees: for the moving leads that you close as clients, you give a fixed amount to your strategic partner. This is simpler than a percentage-based commission where you have to account for all your revenue and potential costs. This being said the best deal is the one you organically create with your business partners by openly discussing your respective preferences.
I ranked this moving leads source as intermediate level since it takes time to create these relationships.
2. Google’s Local Service Ads
📢 Type: Inbound marketing
🎚️ Level: Beginner
⏱️ Time to results: Immediate
💸 Return on investment: Mid-range
Local service ads are an advertising platform offered by Google for easily running local ads. All you need is a verified Google Business account.
When potential moving leads near you search for your services on Google (“moving company + City”, “moving company near me”), your Google Business profile appears at the top of the search results.
You only pay Google when a moving lead calls your number. Even better, if someone calls you by mistake, you can request a refund from Google. So you pay only for the valid moving leads.
If you are a moving company owner, I advise you to start local service ads today. It will provide you with immediate moving leads, and if your pricing is competitive, you will transform these leads into business.
3. Google Business
📢 Type: Inbound marketing
🎚️ Level: Beginner
⏱️ Time to results: Mid-range
💸 Return on investment: High
With Google Business, you create a business profile for your company that appears organically in the Google’s local pack for local queries such as “moving company + City” or “moving company near me”.
Google’s local pack is a premium placement for local companies: 42% of local searches lead to a click in the local pack.
The user journey looks like this:
- Local search
- Your Google Business profile appears in the local pack
- Call or site visit
Moving leads coming from your Google Business profile show a high ROI:
- Inbound leads: the leads approach your company when they are ready
- Exclusive leads: These leads are yours and aren’t shared with anyone else
- Local leads: Leads within your area perform better than national leads
- Free leads: you don’t pay for these leads since you appear on Google organically
The key with Google Business is to appear in the top position for your target keywords. We’ve created an extensive guide on how to rank on Google’s local pack.
4. Facebook
📢 Type: Outbound marketing
🎚️ Level: Beginner
⏱️ Time to results: Immediate (for paid ads)
💸 Return on investment: Mid-range
Facebook is still one of the best ways to generate moving leads. Facebook is an outbound channel, meaning you reach out to your audience, the key is to show presence to the people in your area.
Two marketing strategies can help you get leads on Facebook
- Facebook groups
- Facebook Leads ads
With Facebook groups, the goal is to approach groups in your area that can potentially need your moving services (private neighborhood groups, private mom groups).
Identify these groups and request to join them. Get in touch with the admin before posting as it may be seen as spam. The goal is to create trust with the admin: Explain your offer, and how beneficial it may be to some members of the group. The admin can connect you with the members that are currently moving, and can even post in the group on your behalf.
If the group is more opened, simply advertise your offer in a post.
The other technique to generate moving leads on Facebook is to run Leads ads. Facebook offers the possibility to run your ads in your targeted area for a targeted audience. When someone clicks your ad, a contact form opens on Facebook directly, and the person is invited to answer qualifying questions.
Example:
- When do you plan on moving?
- Current and future address?
- Contact details
Facebook Leads ads are quite efficient and you can generate moving leads for a few dollars per lead only. The advantage is that you don’t even need to have a website, since the moving leads are collected directly on Facebook.
To start with Facebook Leads ads:
- Create an account on Meta Business Manager
- From the Ads Manager, create a Leads campaign
- Attribute a monthly budget that you can maintain for at least 6 months
When you start generating leads, you will need to measure two indicators:
- The Cost per Lead (CPL): provided by Facebook
- The Conversion Rate (CVR): The percentage of moving leads that transform into a paid customer. Use tools like leadsources.io to measure CVR for each Facebook ad
Measure the CPL to optimize your ads: Your first ads will generate leads at a high CPL, that’s normal. This is where the real work starts. Keep the same monthly budget, and optimize your CPL by testing different:
- Locations: you can try to launch one ad per zip code and measure which one provides the lowest CPL
- The offer: A book like $100M OFFER by Alex Hormozi can help create the perfect offer
- The hook: Work on different hooks to measure which one provides the lowest CPL
Measure the CVR to:
- Optimize your sales pitch: You have already paid for your lead, so the conversion rate impacts directly your cost per sale
- Identify which Facebook ad generates the best quality leads: for this, you will need a tool like leadsources.io to capture the source of your leads
5. Emailing
🎚️ Level: Beginner
⏱️ Time to results: Mid-range
💸 Return on investment: High
Use emailing to convert your moving leads into paid customers. Since timing is key in your industry, the average lead-to-sale duration is short. Emails need to be sent at a high frequency. E.G. every day for 10 days.
Here is an example of an automated email sequence you can send to your moving leads:
- Day 1: Let’s create your personalized moving plan
- Day 2: Meet your moving team
- Day 3: What our customers are saying about us
- Day 4: Moving tips
Pro tip:
Use a CRM and connect it to your email marketing tool to automatically opt-out your leads when they transform into paid customers. You can also trigger a second email sequence after they moved, and communicate about your referral program, ask for a review, etc.
6. Local SEO
📢 Type: Inbound marketing
🎚️ Level: Intermediate
⏱️ Time to results: Long-term
💸 Return on investment: High
Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the activities associated with ranking your website at the top of Google’s search results for local queries such as “moving company + your city”:
- Someone searches for “moving company Austin”
- Your website appears on Google’s organic results
- The person clicks on your website and leaves his contact details
- You call the person back to deliver your sales pitch
Local SEO is less competitive: it’s completely achievable for a moving company to rank on Google for a local query like “moving company + City”, in comparison to national queries like “best moving companies”.
Local SEO is a long-term game: It takes time for a website to rank on Google for its target keywords. Consider a 6-12-month period of consistent efforts before hoping to generate a sale from local SEO.
Local SEO provides a constant stream of organic moving leads: Once you start ranking on Google, you will generate moving leads each month, providing a solid revenue base.
Here are a few strategies to get started with local SEO:
#1. Select your local keywords: use SEO tools like AhRefs to search for the terms that people search for in your area when they are ready to move. Ideally, you want to select a few keywords that meet these criteria:
| Keyword selection criteria | Description |
| Keyword relevancy | The keyword has high-purchase intent. For example “moving company Austin” has a bigger purchase intent than “how to move to Austin”. |
| Keyword intent | On AhRefs, check how many people search for your keywords each month. High volume will lead to a high number of monthly clicks. |
| Keyword search volume | On AhRefs, check how many people search for your keywords each month. High volume will lead to high number of monthly clicks. |
| Keyword difficulty | On AhRefs, each keyword is associated with a difficulty percentage, from 0 to 100, depending on how competitive it is to rank on Google for that keyword. When you start, keywords with a difficulty below 10% are within your reach. |
#2. Create content: Create content on your website that targets the keywords you have selected. Use the homepage to target your main keyword, for example “moving company Austin”. As a generic rule, for commercial keywords like “Moving company + your city”, create a landing page, and for informational keywords like “how to move to Austin”, write a blog post.
#3. Link building: To increase your ranking on Google’s search results, you need to demonstrate to Google that your site is trustworthy. To do so, make sure that other websites link to yours.
That’s what we commonly call “a backlink” or “link building”. Follow the following criteria to select the websites that will link back to you:
| Link building criteria | Description |
| Affinity with your service | The websites that link back to your site should be relevant to your industry in order to impact your ranking. If a pet blog links to your moving company’s site, it won’t affect your ranking due to the lack of relevancy. |
| Domain rating | AhRefs introduces a metric called Domain Rating that indicates the strength of a website’s backlink profile. In other words, how much strength a link from this website can bring to yours. |
| Monthly traffic | How much traffic this website generates each month? Getting a link from a website that doesn’t have any SEO traction won’t impact your site’s ranking much. |
7. Instagram / TikTok
📢 Type: Outbound marketing
🎚️ Level: Beginner
⏱️ Time to results: Long-term
💸 Return on investment: High
Marketing practices evolve with time. A new marketing practice is to build your personal brand.
We are social creatures, and this is also true in business. People prefer doing business with the people they know and trust.
Building your personal brand on Instagram and TikTok will allow you to communicate with your audience about yourself, your skills, your knowledge, and your results, building trust as a result.
When someone is ready to move, you will be the first they contact to receive a quote.
Because you have built your personal brand, pricing is not the number one selection criterion for your customers anymore. They’d prefer to pay a premium and be served by someone they know and trust, rather than paying for a low-cost moving company they don’t know.
8. YouTube
📢 Type: Outbound marketing
🎚️ Level: Beginner
⏱️ Time to results: Long-term
💸 Return on investment: High
YouTube is a great platform for longer-form content (8-10 minutes). You can use YouTube to answer your customer’s most-asked questions.
You will demonstrate your knowledge, and this may lead to new moving leads.
YouTube can be a good option for moving companies with national reach.
However, I would argue that even small local moving companies should start on YouTube as it could bring their business to a whole new level.
Imagine solving the problem of thousands of people who are getting ready to move. You could monetize your audience by selling the leads to your competitors outside of your area, and keep the local leads to yourself.
If you are ready to start on YouTube, give yourself at least 12 months before hoping to see any results. Focus on sharing value to your viewers, and making each video better than the previous one.
