Van Line Leads

Two of the van line Sales & Marketing department’s main goals each year are to generate leads for our agent network and to help our agents generate their own leads. Through the use of the ad fund budget, the van line sets forth a number of initiatives each year in that interest. In addition, the regional sales directors gather information from the salespeople in our network on an ongoing basis to determine what new collateral, programs, and the like are needed to boost those efforts.

HOW THEY COME IN

Ad Fund Budget

The ad fund budget determines the initiatives the van line takes on each year. It’s based on the previous year’s linehaul, consisting of 1 percent of every commercial order (COD and NAT) collected from agents in the previous year, plus matching funds from the van line. The ad fund pays for efforts from website development and search engine optimization to advertising co-op and software.

The takeaway from the ad fund budget is that the better the network does in linehaul in a year, the more funds there are for marketing initiatives in the upcoming year.

Attracting Leads & Boosting Recall through Targeted Outreach

One of the first exercises the Marketing department included in the first edition of this workbook was to help agents outline their target audiences. There are a ton of ways to reach out to a mass audience but they’re all expensive. That’s why, in van line marketing efforts, we spend most of our resources on targeted outreach. We’re not only conserving resources but also attracting the kind of customer our agents want to work with.

SOCIAL MEDIA ADS

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, offers a ton of insight on its customers that they’ve made available through their profiles, the pages they’ve followed and the groups they’ve joined. All this insight allows marketers, like Wheaton | Bekins, to create lookalike audiences so we know who we’re targeting with our ads.

The van line used Meta’s capabilities to target older adults looking to move and households with high income looking to move. After priming the audience with the goal of recall, the campaign switched to the goal of lead generation and has seen significant pickup from older adults.

PAY-PER-CLICK ADS

Agents who have opted into the van line’s leads program offer zip codes for their priority customers. By combining this information with the lookalike audiences, the van line targets customers to receive our Pay-Per-Click ads and funnels those marketing qualified leads to our agents.

Our PPC experts from B2E Marketing use language indicative of the target audience to attract the right viewers and get them to both click on the ads and convert them into leads.

E-NEWSLETTER TO PREVIOUS CUSTOMERS

People who have moved with our agents and had great experiences are primed to become repeat customers. The challenge comes in keeping our brand top-of-mind so when they need a move – or need to recommend a mover – they remember us.

In 2021, the van line began a bi-monthly e-newsletter program, recycling blog content to send to previous happy customers (dating back to 2013). Each message contains a button for those who need a mover to fill out a contact form. Those who include their current mailing address receive a care package from the van line, with a personalized letter from Wheaton | Bekins President A.J. Schneider. The e-newsletter also encourages recipients to forward the message to friends looking to move.

Brand Recall & Lead Generation

It’s easy to understand the van line’s marketing goal of lead generation, since the output of leads seemingly comes directly from the input of money. Brand recall, however, is less of a concrete idea but is still important to the success of Wheaton | Bekins and its agents. The moving industry as a whole doesn’t have great brand recall outside of Two Men & A Truck and U-Haul. Customers more often find themselves using nonbranded search terms than going directly to their last mover’s website.

Even so, a large proportion of leads come from customer referrals, so the more the van line can remind customers who they moved with and had a great experience with – and the more we can get their experiences out to potential customers – the better the chances of turning those happy customers into lead generators for our agents.

Boosting brand recall and lead generation is a never-ending cycle. The better our brand recall, the more lead generation we enjoy, and vice versa. The van line puts its energy toward three overall methods of doing both.

DRIVING TRAFFIC WITH SEO

Another way the van line attracts leads is by funneling more eyeballs to each brand’s website. The more prospective customers we can get to visit the sites and learn about our company, the more likely we are to convert their interest into form fills or phone calls.

Our SEO vendor, Gemini Advanced Marketing Solutions, concentrates on optimizing key website pages for ever-evolving common, nonbranded search terms. They also focus on seizing opportunities to rank higher in search engines like Google based on factors like site speed.

Leads can convert in multiple ways from the websites, including:

SOURCING LEADS THROUGH GOOD OLD-FASHIONED PARTNERSHIPS & IN-PERSON EVENTS

NASMM Member & Educator

Todd Emrick has been the older adult ambassador for the van line, joining the associations as an affiliate member and forging relationships with the boards. He’s always looking to add value to NASMM and its members with educational opportunities such as packing training classes and rogue mover advice. Through the contacts Todd has built, in particular at NASMM, he’s been able to connect agents in the network with senior move managers in their areas, leading to interstate and local move opportunities.

Erickson Senior Living

With network agents serving many senior living locations, Todd is the go-to for quality assurance for groups like Erickson Senior Living. The residences know Todd will be involved in the moves, so they are more likely to offer Wheaton | Bekins as a preferred mover to their incoming residents.

The Marketing department recently completed a case study highlighting the van line’s relationship with Erickson Senior Living, which Wheaton | Bekins will disseminate to other vendors such as senior move managers and real estate agents to create new partnerships and generate leads.

HOW YOU GET THEM

Once the van line has generated a new lead, the agent is informed and takes over by turning the lead into an estimate. Depending on which initiative generated the lead, there are a few ways you could receive it.

Via Access

The vast majority of leads will come to agents through Access for those agents who have opted into the leads program. Access determines which agent of the appropriate brand is closest based on the customer’s zip code and marks the new lead for that agent.

If you don’t know whether your agency is part of the leads program, look at your agency dashboard in Access. Click on Leads/Local Rates, and you’ll see Participating in green or Not Participating in red under Configuration. Any agent looking to change their status, change their leads radius, limit zip codes or change the type of delivery for their agency should reach out to Justin Swing.

Agents who have subscribed to lead notifications receive an alert when their company has a new lead attributed to it. If you have not subscribed to leads notifications, now is a great time to do so. In Access, go to Add Subscription and choose Lead Offered as the Event. Contact AccessHelp with questions.

From Your RSD or Todd Emrick

A few marketing initiatives necessitate the lead coming in through a different source that is not hooked up to Access. Previous customer leads from the e-newsletter come to a specific form so that marketing knows to send those former customers a care package. All RSDs are included in the notification of those leads, so if yours is the closest agency, you’ll get an email from your RSD with the lead information. Leads that come in through partnerships are often phone calls to Todd from NASMM members or directly from places such as Erickson Senior Living, so you’ll get an email or phone call from Todd to make you aware of those opportunities.

In addition to proximity, the RSDs and Todd will consider the quality of nearby agents and Silver Certification status to keep the best relationship with those partners. A previous edition of the workbook includes steps to improving quality, and you can email your RSD or Todd to get started with Silver Certification; note that once you start the certification training, you have a limited amount of time for five members of your agency team to complete their courses.

Make sure Todd and your RSD know the best person in your office to receive those leads to mitigate waiting time to respond to the lead.

BONUS: REPLICATE THE VAN LINE LEADS PROGRAM ON YOUR WEBSITE

Complete Marketing Check-Up Exercise

Read and perform the Marketing Check-Up exercise. It will allow you to drive more traffic to your website and convert that traffic into leads. No matter how basic or advanced your marketing practices are, the exercise will help you go a step further to expand your program.

Attracting Leads & Boosting Recall through Targeted Outreach

How quickly do you respond to leads? How quickly do your competitors respond? When it comes to potential customers gathering information about household goods moving services, the more quickly they receive a response, the happier they are. It's extremely important that you get back to them before the competition does.

Depending on your resources, your response might be “ASAP,” where the actual time is anywhere from one business day to two weeks. You and your customers will be best served if you create a finite process to encourage prompt response to leads. Work together with your sales team to determine a realistic and prompt response procedure. Call in your RSD to help!

Capture Local Leads

Much like the Access program can take a lead all the way from new to closed, you’ll be well served to set up a program to take leads straight from your website into your moving software, so you aren’t responsible for data input or for keeping track of a ton of emails in your already-full inbox. Many software providers include setup and optimization lessons, so reach out to them for demos for your project.

You capture leads from your website, you can use a form plug-in such as Formidable, or you can use code to create your own form. The van line makes our ballpark estimate code available for agent use. Just go to Access>Forms & Manuals to download the code (righthand column, very last link at the bottom). Then, call up your moving software provider to set up an API to link the form data to their software.

Goals >