Turning an electrician’s Instagram into a lead system that texts back in under a minute

Highfield Electrics is an owner-operated electrical contractor in Cardiff, run by Chris. Ex-military. On the tools every day. The kind of tradesman who turns up when he says he will.

Chris built the business the way most good tradesmen do: by doing the job properly and letting people talk. Word of mouth kept the diary full enough. But word of mouth doesn’t scale, it doesn’t choose which jobs come in, and it doesn’t do anything when a quiet week lands.

On the surface, a busy electrician doesn’t look like he needs marketing.

But busy and growing aren’t the same thing. Every new job depended on someone else’s recommendation. The Instagram account existed, but it was a graveyard of finished fuse boards and no face. There were no ads, no pixel, no way of knowing where an enquiry came from, and no system for following one up while Chris was up a ladder with his phone in the van.

The work was good. Nobody outside Cardiff’s group chats knew it.

Trades have a lead problem that most agencies ignore: the person who gets the enquiry is the same person doing the job. A lead that comes in at 10am gets a reply at 6pm, by which point the customer has rung two other electricians. Speed was the whole game, and Chris had no way to win it.

To grow, Highfield didn’t need to look bigger. It needed a front door that was open all day and answered itself.

We built the content to get him noticed and the system to make sure nobody got away.

The insight was simple: for a tradesman, the lead isn’t the win. The reply is.

Homeowners with an electrical problem don’t shop around for weeks. They message three people and go with the first one who sounds competent and comes back quickly. Chris could out-work any competitor on the job. He couldn’t out-reply them from a loft. So the system had to reply for him.

“Trades don’t lose leads because of bad marketing. They lose them because they’re working. Chris is an electrician, not a receptionist. If the enquiry sits unanswered for six hours, the ads have wasted their money. So we built the bit that answers.”Finn Hyett, founder of Proteus Digital

“A lead that waits is a lead that’s gone. For a one-man trade, the follow-up is the marketing.”

The second insight was about trust. People let electricians into their homes. Before they do, they want to see a face, hear a voice and get a sense of who’s turning up. Finished work photos don’t do that. Chris does. Ex-military, straight-talking, visibly competent on camera. The content had to be him, not his fuse boards.

The third was about intent. Someone scrolling past an electrician isn’t thinking about rewiring. Someone searching for one is. The organic content builds recognition in Cardiff. The ads catch the people who actually need a job done this week.

Treating Highfield as a lead generation business that happens to do electrics.

Our strategy was to treat Highfield as a lead generation business that happens to do electrics, and build the infrastructure to match.

Chris took center stage on camera for monthly content production: what he’s working on, what homeowners get wrong, and what a proper job looks like versus a bodge.

Meta lead campaigns run on instant forms so homeowners can enquire without leaving Instagram. Every form submission triggers a Zapier workflow sending the lead to a Google Sheet CRM and triggering an automated text message through Twilio in under a minute.

Following a three-month foundation setup that generated £5,000+ of paid work from £250 in ad spend, Highfield transitioned to an ongoing retainer for content and ads management.

“Most trade marketing stops at the ad. We stopped at the text message. Chris’s customers hear back in under a minute, every time, without him touching his phone. Two hundred and fifty quid in, five grand out. That’s not a marketing trick. That’s the difference between getting the job and not.”Finn Hyett, founder of Proteus Digital