Getting leads for construction projects is much harder than you might think. Due to the specific nature of the business, only a small percentage of internet users will be interested in this kind of service. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s an enormous number of companies vying for a relatively small ad space.
Despite the inherent obstacles this industry faces, there are still numerous methods you can use to find potential customers for your construction company. In this article, we’ll go through some of the best tactics for boosting your marketing efforts, thus ensuring the long-term sustainability of your brand.
4 Construction Marketing Challenges
To understand construction marketing, you need to understand the challenges associated with the process. Although many people advertise their companies online nowadays, the industry still feels a bit “brick-and-mortar.” In other words, clients are reluctant to try brands they know little about.
What’s worse is that many construction businesses don’t fully understand the potential digital marketing carries. Many of them try SEO or SMM for a few months and bail them due to the lack of initial success. With that in mind, here are the biggest challenges a company needs to consider beforehand:
- Paying for expensive leads
- Creating a unique proposal
- Investing long-term
- Finding optimal channels
1. Paying For Expensive Leads
The cost per lead in the construction industry is much higher compared to some other businesses. While the companies manage to compensate for this fact by having higher margins, it doesn’t change the fact you’ll need to invest heavily during the initial days.
2. Creating a Unique Sales Proposal
Construction is, according to many marketers, a dull industry. For the most part, we distinguish brands based on their service offering and whether they’re “good” or “bad.” Given such limited information, clients are usually looking for something extra to latch to, which is why you need to find a way to differentiate yourself.
3. Investing in Marketing Long-Term
Marketing is a hard pill to swallow for any contracting business. Many brands don’t have a long-term vision or simply don’t trust their agency enough to see the project through. So, before starting a campaign, you need to ask yourself if you can survive the initial period while the marketing channels are being developed.
4. Finding Optimal Channels
Another common issue is not using the right channels for your marketing goals. Brands often use a mish-mash of tactics to attract commercial construction leads, often leading to a lack of focus and subpar results. Make sure you have a well-polished plan before you set things into motion and that you choose the right channels according to your goals.
Creating a Construction Lead Generation Strategy
With the appearance of digital marketing, the entire marketing field is extremely diversified, offering companies all sorts of valid strategies. Before you can start any type of campaign, you must determine your business needs:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Improving reputation
- Boosting short-term sales
- Building a sustainable brand
Your ideal promotional tactic will vary significantly based on your construction lead generation strategy. Generally speaking, search engine optimization is usually the best way to build a brand, while paid ads are much better for short-term sales. You’ll likely have to rely on other methods, such as email marketing and social media marketing, as well.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Brand awareness strategies give you the most leeway out of them all. Your main task here is to share your message with as many construction leads as possible, not particularly caring about closing during the initial stages. In that sense, as long as people see your message, it isn’t actually important which channel you use.
Brand awareness campaigns usually go hand-in-hand with regular SEO campaigns, as you’ll use outreach to connect with various influencers and news websites. Furthermore, guest posting, which is a common part of the process, is another fantastic opportunity to get people acquainted with your brand.
You might also consider social media for this particular purpose. Keep in mind that these platforms aren’t always suitable for construction businesses because they don’t translate as well as some other tactics. Out of all the tactics for increasing awareness, pay-per-click is considered as one of the worst due to its high price per user.
Improving Reputation
Although brand awareness and reputation might sound like similar terms, there are a few important distinctions to be made. For example, people might know about a certain brand, but they don’t trust them enough to buy their services. In these cases, you need to perform a full-scale campaign that will improve your perception in the eyes of potential clients.
Specifically, unlike awareness campaigns, where your main task is just to spread the message around, you need to be more diligent when building a reputation. Companies looking to boost their reputation usually have good online visibility, but the users simply don’t trust them enough to become qualified leads.
The best way to improve reputation is through PR campaigns. Sharing your content with top-tier publications will increase your authority within the industry, allowing you to close qualified leads at a much higher rate. Besides that, you might also consider working with construction influencers and appearing on popular podcasts.
Boosting Short-Term Sales
While this might sound contradictory, boosting short-term sales is the most straightforward strategy. All you have to do is invest money in highly converting ad space and wait for construction leads to roll in. Based on this sentence alone, it becomes obvious that pay-per-click is the best way to achieve this goal.
Paid campaigns are extremely targeted, allowing you to connect with specific residential construction leads. The conversion rates are also great, given that you’ll only pay for keywords that are related to your business.
Unfortunately, the approach does have a few flaws. Most notably, each lead costs you money (you spend money each time a person clicks on your ad). It also doesn’t offer much in terms of scaling, as ads are removed as soon as you stop paying. Because of that, many companies prefer SEO, as it’s much better for long-term brand building despite not providing good initial returns.
Building a Sustainable Brand
Many construction companies are not prepared to invest in a long-term future. There are many reasons for this, among which lack of cash flow is the dominant one. Nevertheless, if you wish to make sure your business is healthy ten years from now, you might want to prioritize a brand-building strategy.
An interesting thing about this approach is that it starts slowly. As your main focus isn’t on sales, you’ll likely have to make concessions along the way and miss a lot of solid opportunities. Most of your money will go on things such as creating content and building links, whose benefits you won’t notice at first.
The best way to build a brand is through search engines and by boosting social media presence. Both of these tactics start slow but have enormous scaling potential. In theory, you might want to add as many other tactics as possible to the mix, especially the ones that will increase awareness.
Patience is crucial when building a brand. You must avoid any risky SEO strategy or SMM tactics that go against your values and mission.
Targeting the Right Users
The success of your sales and marketing efforts is mostly affected by your targeting. Companies missing their mark usually have to contend with subpar performance, with many stopping their marketing projects after a brief stint. That being said, these are the three main considerations you need to make related to your audience:
- Audience type
- Audience demographics
- Audience location
Here’s a breakdown of optimal audiences for each category and how to attract more leads with customized marketing practices.
Audience Type
We can separate all project leads into commercial and residential construction leads. Commercial leads are large businesses and investors that build hotels, apartment blocks, and other enormous structures. Among others, commercial construction can also encompass various governmental projects.
Due to the sheer size of commercial projects, new construction businesses often defer to residential users. Most of these projects don’t require connections and flawless reputation to close leads, making things easier for marketing and sales teams.
Audience Demographics
As you probably know, middle-aged men are the most common buyers of construction services. Ideally, you should target folks at least 30 years of age (better in their 40s) who can support the high expenses associated with these projects.
However, that doesn’t mean you have to stick with this group. It’s often much better to target other categories as they’re usually cheaper to market and give you the opportunity to specialize yourself.
By using tools like Google Analytics, you can easily determine whether you’re hitting your mark. Similarly, you can track the effectiveness of PPC and SMM campaigns by utilizing various programs for these respective channels. Paid ads are probably the easiest for targeting a specific audience, as you can choose who to show your message to.
Audience Location
Companies usually specialize in their local market, executing projects in their city or broader area. However, some brands have become successful by catering to the international markets and other states.
As a construction business, you should try to get as many qualified leads as possible, regardless of the location. You should probably start building a reputation in the local market, as it’s much easier to close deals and execute projects. Once you have enough know-how, you can branch out to other regions.
The easiest way to market to a local audience is through local SEO. With this promotional tactic, you can become one of the leading brands in your city by simply providing excellent service. Local optimization hinges on Google reviews and what people write about your company online. As such, it’s a great method for experienced construction businesses to save money.
7 Lead Generation for Construction Tips
As a business owner, you should never take a backseat to your marketing agency. Instead, you need to have a proactive role when managing various marketing efforts. That way, not only will you stay in the loop with everything, but you’ll also gain more quality leads for your business.
1. Repurpose Your Content
Content is a crucial vehicle for spreading your brand message and, as such, should be the focal point of your marketing. However, if you’re already willing to invest so much money into various articles and social media posts, you should also try to squeeze as much value as possible from them.
Whenever you can, repurpose content for other channels. You can easily turn blogs into shorter social media posts but can also use them as a basis for user-generated content. These pieces can also be fantastic for your email marketing, specifically newsletters.
2. Use Content Funnels
Staying on the topic of content, you can significantly boost your lead generation and sales by simply creating funnels. These lead pipelines can work in all sorts of manners and for different channels. The best example is internal links that guide blog readers from articles to service pages.
However, you don’t have to limit yourself to that. Just about any informational piece of content can lead users to converting landing pages, where you can introduce them to your offer. With funnels, you can maximize every lead with minimal investment.
3. Don’t Bail Too Early
One of the most common mistakes we see construction companies make all the time is quitting a project too early. Most of these tactics have a long window, and it might take them up to six months to show any movement. This is especially true for social media and search engine optimization campaigns.
In some cases, your channel can show promise down the line. For example, even if your Facebook page can’t generate any leads, you might wish to keep pushing for at least a little while. As long as you repurpose content, as we just mentioned, you can keep it active without extra spending.
4. Try Remarketing
Remarketing is one of the best ways to squeeze more value from every lead. With this strategy, you can reach out to users who have previously interacted with your brand and have shown some level of interest in your services.
When we talk about remarketing, we primarily think of paid ads and email marketing. For example, many users leave their contact details while visiting the site. You can use this data to send periodic newsletters that include discounts and notifications about new products.
Ads work in a similar way. If a person has previously shown interest in a certain product or service category, these platforms can show them ads according to their browsing preferences. Similarly, you can use any data they might’ve left when interacting with your ads and use it to contact them and sell them directly.
5. Get Boost From Events
You should never forget that digital marketing is a great vehicle for real-world activities and vice versa. Marketers can use digital media to notify fans whenever they attend a trade show or some other live event. Ideally, they should share the message through as many channels as possible to boost attendance and interest.
On top of that, whenever you organize a trade show, you should spread the word to get as many links and social media shares as possible. That way, each event that you organize can boost your social media followership and build your website authority. With a proper funneling strategy, all the visitors who check your pages during this period can be sent to your sales team and converted.
6. Focus on Technical Aspects
Even if you don’t like the concept of SEO, you should still hire a specialist to perform occasional audits. Your website should be well-optimized for speed and mobile devices, and it should have a fantastic structure. Make sure that Google’s robots can easily skim through your pages to expedite indexing.
There are many situations where construction companies totally forget about their site performance, focusing on the development of other channels. Keep in mind that all construction leads you get from other tactics will eventually end up on your site. So, if they can’t properly open your landing pages, it doesn’t matter how much you invested in influencer and email marketing or paid ads.
7. Interact via Social Media
When we talk about construction projects and industry, in general, we rarely think about social media. But it shouldn’t be so; platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn can help generate as many leads as your website. That is, if you use them to create meaningful connections.
The good thing about social networks is that they allow construction leads to have a simple, unforced conversation with company representatives. Social media is especially great for younger users, as they prefer doing business through these channels. That being said, you should hire someone who will answer all inquiries and provide assistance when necessary.
Conclusion
If you’re in a construction business, you should first determine your goals and requirements. It’s also very important to set the audience you want to target and find where they’re located. With pinpoint precision, not only can you optimize marketing efforts, but you can also gain free construction leads you didn’t count on.