Blueprints to Success: Marketing for Construction Firms

Today we are going to discuss how to use digital marketing to grow your construction business. 

These marketing strategies can help you get more leads, close more sales, and make more money!

Build a Sales Funnel First!

Marketing is all about generating traffic. But that’s just the first step.

You then have to convert those visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers. 

And you can’t just wing it and hope for the best. You need a system for all that.

In other words:

You need a sales funnel!

Build a Quote Funnel

We recommend building a quote funnel for your construction business:

Page 1: A survey that asks questions designed to qualify leads (their location, their project type, their timeline, their budget, any special requests, etc.). 

Page 2: A squeeze page that asks them to provide their email address so that you can send them their quote. You can create the quotes manually or set up a system that generates them automatically. 

Page 3: A thank you page that encourages them to book a FREE 30-minute consultation with you. 

This is the easiest way to generate leads for a service business. All you need to do is set it all up and start driving traffic to the survey page!

This approach can be especially useful for businesses that offer custom, project-based pricing as opposed to charging service-based fixed fees. Why?

Because potential customers might hesitate to contact you for a quote out of fear of embarrassment. What if it turns out that your services are outside their budget? No one wants to feel foolish.

You can easily solve this problem with a quote funnel that features a survey with multiple-choice questions. 

Instead of asking the potential customer to type in their budget, use a multiple-choice question where they have to pick between several budget ranges. 

That way, if they can’t afford your services, they will know immediately and disqualify themselves without completing the survey.

And if they can afford them, they will probably feel inclined to complete the survey and schedule a free consultation!

You can easily build a quote funnel with ClickFunnels. 

Our software includes a proven quote funnel template, a visual editor that you can use to customize that template, and an email marketing functionality that allows you to send potential customers appointment confirmation and appointment reminder emails. 

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Send Email Reminders

Once the potential customer has scheduled the free consultation, you want to send them three automated reminder emails:

• One 24 hours before the appointment.

• Another one an hour before the appointment.

• And the last one 15 minutes before the appointment. 

This will help you reduce the no-show percentage and will likely be appreciated by the potential customers because everyone is busy and it’s so easy to forget appointments!

Close the Sale

The purpose of the free consultation should be to determine whether the potential customer is a good fit for your business. 

Review their survey answers before the call and prepare more qualifying questions that can help you understand their situation better.

If you believe that you can help them, pitch your services at the end of the call. Make sure that you have a concrete call to action. What do you want them to do next? 

And if you realize that this isn’t a good match, be honest about it and recommend someone who might be a better fit. 

Drive Traffic Directly to Your Survey Page!

We have already mentioned this but we can’t emphasize it enough: you should drive traffic directly to your survey page!

It should be a standalone landing page as opposed to a page on your website. Websites are too distracting.

Also, you might want to consider creating a separate quote funnel for each service that you offer. 

You will need to test this to know for sure but service-specific quote funnels might convert better than your general quote funnel. 

Best Marketing Strategies For Construction Firms

Okay, so now that you have your quote funnel, it’s time to start driving traffic to it. But first, let’s discuss the biggest construction marketing challenge…

What Is the Biggest Construction Marketing Challenge?

We assume that your construction company only serves a particular geographical area, whether that is your town, city, county, etc. 

In that case, you need to make sure that your marketing campaigns target people in that area.

This has serious implications for how you should approach marketing. What works well for businesses targeting a global audience probably won’t work for you. You can’t blindly optimize for general reach, you need to optimize for local reach…

Now with that out of the way, let’s discuss the top five construction marketing strategies that you can use to grow your business…

Construction Marketing Strategy #1: Google Search Ads

Google Search ads are displayed at the top of Google’s search results for specific keywords. 

They can work really well for local businesses but you will need to learn the basics of keyword research. 

We recommend targeting keywords along the lines of “construction services [geographical area]” and “[specific construction service] [geographical area]”.

Use general keywords to drive traffic to your main quote funnel and create service-specific quote funnels for service-specific keywords.

You might want to consider prioritizing leads that come from these ads because someone who is googling construction services is probably highly likely to convert to a paying customer. 

Construction Marketing Strategy #2: Social Media Ads

Social media ads are another great way to drive targeted traffic to your survey page.

All major social media platforms allow you to run ads but your best bet is probably Facebook because it’s the most popular one and has amazing targeting capabilities. 

Create a campaign designed to promote your construction business and start running it with a small daily budget. 

Once you figure out how to run ads profitably, you can begin scaling your campaign by gradually increasing its daily budget.

Experiment with driving traffic to both your general quote funnel and to service-specific quote funnels to see what works best.

Construction Marketing Strategy #3: Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a popular digital marketing strategy that seems to be underutilized in the construction industry.

Consider taking this approach:

1. Figure out what service you can provide where the end result would look good on Instagram.
2. Reach out to local influencers and offer them that service in exchange for a photo and a shoutout. Ideally, you should provide it for free but if that’s not possible then do it at a significant discount instead. 
3. Make sure to give each influencer a custom link to your quote funnel for that service so that you can track how much traffic they are driving to it.

Something to keep in mind here is that influencer marketing is much less predictable than paid advertising which makes it much riskier. 

So don’t go crazy with offering expensive services for free. Make sure that your business can absorb the losses if these campaigns don’t lead to a single sale. 

On a more positive note, doing construction work for influencers might lead to not only new business from shoutouts but also to direct referrals and more exposure opportunities. 

After all, if they are happy with your work, they might recommend you to their family, friends, and fellow influencers!

Construction Marketing Strategy #4: Leafleting

Leafleting is an old-school marketing strategy that can work well in the digital age if you put some thought into it. 

Typically, when local businesses use this approach, they distribute leaflets with a list of services, pricing, and contact details. 

But we recommend distributing leaflets that feature a list of services and a link to your general quote funnel instead. 

You can also add a QR code that will take people to your survey page with an arrow pointing at it and an instructional text along the lines of “Scan This Code to Get Your Quote TODAY!”

Printing leaflets can be expensive so you may not be able to cover the entire geographical area that you serve.

That’s why it’s important to be strategic and distribute your leaflets in neighborhoods where people are the most likely to be in need of construction services. 

Identifying such neighborhoods might require walking around and looking for obvious issues that you can help with. 

Also, whenever you complete a project for someone, consider hitting their neighborhood with leaflets promoting the same services. 

Neighbors talk so if you did a good job other people in the neighborhood will likely hear about it.

They also often compete with each other so when one person or family does something, the others might feel inclined to do the same thing. So why not help people keep up with the Joneses?

Construction Marketing Strategy #5: Referral Discounts

You should also encourage customers to recommend you to their family, friends, and colleagues. 

The best way to do that is to give everyone they send your way a substantial discount on all your services. 

If you do good work, you’ll probably get referrals anyway, but creating a referral discount can help you get more of them. Why?

Because it allows the person who’s recommending you to make themselves look good in the eyes of someone they know by hooking them up with a special discount!

And that special discount will make your construction business stand out among the competition. If the potential customer is evaluating several options, you will almost certainly end up being the frontrunner. 

Optimize Your Sales Funnel With A/B Testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the primary method that online marketers use to optimize web pages for conversions.

Here’s how it works:

1. You create two variants of the same page: variant A and variant B. There should only be one difference between them (e.g. the headline). That’s the element that you are testing.
2. You split your traffic into two and send half of it to variant A and the other half to variant B. 
3. You let the experiment run until it reaches statistical significance, evaluate the results, and keep the winning variant. 

We recommend using A/B testing to optimize all pages in your sales funnel. This can help you maximize the ROI of your marketing spend!

Build A Sales Funnel For Your Construction Business with ClickFunnels!

ClickFunnels has everything you need to build a sales funnel for your construction business:

• A proven quote funnel template. 
• A visual editor that you can use to customize that template.
• An A/B testing functionality that allows you to optimize every page in your quote funnel. 

We also offer a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk. So why not start building your quote funnel today?

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