Want to grow your construction business?
Here are five construction marketing strategies that can help you do that…
Grow Your Construction Business With Sales Funnels
Marketing is about generating traffic. But that’s just the first step.
You need a system for converting those visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers and referrers.
In other words: you need a sales funnel!
What is the Value Ladder Sales Funnel?
We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.
It was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).
This sales funnel has four stages:
- Bait – You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
- Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
- Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product or service.
- Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.
Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross-sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.
The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:
- Start the relationship with that person by offering free value
- Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email
- Build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage
Here’s how Russell explains it:
Build a Quote Funnel for Your Business
Okay, so now you understand the general concept of the Value Ladder, but how can you implement it in your construction business?
The Survey Funnel
The survey funnel is a lead generation funnel that looks like this:
Page 1: A survey
Page 2: A squeeze page based on the survey results
Page 3: A thank you page based on the survey results
Get 22 Sales Funnel Recipes for FREE!
The Quote Funnel
You can use a variation of the survey funnel known as the quote funnel to generate leads 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. Use appointment booking software that allows them to see available times and book appointments themselves without needing to email back and forth with you.
Once they schedule an appointment, 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
The call itself should be set up as a discovery call as opposed to a sales call. Your aim should be to determine whether they are a good match for your business.
Review their survey answers before the call, then ask them questions to get a better understanding of what they are looking for.
If you believe that you can help them and want to take on their project, pitch them your services at the end of the call.
If you don’t think that this is a good match, you can end the call by recommending someone who would be a better fit for them. This can help you build goodwill!
Quote funnels can be surprisingly effective, especially if you offer custom per-project pricing as opposed to charging flat fees.
In such situations, potential customers often disqualify themselves before they even talk to you, even when what you offer is a great match for them. Why?
Because they are worried that they won’t be able to afford your services and are afraid to embarrass themselves by contacting you.
That’s why getting them to fill out a survey can work really well. You can use the question about their budget to indicate the budget range that you can work with. Simply make it a multiple-choice question instead of asking them to type in a number.
That way, if they can’t afford your services, they will realize it without having to talk to you, saving you both time. But if they can, they will feel more confident, especially after getting a quote.
Our software, ClickFunnels, makes it easy to build quote funnels because we provide a proven template.
All you need to do is customize it according to your needs with our visual editor, make it available online, and start driving traffic to it!
Drive Traffic Directly to Your Survey Page!
Once you have a quote funnel, you should use paid advertising, influencer marketing, and leafleting to drive traffic directly to your survey page.
Note that the survey page should be a standalone landing page separate from your company’s website.
A landing page is a web page designed with a single conversion goal in mind. In this case, it’s to get the potential customer to fill out the survey and provide their contact details. There should be nothing on your survey page that could possibly distract them from doing that.
Of all types of web pages, landing pages convert the best. This means that you’ll almost certainly be better off driving traffic to a standalone landing page instead of a company’s website that is full of distractions.
That being said, you can use your website to drive traffic to your survey page by displaying a “Get a Quote” call-to-action button at the top right corner of your homepage. Make sure to use a color that stands out in the overall color scheme of your website so that it would be impossible to miss!
Best Construction Marketing Strategies
Here are the five best construction marketing strategies that you can use to promote your business:
Construction Marketing Strategy #1: Google Search Ads
Google Search ads are the best way to get the attention of potential customers who are actively searching for construction services in your area.
This marketing strategy will require learning the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) because you will need to do keyword research, analyze relevant keywords, and pick the most promising ones
We recommend targeting both general keywords like “construction services [geographical location]” and service-specific keywords along the lines of “[specific service] [geographical location]”.
Use general keywords to drive traffic to your main quote funnel and create service-specific quote funnels for service-specific keywords.
ClickFunnels allows you to whip up new funnels really fast so creating one for each of your services is super easy!
Construction Marketing Strategy #2: Social Media Ads
Running ads on social media platforms is the best way to drive traffic to your main quote funnel. Why?
Because paid traffic is:
- Immediate – You can quickly test your funnel, see if it’s working, and then optimize it.
- Targeted – You can make sure that your ads are only shown to people who live in your area.
- Scalable – You can scale your ad campaigns in a controlled manner by gradually increasing their daily budget.
All major social media platforms allow you to run ads so you might want to experiment with a few of them until you figure out which one is the best fit.
If your target audience is private individuals, then you might want to start by running ads on Facebook. Meanwhile, if you target businesses, then LinkedIn may be a better choice.
Regardless of the platform, the approach you should use remains the same: create an ad campaign designed to drive traffic to your quote funnel and start running it with a small daily budget. Once you figure out how to run ads profitably, you can begin gradually scaling your campaign.
Construction Marketing Strategy #3: Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing doesn’t seem to be popular in the construction industry but this marketing strategy is worth considering if your target audience is private individuals.
Figure out what service you can provide where the end result would look good on Instagram. Ideally, it should be something aspirational, like renovating a living space, as opposed to something mundane and boring.
Then, reach out to local influencers and offer them that service in exchange for a photo and a shoutout. It’s ideal if you can provide it for free but if that’s not possible then you can do it at a significant discount instead.
Make sure to give the influencer a custom link to your quote funnel so that you can track how much traffic they are driving.
Influencer marketing is likely to be a hit-and-miss marketing strategy so play it safe and don’t go crazy with expensive services. You want to make sure that you can handle the losses even if the campaign falls flat.
It’s worth noting that doing construction work for influencers might lead to not just new business from the shoutouts but also to direct referrals.
If they are happy with your work they might recommend you to their family, friends, and fellow influencers!
Construction Marketing Strategy #4: Leafleting
Leafleting might seem old school but local businesses use this marketing strategy all the time because it still works.
However, you need to be strategic about it. Ideally, you want to target areas where people are highly likely to be in need of one or more services that you provide. Use leafleting to drive targeted traffic to your service-specific quote funnels.
Also, if you have recently done work for someone in a particular neighborhood, consider hitting that area with leaflets designed to drive traffic to your main quote funnel.
Sometimes, when one person or family does something, their neighbors also become interested in doing that same thing. So why not help them keep up with the Joneses?
Construction Marketing Strategy #5: Referral Discounts
We also recommend encouraging customers to recommend you to their family, friends, and colleagues by giving anyone 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. They aren’t just making a regular suggestion, they are hooking them up with a special discount!
And that discount makes your business stand out among the competition. If the potential customer is evaluating several options, you will almost certainly end up being the frontrunner.
Use A/B Testing to Optimize Your Quote Funnel
Driving traffic to your quote funnel will help you establish the baseline conversion rate for each page. Once you have enough data to be sure that these numbers are reliable, it’s time to start optimizing your 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:
- 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.
- You split your traffic into two and send half of it to variant A and the other half to variant B.
- You let the experiment run until it reaches statistical significance, evaluate the results, and keep the winning variant.
We highly advise you to adopt the Always Be Testing mindset: optimize everything as much as possible, from the page design to the visuals you use to the copy. This can help you maximize the ROI of your marketing spend!
Build a Quote Funnel for Your Construction Business with ClickFunnels!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to build a quote 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?