As a construction company, you need a steady flow of leads to keep busy. If you don’t have another project waiting for you when you finish with one, you’re losing revenue.
That’s why it’s essential to have a robust lead generation system. Lead generation simply refers to how you attract potential customers and turn them into paying customers.
If you want to generate more leads for your construction company, it’s important that you implement the following into your every day business functions:
Define Your Ideal Commercial Contractor Lead
The first step to generating construction leads is defining who your ideal commercial contractor is, aka your ideal client profile (ICP). In other words, what types of businesses do you most want to work with?
Of course, you may have different buyer personas within your target market. For example, you might specialize in working with restaurant owners. Within that target market could be regional executives of national fast-food chains, owners of small mom-and-pop restaurants, and landlords of bars and cafes. By having a clear image of each buyer persona, you can better target them in your marketing efforts.
Not sure who your ideal commercial construction leads are? No worries. The easiest way to identify them is to take a look at your current book of business and find commonalities between your most loyal and highest-paying clients. Pay attention to the industry, business size, types of construction projects, the most common decision-makers, and so on.
Once you have a solid understanding of your target market, ICPs, and what a high-quality lead looks like for you, your sales and marketing teams will be able to look for these qualities in potential clients and continue to chase them and convert them from prospect to customer.
Implement an Outbound Appointment Setting Program
As a growing construction business, it’s important to have an effective outbound appointment-setting strategy. Why? This is how you turn leads into clients. Here’s what it looks like:
Strategic Prospecting
Search out potential clients and start building a lead list. Make sure to record the contact information of key decision-makers and update it regularly to keep the information on your list clean and accurate.
Lead Qualification
Not all leads are created equal, so it’s important to qualify leads by making sure they would make a good fit for your construction services. This involves evaluating their sales qualifiers (such as their projects needing to be worth over a certain price point) and and lead scoring criteria (such as their need, budget, timeline, and overall interest in your construction offerings).
Lead Nurturing
Some leads may be interested in your construction services but not ready for them. In this case, it’s important to keep them in your sales pipeline by “nurturing” or building a relationship with them by sending routine sales emails or making follow up phone calls. Foster a rapport with prospects by learning about their needs and educating them on relevant construction topics. Keep track of what you learn about your leads, so you can leverage this information in your marketing efforts moving forward.
Scheduling Sales Meetings
Once a qualified prospect is ready to take the next step in the buyer’s journey, a sales development representative (SDR) should set up a sales meeting between the decision-maker and a member of the internal sales team. This is your opportunity to lock in the sale.
Following an appointment-setting strategy like this will make sure none of your leads fall through the cracks, and you can make the most out of your marketing and prospecting budget.
Bring Interested Buyers to Your Website With SEO Content
To attract more inbound leads to your business, focus on search engine optimization (SEO). This is the art of getting your website to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs) for targeted keywords related to your business.
For example, your potential buyers may go to search engines like Google or Bing for answers to queries like “construction companies near me,” “what does a construction management process look like,” or “do you need a general contractor?” By creating engaging online content that answers these questions, you can put yourself in a position to be found online by leads looking for the construction services you offer.
Furthermore, if your SEO content provides valuable industry insight, visitors to your site are more likely to convert into leads. So focus on creating helpful, high-quality blog articles, infographics, and whitepapers, at a regular cadence.
Though it may take some patience at first, you’ll eventually see your SEO efforts pay off with higher SERP rankings and an increasing flow of organic web traffic.
For more information on how to effectively approach digital marketing for your construction company, read our blog here.
Invest in Paid Search and Social Advertising to Retarget Leads
Some potential buyers may come across and explore your website without booking a call. But just because they’re not interested in the moment doesn’t mean they won’t ever be. This is a great opportunity to retarget them through paid search advertising or social advertising (or both).
Paid search retargeting involves paying search engines like Google to display ads to users who’ve interacted with your website in the past. That way, they’re reminded of your construction service and can click to learn more. Even if they’re not ready, you’re more likely to be top of mind when they are.
The same goes for social advertising. Social networks like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook allow you to run ads on their platforms to users who’ve interacted with your social profile in the past, as well as those who you have never interacted with. How do social platforms and search engines know who has interacted with your business? They use cookies and other technologies to track user behavior.
Keep in mind, however, that you should choose an advertising solution that makes the most sense for your target market and buyer personas. For example, if the decision-maker buyer personas in your target market don’t use Instagram, don’t put money into Instagram ads because you’re not going to see the results you want, and it’ll end up being a waste of your paid marketing budget.
Instead, research where your target market spends the most time online. For example, they may spend more time on LinkedIn, the professional networking platform. In that case, investing in LinkedIn conversation ads will be a much more effective use of your marketing budget.
Streamline Your Sales and Marketing Efforts
Marketing and sales are often seen as two separate departments. On the one hand, marketing is focused on building brand awareness and attracting potential customers.
On the other hand, sales is focused on closing deals and generating revenue. The former takes a long-term approach, while the latter aims for short-term results. However, it’s important to realize that your sales and marketing departments must be closely aligned in their goals and strategies to have the greatest impact on your business’s growth.
For example, if an SDR calls a prospect, and the prospect says they’re not in a place to buy yet but are looking into adding an extension onto their current building within the next year, the SDR can put them in the lead nurturing stage of the sales development process. Since the SDR knows what kind of construction services the prospect is interested in, they can put them in an email marketing campaign that’s specifically centered around building extension services, so they always receive content that’s relevant to their needs.
Similarly, if one of your marketing email subscribers shows interest in learning more about commercial renovation projects by responding to one of your emails on the topic, a marketing team member can put them in touch with an SDR who specializes in that area of your construction service so that they can pitch the lead on your renovation services.
Ultimately, by working hand in hand, marketing and sales teams can keep more leads in the sales pipeline, thereby generating more overall sales than either team could on its own.
To ensure this happens on a regular basis, establish standard operating procedures (SOPs) that require sales and marketing team members to hand off leads to the other team when appropriate.
Key Takeaways
At the end of the day, effective lead generation for construction companies involves many moving parts. It starts with narrowing down your commercial contractor client, but it then requires a combination of having a robust outbound appointment setting program, attracting interested buyers to your site through SEO, investing in paid search and social advertising retargeting campaigns, and streamlining your sales and marketing efforts.
Once you have all your lead generation ducks in a row, you’ll begin to see your construction business start to grow. You’ll experience fewer lulls in your work schedule because each time you complete a project, another one in your sales pipeline will be waiting for you.
Not sure where to start? Abstrakt Marketing Group has collaborated with growing construction businesses across the U.S. to help them fill their sales pipeline with high-quality construction leads through appointment setting and advanced digital marketing efforts. We can help you take your construction business to the next level through SEO, paid search advertising, social media marketing, email marketing, and much more. Contact us today to see if we have availability in your market!
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