Lead Generation for Construction Websites
There are many ways to garner leads, including through:
- Blogging
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Website landing pages
- Paid acquisition
- Live events and seminars
Developing a lead generation strategy
1. Identify your target audience
The first step to generating leads for your construction business is identifying your ideal customer.
Ask yourself:
- What service(s) do I offer?
- What types of clients do I want to work with?
For example, if you specialize in interior design, you’ll probably not want to work with someone who wants to revamp the landscape of their beachfront house.
Think about the service(s) you offer and try to identify the different buyer personas that exist within your target market. So if you exclusively work with rental spaces, your buyer personas could be landlords and caretakers, owners of studio apartments (or AirBnBs), and regional executives of national hotel chains.
When you have a clear image of each buyer persona, you can target them better with your marketing and convert them from prospects to customers.
2. Create a value proposition
A value proposition is a brief statement that tells buyers why they should hire you or buy from you. It’s not a description of your product or service; instead, it’s a promise of the value that customers can expect your company to deliver, should they hire you.
Here’s a section of Reborn Homes’ website. While their value proposition isn’t in a statement format, they do clearly state what sets them apart from their competitors.
Value propositions play a very important role in converting qualified leads to paying customers. Once a prospect knows the value you offer them, they’ll be more likely to hire you.
That’s why you have to craft a value proposition that accurately represents your services and makes it clear why your company is the best choice. Here are the steps to take while crafting a value proposition:
Identify your ideal customer’s problems: What problems do your ideal buyers have? Is it unattractive windows or insipid landscapes? Could it be preparing bare land to start building on?
Whatever their problems are, write them down (as long as they relate to the services you offer). If you already have some customers, talk to them about this.
Identify the benefits of your services: Here, you’ll out every service you offer and describe its benefits. Focus each benefit on a single customer need/pain point, and explain why this benefit matters to the customer.
Describe what makes these benefits valuable to your ideal buyer: Explain why your target audience would want these benefits.
Connect this value to your buyer’s problem: Next, pair your ideal customers’ problems to the value of your service. If they align, then you can start differentiating your offerings from your competitors’. If not, repeat steps 1-3 until you get a valid customer need and a viable solution you can offer.
Specify why people should pick you over your competitors: Finally, think about a specific service you offer that others don’t, or a free service that your competitors charge for. The goal here is to find something that’ll serve as your competitive advantage. This will make your value proposition unique while focusing on your buyers’ needs.
3. Choose the right lead channels
The success of your lead strategy depends largely on the marketing channels you choose to execute it through. If you don’t use the right channels, you won’t be able to reach your ideal buyers. That said, here are some of the most effective channels to use for lead generation:
Your Website
When a prospect is considering hiring you to do a project for them, your construction website is likely the first place they’d visit. What they find on your site can make the difference between them hiring you or not.
So pay attention to your website’s aesthetics and optimize it for search engines like Google and Bing. This will increase your site’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), which sets more eyes on your business and boosts your inbound leads.
To create a user-friendly construction website, here are some things you should do on your website:
- Use a beautiful color scheme consistently across your website. This includes your logo, design elements, forms, and web pages.
- Use professional, high-resolution images across your entire website. These images should preferably be pictures of your work/service.
- Use a lot of whitespace on your site to draw visitors’ attention to important information.
- Use contact forms and exit popups on your site to capture leads effectively.
- Design your construction website to be responsive on mobile devices. Here’s more information about mobile-responsive web design for contractors.
- Integrate a live chatbot with your website to answer prospects’ questions about your business. Or you can just have an FAQ section on your website that provides answers to frequently asked questions.
- List your website on Google My Business to improve the visibility of your construction company to user searches
- Publish high-quality blog posts, infographics, and whitepapers on topics in your niche. These articles should answer search queries from your ideal buyer. For example, if you offer tiling services and you find that your ideal buyers often search for “ceramic tiles vs marble tiles: which is better”, write an in-depth post on the topic and publish it on your blog.
- In each blog post, optimize your title tags, (sub)headings, body copy, alt texts, meta descriptions, and URLs for long-tail keywords related to your business.
Learn more about effective SEO services for contractors. - Try to get do-follow backlinks from reputable websites in your industry like Architectural Digest.
- Optimize your website for local SEO so you can attract leads in your area. This is especially important if you only offer services in the state your office is situated. This way, if someone in your area searches, “construction companies near me”, your business will pop up on the SERPs.
Social media
Statista.com reports that there are now 4.89 billion social media users. That’s over half the entire world population! So if you’re not on social media, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest are powerful, visual-based channels that can give you access to your target audience. So set up accounts on these platforms and post valuable, business-related content on your pages.
Posting relevant and valuable content will boost your followers, and help your audience build trust in you and engage with your accounts. The more engaged your audience is, the better your chances of getting leads for your business.
Paid advertising
There are two kinds of paid ads: paid search ads and paid social media ads.
Paid search ads involve paying search engines like Google and Bing to display ads to users who’ve visited your website in the past. This keeps your business top of mind and encourages them to get in touch with you when they need your services.
Paid social media ads, on the other hand, involve paying platforms to display ads to users who’ve interacted with your accounts or similar content before (even if they don’t follow you — yet!).
You can invest in paid ads on different platforms, including:
- Facebook ads
- Instagram ads
- YouTube ads
- Twitter ads
Email marketing
Even more powerful than paid advertising is email marketing. According to a recent Litmus report, the return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is a whopping 4,200%. This means that, for every $1 spent on email marketing, you’ll receive up to $42 in revenue.
Leveraging email marketing for lead generation is instrumental for construction websites seeking to establish and nurture connections with potential clients. Crafting targeted email campaigns that showcase the company’s expertise, projects, and services can lead to sales. To fully acquire the right leads, construction businesses have the option to bypass Cloudflare in some sites that are using it.
Email marketing requires you to build an email list — a collection of email addresses belonging to people who have expressed interest in your services in some way. While this is a time-consuming endeavor, the upside is that, unlike your following on social media platforms, your email list does not hinge on the existence of any platform or algorithm. It’s yours to do with as you please.
That said, the best way to convince people to sign up for your email list is by proving that you have value to give them. And to do this, you must give them something valuable for free in exchange for their email. This is called a lead magnet.
Customer reviews
While this isn’t exactly a lead generation channel, customer reviews do go a long way in convincing website visitors that you’re good at what you do. Customer reviews are so powerful that nine out of 10 customers read them before making a buying decision.
Networking
Your network is one of the best ways to generate leads, especially when it includes all kinds of people. If your network consists of peers, subcontractors, and prospects, you’ll be able to get referrals from your peers, collaborate on projects, and convince your prospects to hire you.
- Get on social media, find construction companies similar to yours, and interact with their content.
- Attend construction conferences and events to meet people in your industry. Always remember to carry your business card with you to these events.
- Build an online community for contractors in your industry. For example, if you are a plumbing company based in Texas, you could have a Discord server or Slack group for plumbers based in Texas.
- Offer your help to other contractors and collaborate with them on projects.
Nurture your leads
- Always project a professional image of your company. Beer cans in a photo at a work site is a giant no-no.
- Don’t talk about religion or politics.
- Funny memes are cute, and can get great engagement, but shouldn’t act as the bulk of your content (especially if they’re not relevant).
- Always include a visual in the content you share. People process visual content much faster than text, and also tend to engage with visuals at a higher rate than text only. If you don’t count image creation as a strength within your business, and don’t have a graphic designer at your disposal, you can always hire someone to help.
Lead generation for construction websites FAQ
How can I generate leads for my construction business?
- Optimizing your website for search engines
- Engaging with your target audience on social media platforms
- Paying search engines and social media platforms to run adverts for your business
- Building an email list with subscribers that are actively interested in your business
- Gathering customer testimonials and including them on your website, emails, and adverts — proving to prospects that you’re great at what you do
- Building out your personal network by actively engaging with your peers, subcontractors, and ideal clients
What are the best lead generation channels for construction businesses and contractors?
- Your professional construction website
- Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube
- Your email list
Aaron R. - CEO
Entrepreneur with 20 years experience launching and managing successful web design and marketing companies. As seen in New York Times, Inc.com, Smashing Magazine, Home Advisor and other various mainstream media.
Passionate about #seo #marketing #webdesign #socialmedia #blogging #family #texasbbq
