Construction companies have been thriving in one of the longest economic booms in the last couple of decades. Today, with a recession just around the horizon, construction companies have to battle disrupted supply chains, operational restrictions, and disputes over non-payment. And although no one knows what the “new normal” will bring, one thing is certain: construction companies have to act now in order to overcome this downturn and ensure stable cash flow.

The world is now looking at high inflation rates that affect both material and labour costs. Coupled with a high rate of interest, the economy is getting hit by a double whammy. The construction industry needs to play smart and adapt to this new reality.

In earlier years, when businesses suffered from a lack of revenue, the reason was usually associated with their lead generation approach. Now, a continuous stream of high-quality leads remains the most important criterion for business sustainability and stable cash flow.

Lead generation has become vital for modern construction companies as they continue to work hard to restart their operations and recover what they have lost (which includes good quality skilled labour too). Acquiring new construction leads, when done correctly, is a powerful way of building brand awareness, nurturing prospects and clients, qualifying leads, and, finally, generating revenue.

In this article, we will show you some of the lead generation best practices that your construction company can utilize to ensure a steady income of leads.

5 Lead Generation Best Practices for Construction Companies

Understand the importance of a local SEO strategy

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a nuanced and relatively complex optimization technique. Local SEO adds another layer of consideration that, when kept in mind, can reap dividends. Referrals and online searches are big drivers of leads for a construction company.

Local SEO can supercharge your lead generation engine and help you start churning out high-quality leads. 

As the name suggests, local SEO helps you optimize your online search presence for local search or a specific geographical location. This can help you expand your current market and also help you break into a new market as well.

• You can build organic visibility across digital channels (search results, website, social media, online directories, etc.)
• Build a positive reputation for your construction business in the local region
• Drive more traffic to your website and leads for your sales team

It starts with optimizing your Google My Business page. You can do this by maintaining consistency in your name, address, and phone number. Also always remember to fill out the ‘About’ section, as well as a list of prices and quotes if possible. 

Most local searches show results on the basis of the distance from the search user, so it’s always helpful to have your business information up to date!

Are you a business catering to a particular region? Make sure to embed that as a keyword in your website content. For example, ‘commercial construction company’ may get you leads but ‘commercial office construction company in Toronto’ will bring you much higher quality leads. 

Use long tail keywords that better reflect search intent. 

Build a content marketing strategy aimed at strengthening your competitiveness 

Business cards and a great sales pitch are as important as they were twenty years ago, but there are new tools you can use to bring additional floors to your revenue graph. One of the most important tools is content marketing. And while there are many ways to use it, the best results come when you use it regularly.

The best starting point for content marketing is to have a blog on your website and post on it at least two times a week. Although it can sound hard, opening, and maintaining a blog is fairly easy. 

Another great content piece is creating long-form articles that exhibit thought leadership and cater to a specific pain point that is relevant to your potential customer. Writing content like this is also something that is valued by search engines and helps elevate your search ranking to the first page. 

You already know your customers, so creating blog posts and long-form articles in which you focus on your previous projects or the latest industry trends will portray you as a thought leader in your industry and a desirable contractor to your potential clients.

Content marketing is one of those tools that can build your repertoire of thought leadership, increase your search prominence, and establish your brand without any cost to you. 

It does this by boosting your organic SEO and speaking directly to your target audience. 

Engage in email marketing and never be forgotten by your valued customers 

Once you have ensured that your construction company is easy to find, it is time to make your company worth finding. 

By proactively contacting your potential clients and providing them with regular information that they find useful, you are not only tying your email marketing strategy with your content marketing. 

You are ensuring your company stays top-of-mind whenever that potential client has a construction project. 

However, you should not send emails too frequently or multiple emails with the same content – you don’t want to become too intrusive or a nuisance. 

Although email frequency best practices varies across different industries, as a general rule, one email per week offers the best results for lead generation for construction companies.

Later on, when you’re at a more advanced level, you should also explore how to build an email nurture strategy that customizes emails basis each customer segment and regularly ‘nurtures’ them with the right piece of content, influencing them to move further down the funnel.

Use SEO as a cornerstone for revenue growth

If you ask a person from travel, retail, telco, or any similar industry whether SEO works, they will all say yes.

If that same question is given to someone who works in construction, they will probably say no since many believe that most of their business comes through word of mouth. But what about all those people who hear about their business from a friend and want to get more information about them online?

Having a website that is optimized for your service offerings and your geographic area will make your business easier to find for every potential client that is searching for someone to take on their construction project.

When done correctly, SEO is a great way of connecting the dots between people searching for construction services and your online presence since search engines – especially Google – love SEO-optimized websites and reward them with more visibility.

Improve your website’s UI for optimal user experience

 

Focus on a multi-pronged digital campaign strategy

 

Analyze your campaign results regularly

You’ve built a brand new content strategy. You’ve fixed up your SEO and are paying attention to local SEO as well. Great! The next step is to analyze all the campaigns that are making use of these tactics.

While you can use a CRM system to automate most of this analysis and keep track of your data, asking the people involved directly in the process can yield immense insights as well.

• Lead research – asking the leads that find you (either as a follow-up or when they first fill out the form), how they found you, will help you understand which of your channels are working.
• Customer research – understanding why your customers chose you can help determine your content strategy as well as your approach to SEO. This can also help you build a buyer persona that feeds into all your marketing and sales collateral.
• Internal sales research – your sales team knows which tools and content are the most effective when it comes to converting leads to buying customers. They can supply you with incredibly insightful information that supplements your buyer’s persona and your digital marketing strategy. 

Understanding your lead generation strategy is not an easy job. It requires peering into layers of data and making sense of sometimes unrelated data. But it can be extremely rewarding. 

The end result is an extremely effective lead generation strategy that is optimized across channels and can give a big boost to your sales pipeline.

Ready to get those leads? Ask us how we can turn you into a lead generation machine! Speak to one of our experts to get a customized lead generation plan just for your business.