Marketing qualified lead criteria for Construction Industry

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hey what's going on chuck here and um in you know my daily marketing for my company i i get to see a lot of the keywords that people are typing in to find me and i noticed a lot of people are looking for like marketing strategy for construction company or how to make a marketing plan and just keywords related to that so a lot of people are in the research stage and they're just looking for information and advice on a strategy to market a construction company and since that's what i do literally day in and day out i thought you know it'd be really cool to do a video just kind of brain dumping about this topic i know for me personally when as i'm learning things or picking up new skills it's always really helpful to just listen to somebody who knows more than me just talk about what they're doing i learn a lot just from watching and listening other people and having them explain what they do so today i'm just going to brain dump about marketing strategy for construction companies and construction companies i'm mainly talking about like local service businesses residential contractors um home builders you know people that deliver like services to people in their local community that's the main um kind of company that i work with i don't work with a lot of like big national construction companies or like people building skyscrapers and things like that that's a little bit different of a world but you know if you're like a a smaller construction company meaning one to a hundred or more employees but you service like a local area be it one city or five cities then this kind of stuff would apply to you so i'm just gonna brain dump and talk about you know maybe what i would do starting a company and working my way up to more advanced levels so let's talk about first like the bear basic marketing strategy so if i was a contractor starting out today and this could be a remodeler an electrician a plumber a landscaper you know first thing i would do is like identify who am i working for because if i'm like a plumber or an electrician i'm likely going to be working for a lot of general contractors or builders and maybe i do some work directly with homeowners but if i'm a remodeling contractor or like a landscaper chances are i'm mainly working with homeowners so that's kind of the first step is who who are you trying to work with and if you work with them a lot you know or you have in the past then you should know some things about them you know you should know where they are homeowners are obviously going to be at their house they're going to be looking online a lot of times for things that they need um but let's say that i was a remodeler just starting out today moved to a new city didn't have a website uh maybe don't even have a logo yet just maybe i don't even have a business name yet i'm just working for myself the first thing i would do is i'd get some business cards made if i didn't have a business name i'd just use my own name and i would literally find a neighborhood that i wanted to work in maybe it's my own neighborhood that i just moved into and i would walk around and knock on every single door and just introduce myself hey i'm chuck i'm a remodeling contractor i do bathrooms kitchens wall removal you know i could do just about anything that you need do you need any remodeling or handyman services um most people are gonna say no you know not right now but you can still give them your business card and say hey you know i'm new to the area i don't really have any work that's why i'm walking around talking to everybody and here's my card if you or you know anybody that needs uh my help please just give them my card or give me a call and that alone if you go and you knock on a hundred doors and talk to a hundred people i guarantee you're gonna be able to get some work out of that maybe not right away but in the weeks or months to follow you will especially if you make a good impression you smile um and you're just generally a pleasant person to talk to um but you know i have a friend of mine who he he cleans gutters that's his business and he did this challenge where he it was all filmed on youtube and he um basically started with nothing he had no phone no money no tools no anything and he went door-to-door i think he's in los angeles or somewhere in california he went door-to-door knocking on people's doors and just asking hey we clean gutters do you need your gutters cleaned and he did that for like 12 or 14 hours straight and he made like 600 bucks so you know that's just proof right there that you really don't need anything he didn't even have tools he used their hose and their ladder um obviously if you're remodeling or doing something you're going to need some tools but i'm sure that you have those so yeah like at the most basic stage like you're just you're just trying to find some jobs and there's stuff that you can do to actually produce those and marketing is literally the act of like producing jobs producing customers um so let's just say that you do that and you've been doing that for a month or two and you've saved up some money now is when you can start to invest in things you can get your you can license your llc get your business name you can get a logo made by a graphic designer you can get business cards made hopefully you've saved enough at this point to get your website built now a website that never gets found by anybody is pretty much pointless um but that said most people expect uh companies they work with to have a website it's kind of like modern day equivalent of having a business card so you know me being able to build websites myself i actually have a team that does it now you know that's literally the first thing i would do is like let's have a website built um but for you you might not have that luxury so you have to save up a little bit of money you get your website you get search engine optimization so that people can actually find you on google and the key to that is google maps they call it google my business uh gmb for short and you literally like day one as soon as i moved into my new place i would have signed up for my gmb you go to google.com business put in your information they send you a postcard to your address to verify that you're actually there and instantly people will be able to find you online i'll just do a quick demonstration just to show you let's see so if i go to google and i type in like a remodeling contractor near me i have some ads up top and then i've got google maps and so you sign up for your google maps listing google my business and people in your neighborhood people close to you will be able to start finding you here and the trick is the key is to get reviews on this thing get reviews right away have your friends your family every happy customer you've ever known anybody that will speak well of your character of the job that you do of your reliability of just anything positive ask them to leave a review and get those stacking up you know once you get past 10 past 20 you know up into the 40s and 50s when people find this listing and they look at your name and they look at 50 5 star reviews they just automatically think like okay this is a good this is a good person to work with this person's trustworthy they're making a lot of people happy and that stuff doesn't cost you anything to do you can get the listing for free you can do all this yourself i even have a pdf guide that you can download on my website that walks you through setting this thing up and what information to put in and all that kind of stuff so i'll make sure that we put a link to that thing in the description of this video so you can go download that um but get that set up get reviews going i have a friend who um he doesn't even have a website all he did was get this listing and get some reviews and he gets calls every single week about this about hiring him so it's pretty amazing um but you know if you're in like a competitive area like you'll notice here there's three businesses showing up here right but if i press view all i'm going to see tons of companies here so the trick is you want to show up in the top three otherwise no one's ever really going to see you so how do you show up in the top three well that all comes down to your website so if i click on this is actually my website my remodeling company i've got two companies one's a marketing company the other is a remodeling company and this is our site and so you notice little things like general contractor in coeur d'alene idaho that's where i live um i've got remodeling editions and custom homes you know i've got these are called keywords i've got all the keywords for the kinds of projects we do i'm very specific about where i'm located and just little details like this around the website that helps our listing show up on google maps and i mean i'm making it super simplified if you're in a competitive area it can take a lot of work to make that happen but it's worth it if you don't know how to do it it's worth the investment because you can invest say five thousand dollars in getting a good website built and making sure that you know having all the necessary things in place to get found on google maps and this listing alone will bring in enough projects to get a huge return on your investment this this listing right here has brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for us at this point over the last couple years we're currently booked out for two years we haven't taken any appointments through our website in like eight months you'll notice if you try to contact us like schedule a meeting our contact form is just not even available we're fully booked if you call the number that's listed on our google listing this number right here you get a message a recording saying that we're very busy and please go to the website to book an appointment so we haven't taken any appointments in eight months and we still have return customers and and referrals calling us so i mean we're busy busy as ever but before that a few years ago we weren't and so getting this listing in place was a huge milestone for us um and that's one of the main things that my marketing company helps contractors with but anyways that's that's that would be my main priority for a marketing strategy um if i didn't already have that in place now once you have that in place that's kind of like the foundation there's so many things that you can do and it all depends on what your goals are and a good goal is not get as many jobs as i can that's a bad goal a good goal would be something like get five bathroom remodeling jobs each month in this specific part of town um that's a good goal because that's something that you can actively measure and that you can actually pursue from a marketing perspective if i wanted bathroom remodels in this specific part of town and i knew it took two phone calls two people calling me about a bathroom to get one project then i would use like google ads or other types of advertising combine them all together and do my best to get 20 leads a month four bathroom remodels from that section of town because you can do that you can target specific areas and specific keywords and specific types of jobs and i know that if i get 20 leads and i close half of them i'm going to get 10 jobs so that kind of goal gives me the focus i need on my marketing plan to actually be able to make that happen and to measure how effective it's going to be or how effective it is if my goal was just get as many jobs as possible while getting one job would be one job you know as many jobs as possible but maybe i wouldn't be happy with that maybe i want five and so getting specific about that will really help you narrow down what exactly your marketing plan is and what kind of marketing strategy that you can use now i've got a an article on my website i wrote a long time ago i'll also link to this in the description it's adapt digital solutions it's on my blog it's called lead generation best practices for construction companies and i go through and i really i go into pretty good depth about this stuff i talk about passive lead generation versus active and i just break down all the different little micro strategies word of mouth a website you know google search is up here google maps i just talked about that um you know if i already was maxing out on what i can do from those other strategies i might try using yelp thumbtack porch house and these lead generation companies they're not my favorite and that would probably be my last resort but it's always an option if i need really high volume of leads then that's something that's that you could try um signage having signs on your truck putting signs out on the street in front of your projects doing little things like that just to help get the word out you know if you if you're the owner of a company and you have a crew working your job is to promote and sell projects so finding every way that you can to promote is the marketing strategy you don't want to just you know a lot of guys and girls think that you just find one thing that works and then that's all you have to do like oh i'll just sign up for angie leeds or homeadvisor and that's all i need to do wrong you want to do everything at least try everything you know have signs have your website be on google maps run google ads try facebook ads uh you can try youtube ads you can um go door-to-door like you want to do a bunch of different things and then find out what works for you and your particular market and then do more of those things and then cut out the things that don't work we got pay per click so this is google ads you can literally pay google to show up here at the top you know pal and sons and angie these are two lead generation companies home improvement contractors voted best in coeur d'alene this company just pretends to be an actual company but they're just a lead generation like literally if you click on this all it is oh home improvement contractors and coeur d'alene you put in your form blah blah blah but if you read the fine print you you find out that they're actually just selling your information to angie's list home advisor modernize all these other leads lead sellers so we've got pal and sons lead reseller and we've got angie so there's two companies buying ads for this keyword in this part of town neither one of them is an actual contractor so maybe if me being an actual contractor paid google to be found up here i would get some attention because all i would have to do is name my ad an actual construction company in coeur d'alene you know don't click on the the rs whatever you know um that would be an option what else we have on here um you know in this article i go into detail about a lot of this stuff i talk about what keywords to choose and and stuff like that so you know if you're like in if you're trying to run google ads or even if you're hiring someone to do it it's worth at least doing some research and kind of understanding um what's going on here i talked about door-to-door we've got a direct mail which is just sending out flyers sent out to flyers to all the houses in a specific neighborhood you know for six months in a row or every two months for a year i guarantee that's going to get projects so that few thousand dollar investment in doing that will bring in tens of thousands of dollars of projects if you're a remodeling contractor um and then i've got a section here and this is important like getting the most out of leads you know a lot of people just think oh i'll just do marketing and when i get leads that solves all my problems but wrong like you need there's certain things you need to do with those leads to get the most out of them like call people back immediately or just answer your phone and i know a lot of this is common sense but you would not believe like how many people don't do this some people call back like three or four days later and then they're confused that they don't get those jobs even after you talk to someone and you submit an estimate follow up with them weekly you know just checking in if you follow up with them weekly and you talk to them you'll know how often you should follow up but as a rule i just follow up weekly and measure your results like track this stuff how many leads did you get how many phone calls did you have like you've got 10 leads but you only talked to 8 people of those eight people how many did you actually meet with in person okay six of them and of those six people that you met with in person how many of those did you actually do an estimate for let's say three and then of those estimates how many projects did you actually get paid for let's say one so you track all that stuff for a while and then you realize okay it takes ten leads to get one job now you know so if you want three jobs a month you need 30 leads how am i going to get 30 leads well that's when you can go set out so that's that would be when you that's the strategy and that would be at the point where you're making your marketing plan because you know exactly what you need you can define who you need to talk to what kind of jobs that you'll be doing for them and then how many of those people you need to talk to another thing is uh like your offer like what exactly are you offering some landscapers will offer like a free lawn mowing your first lawnmower free or um a plumber might offer like uh 69 sink unclogging or something like that some kind of like little simple offer to get yourself in the door so that you have a chance to sell more things you know that's getting a little advanced but it's good to think about things like that a lot of people just offer a free estimate that's super common i'm not a big fan of doing free estimates unless it's a small project you know we're not going to be bidding huge additions for free takes too much time but that's a topic for another time you know the last thing i'll bring up is just going to you know this is a great marketing strategy here going to conferences going joining associations like when i was a a superintendent for a remodeling contractor in portland he um him and i used to go to like interior design conferences and architect conferences and we would rub elbows with people that were designing the type of projects that we wanted to work on and those a few of those relationships that we developed ended up turning into millions of dollars worth of projects and so if you're looking for really high-end stuff like the really trick cool stuff it's the relationships you have with the people that are already affiliated with those projects that are going to get your foot in the door it's much harder to get to go door to door and get a three million dollar remodel edition and it's even hard to use advertising or to just have a website that brings you in these ginormous projects you know a website might bring in 150 leads in a year and one of those leads is for a big project you know the rest of them are for medium or even small projects so you know if you're one of those uh people that only wants to work on the big awesome amazing projects rubbing elbows with the right people and then building a reputation for yourself in magazines again associations uh just building a reputation and and putting your image out there as someone who works on these amazing projects that's how you get those kinds so um i hope that this kind of brain dump was helpful for you if you've got um ideas or think of something i missed or you even disagree with something i said put it down in the comment section let's have a discussion about it i love talking about this stuff um if you think this video was cool hit the like button if you want to get notified when i publish more videos like this hit the subscribe button um i post a couple videos a week and i talk about all sorts of stuff so if you have a suggestion for what you'd like me to talk about next throw it in the comments and uh yeah i'll see you on the next one