Does your building company have 18 months of work ahead?
Getting a pipeline of future clients is the #1 mission of EVERY SINGLE BUILDING COMPANY. Without it, your cashflow suffers, the stress mounts and you begin to do things that just feels bad… (like heavily discount just to win work)
At Building Boom, we grow home builders leads and sales with digital marketing so they have 18 months of work in their pipeline… ALWAYS… AND It’s our speciality.
We all know…
You gotta spend money to make money right?
If you want to make money on site, you need some tools first. Spend some money and then make some money.
The same goes for digital marketing for builders… BUT…
If you don’t spend that money THE RIGHT WAY, that money never comes back to you. If you bought a new drill and went to site and it didn’t work, it’d be the same result.
Here’s a REAL example of a builder who went through exactly what I’m talking about:
One of my clients (Infratec Homes) typically would build 10 or less homes a year. Most of the work he would get was from building signs but that slowed down significantly as more people did research online.
He knew he needed to get his digital strategy right so he contacted some agencies.
What he told me next is very typical to what a lot of other builders have told me…
He spent a bucket load of money on a new website, because the marketing agency he spoke to said that was his problem and they could fix it to get him leads.
After launching his brand new website he got… Zero leads.
He then met a different agency who said Google Ads was the answer and he got convinced to give it a try.
After 6 months he got… Zero leads.
At this point he was really frustrated. Two different agencies had tried but couldn’t make it work. Still, something in his gut told him that winning work online was the right path to go down.
This time, he decided to work with a company that specialises in the building industry. Once again, they convinced him that they needed to build a new website.
So, parting with more cash, he did build that new website… only to get, you guessed it… Zero leads.
But here’s the catch.
All 3 OF THOSE AGENCIES WERE CORRECT!!! (kind of)
The problem was, they knew the existing website wasn’t great, but they didn’t understand WHY it wasn’t great. It looked good, but didn’t deliver leads. There’s a big lesson to learn here in case you missed it. A nice looking website is not enough to generate leads.
The second agency couldn’t get his Google ads to convert website visitors into leads. Why? Because the most important elements of the website were overlooked.
So what are the most important elements?
It’s not just one element alone, but how all of your content conveys your message to your ideal client. What you say (text) is MORE IMPORTANT than your images, fonts, logo, colours and everything else. Because people will connect, or disconnect with you based on what you’re saying. Everything else must compliment what is written (the text).
Back to our frustrated builder…
So his money went down the drain plus 10 months of wasted time not generating any leads. 10 months is far too long to wait when you really want new work to boost the bank account.
Just like building, if you don’t have the right foundation to build on, everything else will be out of whack.
But if you have the right foundation, you can build the next layer on top and if you do that correctly, the next layer and the next layer, again and again.
This is how you grow a successful building company with digital marketing… the RIGHT way.
Here’s what John (the owner from Infratec) said after we implemented our strategy for his building company;
JOHN HARRY
OWNER @
INFRATEC HOMES
Let me share a little bit of my own story with you…
in 2010, I first discovered how digital marketing for builders worked… by doing something no one else had done.
Right before this happened, I decided to take a big risk.
I invested $10,000 into a digital marketing intensive because I knew digital marketing was the future… but I really wasn’t sure what to do.
I flew to Sydney (flights + accomodation added a further $1500 to the initial $10k) and sat with an internet marketing expert who helped me design my digital strategy for 3 days. They asked so many questions about who my customers were, what they really wanted and what my sales process was.
To be brutally honest, I was totally unprepared. I couldn’t answer those questions very well and sometimes I didn’t even understand how the questions were relevant to what I was trying to achieve. (My main problem at the time was I didn’t commit to one market segment because I didn’t want to lose potential work… but that’s a different story).
But they knew something I didn’t… so I decided each day to trust the process and see how things progressed.
Once I arrived home I began to apply everything I learned.
The bulk of the work was on my website. As I painstakingly rewrote every single page, I wondered if this would really make that big a difference.
I also connected some marketing automation software and created a lead magnet (downloadable brochure) that would trigger an email automation system where emails would automatically be sent out on my behalf.
*Side Note: Some agencies still recommend similar lead magnets I built in 2010 – NEWS FLASH: THEY STILL AREN’T EFFECTIVE and they shouldn’t be peddling that BS.
Nothing really changed… I still struggled to generate leads and clients and I wondered if the whole thing had been a waste of time.
But I was committed to this and I still believed that digital was what would drive sales, so I made up my mind to figure it out.
Keep in mind, no one was doing anything like this at the time. Most big home builders had a website, but they didn’t do much with it at all. Small and mid sized builders barely had websites and never touched them.
THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED.
After a few months trial and error, my next step worked so successfully that I signed 4 new clients in 6 weeks… A total contract value of $2,425,000!
One of those clients actually signed my design agreement after a 20 minute phone conversation and paid the design fee ($6,500) that night!!! The next week we met to begin the design on his $850,000 home!!!
WOW.
Everything I had learned at the digital marketing intensive was really great as a framework, but the specifics lacked because home building is a completely unique business.
In fact, it’s one of the most complex and complicated businesses out there.
Home building is both a product AND a service business with heavy regulation, financial constraints on both the builder and the client as well as one of the longest sales cycles from the time someone decides to build and when their siteworks begins.
THERE ARE NO OTHER BUSINESSES AS UNIQUE AS HOME BUILDING IN THE WORLD.
Which is why it took a builder to figure it out… before any marketing company ever could.
Often Builders get burned by marketing companies that don’t really understand building – or more importantly, the CLIENTS WHO BUILD. You may have been burned by one of those marketing companies who have a slick website and tons of credentials… but fail when it comes to building company marketing.
That’s why Building Boom even exists today. It took several home builders in Perth asking me to sort out their digital marketing for me to make up my mind and say OK I’ll do it. They saw the work I was winning but had no idea how to do it themselves. Their marketing agency did all the typical things you’d expect, but the results were ordinary (or worse).
Some of those builders are still with me today more than a decade later.
What I discovered in 2010 still works today and yet BARELY ANYONE DOES IT!!
So here are my questions for you…
- Are you ready for more leads?
- Would you like to generate a pipeline of work?
- Are you ready to think long term (12 months and beyond) and really grow into a great building company?
- Are you willing to invest the time and money to get this done properly?
If you are, then it’s time we talked.
Steve Fitz, Managing Director – (New Home Builder since 1991, Software Engineer since 2002 and digital marketer since 2006)
Ready for some real talk?
Send me your details using this form and we’ll discuss your business currently and where you’d like it to be.
It doesn’t take me long to quickly identify what’s stopping builders from generating good quality leads as well as what can be done to turn things around. Digital marketing for home builders is our speciality which makes our diagnosis, strategy and insights highly sought after.
So first things first, we need to have a quick conversation. That will give me the extra info I need to do some more research on you and your future clients. Once I have that I can create a roadmap of what we can do to take your building company to the next level.
This first conversation is free and the only commitment we’re making to each other at this point is to have a conversation about your building company. On average this takes around 30 minutes.
If you’re ready for a chat, complete the form and we’ll speak soon.
