3 Ways Customers to Find Builders Online
Maintaining a flow of new customers for your building company is hard work. Most builders we work with at Outsource Your Marketing find that there’s either too much work coming in, or too little. The ideal, they tell us, is a flow that can be increased, or decreased according to availability. In this article, the OYM team looks at the ways in which online marketing for builders can help grow your online presence and help regulate your flow of customers.
A major challenge faced by our construction clients is that their customers aren’t actively looking for them online. They may be searching for ‘local builders’ or ‘builders near me’. So how do you get your business in front of the people who need work done in your area? We work with local builders, building consultants, and property developers across the UK. When creating a digital marketing strategy for builders, there are 3 key components:
Online Marketing for Builders – 3 Key Components
Online marketing is a set of tools and techniques which promote businesses and products online. These include search engine marketing, social media marketing and paid ads (PPC). The benefits of online marketing for builders include:
- More traffic to your website
- More lead conversions
- A stronger awareness of your brand online
- Sales growth
1. Responsive, User-Friendly Website
Your customers’ first contact with you is most likely to be on their phones. They’ll type ‘local builders’ into Google and look at the results. Ideally your website will come up in the Google map, or the first few results. A responsive (mobile friendly) website will look good on a phone and be easy to navigate. If your website isn’t responsive, however, it will be difficult to read and really difficult to navigate.
There are a number of technical ‘must haves’ for your website if you’re to compete effectively online. Your site needs to load in 2 seconds or less, be easy to read and navigate, and your customers will be looking for a range of features, such as a testimonials, that allow them to trust you as a business.
2. Invest in Search Engine Optimisation
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) involves optimising your website to ensure that it will show up when people search online. If you’re a local business, you can optimise your site for local search terms, such as ‘builders in Birmingham’. This means that your site will appear in the search results when people are looking in a certain region or area for builders.
For builders who want to attract customers online, SEO is a foundational building block. It involves technical optimisation – ensuring that the site’s responsive, indexed, loads fast – and content optimisation that matches up what’s on your site with what your customers are looking for online.
3. PPC for Builders
Pay-Per-Click advertising offers you the opportunity to place ads on the platforms that your customers use most frequently. Because PPC uses smart tech, the ads display only to searchers who are actively looking for a builder in your area. Your ad can be positioned on the Google Search Results page, or on the social media site where your customers are likely to be searching. You pay a fee to advertise each time someone clicks on your ad.
The advantages of using PPC include:
- You choose the geographical area where your ad is displayed.
- There’s no contract to sign. You simply set a monthly budget to start advertising, and you can stop whenever you want.
- PPC is goal driven, so you can set the goal of driving more traffic to your site and the data generated will show you the detailed results.
- You get to learn about which search terms your customers are most likely to use, so it’s easier to market to them using SEO.
- PPC strengthens your brand. The prominent positioning of eye-catching ads will help people recognise you online.
Why Work With Outsource Your Marketing?
The OYM team is made up of digital marketing professionals who live, eat and breathe SEO, web design and PPC. We care about hitting goals for our clients, and nothing gives us greater pleasure than seeing a building client growing their business because of the online marketing strategy we have put in place for them.
