Making your transition to inbound marketing is a massive undertaking for your construction company. Inbound is a substantial methodology, with tons of moving parts on your side, including the added pressure of continuous improvement. It can be a lot to put your head around implementing it, yet you need to get started somewhere.
We have figured out that breaking down inbound marketing a bit makes it look approachable and applicable. If you do not know much about inbound marketing, we will share the basics in this blog. You need to know some foundational elements if you expect your inbound strategy to produce great results. Let’s get started!
What is Inbound Marketing Funnel?
Also referred to as the inbound flow chart or inbound methodology, the inbound marketing funnel refers to where the leads are in the process of picking your company than your competitors. If you are familiar with buyer’s journey, this inbound marketing funnel offers a similar way of looking at things. This inbound flow chart labels your target clients with a different tag based on how interested they are in your service offerings – so you will know what content types to send them and when.
- Strangers: People who do not know about your construction brand or your construction business.
- Visitors: Strangers who come to your construction website and will learn a bit about your construction company
- Leads: Visitors who have been able to progress further into your website and gave you their contact details
- Clients: Leads who convert as your clients by availing your service offerings.
- Promoters: Clients who are glad of your continuous efforts. They are the ones who are pleased with your company and your service offerings. They are thrilled to share them with others.
What is Inbound Marketing Flywheel?
Before getting to the inbound marketing basics, you should know more about the inbound marketing flywheel. So what is it exactly? This one offers an easier way of conceptualizing how your clients feed growth. Instead of always thinking of your every client having a journey from the top of the funnel to the bottom and then dropping out, this flywheel offers a more holistic look.
Your clients are a driving force of your business, and the flywheel perfectly illustrates that. Take a closer look below where the flywheel puts the main focus on clients every single time, relating to them in 3 different ways:
Attract
Pulling in strangers to your construction brand and website. This particular stage is also being used to illustrate the mere process of attracting current clients with a new blog content offer, upgrade services, product, etc.
Attract your target clients by starting a blog. The more you blog about interesting topics relevant to your target audience, you’ll become the authority in the industry.
Engage
How you interact with your prospects, leads, and customers. It is how you send the right message to the right person at the right time that is one excellent example of how you engage with the people within your flywheel to close more and more deals.
Delight
This refers to what you should do to keep your target clients within your flywheel. Personalized follow-up emails, customer services, and reward programs are great ways to delight your current clients and turn them into promoters.
Keep your flywheel spinning! To keep it whirling, you should always attract, delight, and engage all simultaneously, rather than focusing on one little piece of the pipeline. Your flywheel spins even faster when you focus on retaining the clients you have worked so hard to convert.
The Fundamentals of Inbound Marketing
We have taken the entire inbound marketing methodology and broke it down into just five key inbound marketing basics, particularly for a construction pro like you. These five fundamentals will help you jumpstart the critical elements of inbound marketing to deliver the most significant impact on your construction business.
Let’s start diving in:
1. Draw Leads in, Do Not Push Your Message Out
Drawing in leads to the fundamental principle that the inbound marketing approach is based on. In traditional, shout marketing is already over. You can choose to extoll your company’s greatness, but it will not do so much for you if you are not offering value to draw those leads in. Take note that today’s consumers never like promotional marketing.
- At best, consumers will ignore your ads about how you are the best builder in the region.
- At worst, they will unsubscribe from your emails.
And in all honestly, promotional marketing is a ton of work:
- How much time has your marketing and sales team working on leads who were not fit?
- How much time was lost during the crafting process?
- And what did you see as far as the returns?
Our guess is not probably a whole lot. Right? We suggest you focus more on inviting your target leads and have them explore and learn more about the many things they are interested in.
2. Content is Still King
This fundamental focuses more on how you deliver the value that draws these leads in. And that is the content. In terms of inbound marketing, content is still king, whether you are a commercial builder or other. Content, in any form, starting from your blogs to your social media channels, should provide value for your leads.
While there are tons of inbound marketing strategies, content marketing and keyword research are the pillars of any inbound marketing strategy. Why? Because without content, there is not much to offer for incoming leads. Content is the dark horse of your marketing strategy, from helping your construction business rank well on search engines to providing valuable information your target leads want.
3. Define Your Target Market with Buyer Personas
There are tasks your team likes and jobs they do not. The target market is the profitable job you and your team should be focusing on. Defining your target market is another crucial inbound marketing basic you should pay attention to. There are a lot of construction jobs out there, and we know you never want all of them.
Defining your target market is the key to minimizing the number of jobs you never like, increasing the number of jobs you enjoy, and bringing greater profit to your company. After defining your target market, you should be putting a microscope into them to establish buyer personas.
Defining your buyer personas and target market is an inbound marketing basic for your construction business. Those personas will help you determine and refine what types of construction content you develop.
4. Your Construction Website is Your Lead Generation Tool, Not a Brochure
It is crucial that you always think of your construction website as your central hub. It is the focused area where leads, customers, audience and even your marketing team can turn for additional and helpful information. When you have all of these key players in one shared space, your website will become a driving tool to nurture and convert leads.
For your construction business, it is easy to adopt the mindset that your construction website is a virtual brochure. Wrong. This website of yours is a tool. And it is a tool that your target leads are comfortable using. You will start seeing results if you use your website as a lead generation tool, adding CTAs, landing pages, forms, and content offers.
If you still don’t have the best website for your business, upgrade it and invest in web development. Have a responsive design and make it mobile-friendly to attract more of your target audience and get more leads!
5. Work Smarter, Not Harder
This is a fundamental inbound marketing basic that you should live by. At its core, inbound marketing works to help you and your teamwork smarter, not harder. If you are doing inbound marketing right:
- Your marketing team develops, produces, and promotes only content that they know to your target clients.
- Your sales team is spending lesser time on unqualified leads.
- Chatbots keep your new visitors and leads engaged even when your marketing and sales team are off the clock.
ConstructionMarketing.io Is Here to Help!
Inbound marketing is an incredibly massive machine. It takes so much time to understand and implement fully. It can be more overwhelming to think about it, especially if you consider moving your construction business towards a more inbound-focused marketing strategy.
If you keep everything we shared above in mind and start with your website, content creation, and buyer personas, you will soon develop a solid foundation you can build off to draw in and convert more and more leads that can help you deliver the growth you desire.
If you are looking for thorough guidance doing this, we are here to help. It is not simple and easy to implement an inbound marketing strategy as it may seem. Talk to us today, and let’s start your moving journey to inbound marketing methods.