Have you heard of inbound marketing? Inbound marketing, also called content marketing, is exactly what it sounds like: marketing efforts designed to draw customers to you, rather than outwardly pushing your services to the widest possible audience.
Rather than crafting a very general, impersonal message and broadcasting it out to anyone and everyone, inbound marketing is more about focusing on creating content that gets the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time.
This approach is hugely beneficial for builders and other contracting professionals, as these customers tend to do more research than most. If you’re looking for a builder for a potential new project, it stands to reason that you’re going to have a lot of questions and concerns that need to be answered. With the right inbound marketing approach, blog posts, white papers, videos, and other types of content are created to answer the questions your ideal customers most frequently ask. This draws them to your website and also begins a relationship establishing your company as a trusted authority.
The Power of Inbound Marketing: Facts and Figures
In today’s information age, inbound marketing makes sense because your customers are already asking the questions online. According to Hubspot’s List of Marketing Statistics for 2017, only 29% of people will actually talk to a representative from your business to learn more about who you are and what you do whereas 62% of people turn first to a search engine, which is where your inbound marketing efforts come into play.
If you truly understand your ideal customers and know what they need and what they want, it’s easy to craft content that engages with them and helps make their buying decisions easy and even enjoyable. But more than that, you’re bringing people into your company’s orbit in a way that provides instant gratification—thus increasing the chances that they’ll want to continue this new relationship moving forward.
According to Hubspot, inbound marketing generates about three times as many leads per dollar spent than traditional methods. Additionally, businesses who nurture their leads via inbound marketing tend to make 50% more sales at a cost that is approximately 33% less than leads that AREN’T nurtured. With these kinds of returns it’s easy to see why this is one technique that has picked up an incredible amount of steam over the last few years.
The Benefits of Inbound Marketing for Builders
Inbound marketing is also enormously helpful in terms of another technique that builders everywhere rely on: SEO or search engine optimization.
The vast majority of all new customers will find your business through a search engine like Google or Bing. About 94% of all links that people click on are organic, not paid advertising links. So, if you think you can “buy” your way to the top of the search results and rely on pay-per-click advertising, that technique likely will not have the impact you are hoping for.
Likewise, about 68% of all clicks go to the top three search results. Nearly 75% of all users never even bother to scroll past the first page of results. All of this means that if raising awareness is one of the keys to generating new business as a builder, inbound marketing is exactly how you do it.
Every single time you publish a new blog post or create some other type of helpful, relevant content that will live online, what you’re really doing is giving yourself another opportunity to rank for your desired keywords. A HubSpot report indicated that websites with between 51 and 100 pages across their primary domain tend to generate as much as 48% more traffic than websites with between one and 50 pages. So, the more inbound content you create, the more opportunities you have to rank, which will ultimately help increase those rankings at the exact same time.
Another one of the major reasons why inbound marketing is so helpful for builders comes down to how long the sales cycle typically is in this industry. Engaging with a builder on a project isn’t something that happens as quickly as, say, buying a new car or television set. Depending on the needs of the specific customer, it can be months or even a year or more from the time they begin their research to the time they find a partner they feel comfortable with. Inbound marketing and the creation of high-value, relevant, and engaging content is a way to gain someone’s attention in a way that also helps you guide them through the buyer journey, earning their trust along the way.
Depending on the nature of your campaign, inbound marketing can also be a great way for your leads to essentially self-qualify themselves. If you’re a builder with a very specific focus, showing that through inbound marketing will a) attract more people who are already interested in that very specific niche, and b) quickly show everyone else that yours may not be the company that they’re looking for. Not only can this be a great way to actually shorten the sales cycle, but it’s also a great way to free up the valuable time of your employees so they can focus on those matters that actually require their attention.
Finally, inbound marketing benefits builders because of how this type of content helps to bridge both knowledge and trust gaps at the exact same time.
Think about it like this: Even customers who are thinking about engaging your services for a relatively small project are going to have a lot of questions. By crafting content around frequently asked questions, common issues, and even your building process itself, you’re eliminating as much confusion from the situation as possible in a way that immediately warms someone up and puts their mind at ease.
But more than that, you’re creating a helpful resource that is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. That valuable blog post you wrote about an important construction industry topic will still be helpful six months (or six years) from now—allowing it and the rest of your inbound marketing efforts to become an investment that will absolutely pay for itself over time.
