You want to generate the best asphalt paving leads possible to increase your business’s market share and grow. It makes sense. After all, the more leads you generate, the greater your chances of increasing revenue and sales.
To achieve these objectives, you need to work around the best strategies and set your plan properly.
Your business’s growth depends on quality leads. However, it is often hard to find them, especially in highly saturated construction, asphalting, and paving industries.
Because there is only a limited number of growth opportunities within your market, businesses often rely upon disjointed lead generation strategies to drive new business and expand reach.
Unorganized approaches to lead generation can result in missed opportunities or leads that aren’t right for your business. All you need is concrete strategies to generate leads, increase sales and open the door to growth.
This post will discuss the top lead generation marketing strategies your asphalt paving company can use to generate high-quality leads. You can apply any of them at any stage in the lead generation process.
Take your time to read each point to get the best results from your efforts and focus on internalizing every recommendation—or more what you need to do to succeed.
Do Your Research
It is crucial to identify your target audience before setting up appointments for B2B. Most business owners in the market often forget the importance of research.
It will help you find high-quality leads and also allow you to integrate other aspects of your lead generation strategy. Knowing your target audience will help you accomplish the following objectives:
Personalize Your Message
You can target your audience to tailor messages that are relevant and useful. You’ll create a resource they can turn to for help or questions.
Your audience will more likely contact you if you have valuable information in your marketing materials. Personalization is possible, just like messaging.
It will allow you to use the correct language, images, and information to promote your product or service. You can use this information to generate paving leads.
Your Proposition’s Value
Knowing your customers will help you identify the problems they are trying to solve and how your services can help them. You’ll quickly understand what value you offer and be able to speak in terms that are appealing to your target audience.
Spending more time researching your target audience and understanding their needs will make your marketing campaigns and sales more efficient. Prospecting becomes easier when you have a deeper understanding as well.
Other marketing strategies such as cold calling and email marketing will also make a noticeable impact on your bottom line. It emphasizes the fact that value preposition is crucial during the research process.
Privacy Appointment Setting B2B
Paving is a highly competitive industry. You can’t just sit back and wait for the next project to start.
Your competitors will grab the best opportunities, leaving you with only a few repair jobs.
Do you do everything possible to be one step ahead of your competition? The best advice here is to focus on B2B appointment making. You can find hundreds of leads using a combination of traditional and modern outbound strategies.
It will ensure that the most qualified people see your proposal. These are just a few methods that sales professionals use to reach potential customers. Learning more is essential in the lead generation process:
Cold Calls
Cold calling is not dead, despite what you might think or imagine. It’s just evolving. It is long past when you could dial 100 numbers and repeat the same boring speech.
Instead, it’s now a personalized, strategic process where two people engage in a two-way conversation.
Cold calling allows you to gather information about the potential lead and determine if there is a paving job for them soon.
You can also leave the door open for future relationships. Take the time to learn more about the best cold calling techniques and implement them.
Customized emails
If an email appears in your inbox randomly, it is likely headed to your “deleted” folder unless the subject line grabs your attention. Your leads must know you care about their business and send them a few personal emails to start a conversation.
Emails work better when they address the target audience directly. You have to make sure that your email content addresses the specific needs of your customers.
Social Media Messages
Your leads are there, regardless of whether you like it or not. A well-written social media message could be the start of your next big paving job.
Once your sales team has reached out to leads to set up a B2B appointment, they move those leads through their pipeline. Some prospects are in immediate need of repairs or repaving and can make an appointment immediately.
Others wait until they find the right contractor to start a project. A good appointment maker will keep both sales-qualified leads in line for as long as it takes them to schedule a meeting.
If you outsource appointment settings, your sales team will prepare and present you with the best proposal or pitch. Then, you close the deal.
This process could take several days or months.
Next, you will repeat the process for your next lead. If done correctly, B2B appointment setting can significantly expand your pipeline, improve your company visibility, and increase revenue.
Do you find the B2B appointment-setting process confusing? It is. It can be challenging to gather contact information from hundreds or thousands of leads, get them responding to your messages and convince them to make appointments.
Partnering with a B2B appointment setting firm is an option if your marketing team cannot handle the extra hours.
Build a Website That Has a High SEO Value
A few leads might ask for recommendations to repair a pothole, pave a parking lot, or install a new sidewalk. Many more will contact an asphalt or concrete contractor they have used in the past.
However, the vast majority will reach out to Google for help. You need to have a website and landing pages in search engine results for this reason alone. It will give you a chance at getting those leads.
Google has a strict policy about which sites it displays first.
Search engine optimization (SEO), if you incorporate it into every page of your website, will help you rank high in search results. You can optimize your online site for search engines by taking the following steps:
Incorporating keywords in headers
Leads search for your services using specific search terms such as “asphalt paving company nearby me,” “commercial asphalt paving,” or “concrete paving repair.”
Including these keywords in your page titles and headers will improve your chances of visitors finding you for the keywords.
Writing SEO-friendly Content
Good SEO content is more than just putting a few high-volume keywords in every paragraph.
Your content marketing should address common questions and condense complex information into simple phrases. It also needs to flow well to attract your prospects.
Adding Links to Each Page
Search engine bots won’t index pages they can’t locate. Site visitors will find the pages they are looking for easier if you include internal links to other pages on your site.
It can improve your rank and help them reach the pages they want. External links to trusted sites help you build credibility with search engine bots and readers.
Speeding Loading Time
Would it be better to wait for a webpage to load or click on the next search engine result to get immediate answers?
The majority of people would choose the second option.
Slow websites are more difficult to find, take longer search engine bots to crawl and rank lower on Google.
Your website can serve as an independent lead generator, a support tool in your B2B appointment setting program, and it should be informative and well-written. Your website visitors want to get as much information as they can when they get to your site.
It is a given that every business should have a website. Your website is more than a place where visitors can learn more about your business. You can use it to generate leads.
While there are several things you can do to optimize your website’s performance, one of the most effective ways to make your site stand out is to create quality content specific to your area.
These can be blog posts, new websites pages, or pieces that contain keywords relevant to the location you are trying to serve.
Relevant content will not only help you rank higher in Google and get you to the first page of results. It will also show that visitors know that your asphalt business is knowledgeable about the area.
Use an Email Marketing Platform
Email marketing is a crucial part of your B2B lead generation strategy. It allows you to communicate with prospects and guides them through your sales funnel.
Email marketing can be compelling, but it can also take more work and become time-consuming. It may be worthwhile to invest in an automated email platform to ensure that the right people receive the right messages.
Emails help you establish better relationships with your audience so that when it comes time to buy, they will be able to call you first. It saves salespeople time by not having to manage email communications. It allows them to pay attention to what they excel at: closing more deals.
Nurture the Results You Get
Cold calling, email marketing, and your website are all ways to get leads. However, many of these leads will not be ready to purchase yet.
To ensure that they are ready to buy, it is crucial that you nurture them. Consider a customer that loses their long-standing paving contractor. If you have taken care of the lead, customers will look to you for a replacement.
A lead nurturing program is a vital part of your B2B appointment-setting strategy. A lead nurturing strategy is about consistent communication with potential customers and relevant information.
You can communicate with potential customers using an email marketing platform. A CRM is also available to help manage, nurture and move leads through your sales funnel.
Connect With Prospects About Social Media
While you can use social media to supplement your outbound sales strategy, you are missing a huge opportunity. Social media can work as a lead generator by itself.
You need to create profiles for your company on top B2B social networks, post content that appeals directly to your target audience, build your prospect network and add targeted ads. It sounds tedious, but it is worth it.
Potential clients will remember your message if you deliver it to them before they need you. Some leads might even use Facebook and LinkedIn to search for a paving company partner. Your company profile can make the difference between winning and losing a deal to a competitor company.
Online advertising is essential, but don’t forget social media. Post frequently on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and interact with your followers.
You should also be aware of who is interacting with your posts. People who liked your content enough to share it, like it, and leave positive comments are likely to be interested in your services. They will also be more open to your offer.
Streamline the Appointment Setting Process
If you don’t have an effective and consistent process for setting up appointments, you won’t sustain the aforementioned initiatives.
This process should reveal who your customers are, how to contact prospects, and how to move them through your sales funnel. Here is what you should ask yourself:
- How and where will your appointment setters access your prospect data and the tools?
- Are there steps involved in setting up appointments?
- How do appointment setters approach data cleansing? It is how they decide who the critical decision-maker (KDM) is and what criteria make a lead worthwhile.
- How do the sales development professionals store information about leads and the leadership development tools they use?
- How should your brand message sound for different KDMs?
- How do the appointment setters nurture leads?
- What personalized, valuable, and relevant information should they use for this purpose?
This process is essential to ensure that your B2B lead generation and sales efforts align with your growth goals. You’ll also have difficulty sustaining your success, but it is essential in your lead generation campaign.
Invest In Print, Digital, And Video Collateral
Even the most skilled salesperson can still need support to sell products and services. Brochures, pitch decks, company videos, and sell sheets are all marketing collateral that you can use to support your sales team and keep you selling long after the call is over.
Although you might not believe that a brochure or a video of a minute length will increase sales, they can be the last push your leads need before agreeing to meet.
It doesn’t need to be something you give out at meetings.
You can embed a high-quality video on your website or attach a PDF document to an email. Whatever format you choose, collateral can increase brand awareness, highlight your past successes, or distinguish your paving company apart from the rest.
Get Creative with Content
Even if you use every sales strategy, you won’t see your desired results. Your content is what potential customers use to assess your authority, learn more about you, and decide if it’s worth their time.
If you want to attract property developers and secure a six-figure contract, a few paragraphs of generic content will not suffice. Your content can wow leads: Write branded content that appeals to a wide range of clients.
Some formats we can introduce you to include:
- Web pages: Website content should be engaging, informative, detailed, and easy to read. If your leads can access a site with better content, they won’t bother understanding tedious and unorganized pages.
- Blogs: Blog content is a great way to establish credibility with your leads. Blogs that answer common questions leads may have, such as “What material is best for my next asphalt paving project?” and “How can I prevent my asphalt parking lot cracking?” Potential customers will easily find your content when they search the internet for answers.
- Social media posts: You can see the flood of posts on your leads’ social media accounts. You need to grab their attention with creative, action-inducing words if you want them not to scroll down until they reach yours.
Organize a Local Contest
Everyone loves to win prizes. This universal trait can help you locate people interested in asphalt services in your area. Make sure you do it right.
A giveaway of the latest smartphone can be a great way to get much attention, but a free smartphone does not necessarily indicate an interest in asphalt maintenance.
There might be people out there interested in resealing their driveways or repainting their parking lots, but finding them can be tricky and time-consuming.
It is usually better to offer a more specific prize to the customers you are interested in. To avoid losing more revenue, you might consider repairing cracks in the winner’s asphalt surface. It will let you know that everyone is interested in fixing their asphalt surface.
Get Involved in Local Events or Charities
Being involved in the community has several benefits for you, personally and socially. It can also help your business improve lead quality.
If you are involved in a local event, you will also significantly increase your lead scoring because your target audience will associate with your brand more than ever before.
Community recreation and charity events attract many people to interact with and attract attention from local news agencies.
Sponsoring, participating in, or hosting these events can help you get more attention from local news organizations. It can boost your business’s image and reputation.
Professional Marketing Materials
It can be difficult enough to get your foot in front of potential customers. Professional marketing materials will help you present your business positively.
Designing these materials will also help you improve your lead capture process. Great flyers, including before-and-after images of asphalt jobs and invoice templates, can help leads feel more confident about choosing you to handle their asphalt maintenance needs.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Asphalt Paving Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Asphalt Paving Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Asphalt Paving Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.