You can focus your marketing efforts to generate more excavation leads by learning new & improved lead generation strategies for your business. Running a successful excavation business can be very profitable. But it takes commitment to actually want to grow and create a true brand in your field.
Owning a construction excavation company requires equipment, financing, professional licensing, and business licensing. There’s a list to follow if you want this investment to be a success.
Digital marketing is a powerful lead generation strategy that can help you expand your reach, increase brand awareness, converts, and sales, and ensure your company’s success.
Our goal here is to cover the basics of digital marketing for excavators. We’ll also discuss implementing effective lead generation strategies that will take your excavation business to new heights.
Digital marketing helps you market your services and products online using digital technology and online channels. You can promote your excavation business to more people online compared to traditional options.
However, with so many options and steps, it is crucial to know where and how to start. Below, you will find what you need to work on this.
Build a Brand!
Your most important marketing objective should be to build your brand offline and online.
First, your logo must be unique and professional. A professional graphic designer can help you create a functional and impressive brand right from the beginning of your marketing strategy. Your business’ success depends on your brand behavior.
No matter if a customer is visiting your website, your Facebook page, or driving past your office, they should be capable of recognizing your brand on all platforms.
This is how you build a brand.
Your logo should be consistent and use the same colors. Your brochures and business cards should reflect the branding you use on your website and social media.
Consistent branding will improve your reputation. Potential customers will see your brand as trustworthy and reliable.
Focus on Social Media
You may be thinking, “But what is my excavation company doing on Instagram or Facebook?” “What kind of content can I come up with to fill my page regularly?”
Social media is more than just pretty images and tempting ads. It would be best to focus on reviewing past customers when building your social media presence and getting sales qualified leads.
Did you know 72% of customers will not act until they have read reviews about a business? Positive reviews are more likely to convert a browser or searcher into a customer.
Social media can be summarized as follows:
It does not matter how many likes your page gets, but how valuable the engagement is from your audience. Is it better to have ten thousand likes and get ten likes for your content than one thousand likes and get one hundred likes for your posts?
This is how you will generate quality leads that are beneficial to your business.
Are you still wondering how to generate leads? If you have the right excavating company marketing strategy and navigate the ad builders, advertising on Facebook or Instagram can be cost-effective.
Your ideal customers for excavating can be targeted by their location and any other pages they have liked, including your competitors’ pages.
This audience can see excavating ads. It will also help to increase awareness and create new customers. People will remember your business if they see your logo.
Prioritize Your SEO
SEO is a tangible aspect of digital marketing. If your website and digital properties aren’t optimized for SEO, you will lose your website among the hundreds of pages after search engines index it.
It would help to maximize your SEO efforts to ensure that your brand’s social media pages and website climb the ranks as quickly as possible.
A good web developer will incorporate basic SEO into your website’s design, but it doesn’t end there.
SEO also involves posting regular and relevant content to your website. You can use images, blog posts, or video marketing to achieve this. Your SEO performance can be affected by your social media activity.
SEO for excavation firms alone can generate most of your local excavating leads if your lead generation campaign is strong enough. However, we recommend that you also read the rest of our ideas so you can have a whole strategy set for your business.
Setting up an account on Google My Business is a good start. You can then move on to content marketing and backlinking.
Take Strategic Relationships into Account
This tip is based on the age-old wisdom of networking. Although it may seem silly or out of date, the system works.
We mean this by looking for businesses in your industry that offer similar services but not the same products or services. Then, investigate ways you can form and maintain a partnership. Ask yourself, for example, what happens after excavation?
After digging, you will put the foundation in, and the walls will go up. Once the walls are up, you can install windows and roofs. Look for companies specializing in these areas and build a rapport with them.
You could share content online, a brochure, or a booth at an expo. These partnerships can be mutually advantageous. You may find that if you pass on a few leads to one of these people, they will do the same for you.
Content Marketing = Awesome Digital Marketing
It’s a great way of generating high-quality leads if you know what to write about or the type of content that will drive them to your business.
Write blog posts or articles you can publish on your website and allow your audience to share the content on social media.
Here are some topic suggestions:
- Why Excavating is Better left to the pros.
- What is the best time to hire an excavating company?
- How to handle small projects on your own.
Do you have another idea for content? It’s possible to write it down, make it into an article and post it on your excavating site.
How to get Paving Leads at Trade Shows
Trade shows are an excellent idea for excavating advertising. These shows offer many solutions for lead generation and allow you to observe your competitors, form new business partnerships, get inspiration for new excavating ads, and increase brand awareness among potential clients.
Make sure you offer something valuable to your customers at trade shows. This could be a coupon, giveaway, contest, or other incentives.
Also, ensure you collect visitor information and follow up to close the sale. Don’t forget business cards to hand out!
Directory Listings Are Important
Do some online research in directories, much like the telephone books or yellow pages of past years, and you will notice how many people still use them. You can list your business anywhere you want to be found.
A website may be created in your town or district listing local businesses that could assist residents. This is where your excavation company should be located.
Many businesses also provide business listing information to their clients if they have recently purchased land.
Local real estate agents are a great place to start. Look at their websites and see what information is available for residents of your area. Now, you need to get your business listed in these directories.
You should ensure that your listings are accurate. However, you will need to verify that your contact information is correct and that your services are current.
For example, if someone is moving to California, they might be searching for an excavation company in their area.
Traditional Marketing Is Still Essential.
We have been focusing on digital marketing until now, but we feel it is important to remind you of the traditional marketing methods.
Visible billboards, professionally designed brochures, outstanding business cards, and advertisements in local publications are all worthy of praise.
How often have you found the product or service you are looking for when passing by next to a store or billboard? An ad with an editorial in a local newspaper or magazine can be a powerful tool to bring in qualified leads.
You can create press releases about your latest projects or articles on excavation tips and techniques. Send this to local newspapers and magazines. Ask them to include your contact information and brand visibility.
Consider Some Pro Bono Work
Often, local schools, charities, and non-profits need to be involved in large-scale projects. These organizations offer tremendous exposure, so keep up to date.
We don’t say you have to do thousands of dollars worth of work to get your brand noticed. Choose one or two local projects that you are passionate about that will benefit your community.
Then, create branding to let the world know that your company is doing well. This is an excellent opportunity to make a positive impression with your marketing efforts. Sponsoring a high school or local sports team with branded shirts and tog bags is a great way to get this.
This is a great way to show people that an excavation company isn’t just another big corporation. It makes them feel like you care about their community and encourages them to use your services again.
How to Get Excavating Jobs with Excavation Website Design
Your first problem is likely already solved if your excavation company has a website. A website is a must for every business, whether it’s a restaurant, butchery, or mechanic.
Perhaps you are asking, “Why should a construction or excavation company go online?” It seems unnecessary. Well, a website is a must-have in 2022.
Why? Because that is where potential customers spend most of their time.
In 2022, 80% of location-based mobile search results led to a purchase. This means that your potential customers in your area may be online searching for solutions to their problems.
This includes looking for construction and excavation companies. What should be evident on your website?
Your brand has to be consistent across your website and your services. Clear contact information and a portfolio of a job well done are essential.
A website is one of the most important things you can do to improve your online lead generation exercise. Your excavating or paving company’s website is your online shopfront. It gives potential customers an area to look and ask questions.
- Find out more about your excavation company.
- Learn more about the excavation and paver services we offer.
- Check out your service area.
- Talk to us about possible paving or excavating jobs.
How will your ideal customers find you on Google if your company doesn’t have a professional website and a website designed for excavation companies? They won’t and will likely contact one of your competitors instead.
Excavating website design is the core of many marketing strategies. Don’t let your competition get ahead of you. Start generating leads by investing in website design.
Grab Excavating Leads in an Area You Can Canvass
Although it might sound like a traditional lead generation strategy, consumers will be more inclined to do business with businesses that can provide a face to their name. These four tips will help you get the most out of canvassing.
Even if you don’t get a positive response, always be polite. For each interaction, set a goal: make an appointment, get their contact info, or sell. So you are better prepared, have a script.
After obtaining their information, follow up with potential customers. Ensure you have many business cards on hand! It’s even better to have fridge magnets, as they are less likely to be thrown away.
You can use Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay-Per-Click to get more excavation leads. One excavating company advertising idea is a good PPC or SEM campaign. It has been proven over time to bring in quality leads.
Google is the most used search engine for lead generation campaigns. However, Bing is still a popular choice.
Are you still unsure about PPC or SEM? These stats will help you decide:
- You could earn an average of two dollars for every one you spend in Google Ads to place your excavating or paving ads.
- Around 41% of clicks from a search result page go to the top three paid excavation and paving ads.
- Over 85% of internet users use the internet for local excavating or paving companies. Visitors who visit your site via PPC/SEM are fifty percent more likely than others to become customers.
Comprehensive Digital Reputation Monitoring
Did you know that 84% of people use the internet to search for local excavating companies? These same people also research your reputation.
What are the opinions of past customers about your excavating work? Were your prices fair? Are you on time and doing what you promised?
You can also use word-of-mouth offline. Ask satisfied customers to recommend any friends, neighbors, family members, or acquaintances that might be interested in excavating or paving services.
You can give them many business cards and ask if they will allow you to put up a temporary sign in their yard displaying your company name and number.
You can list your excavating business online on review sites and ask happy customers to leave reviews on Google. This increases the likelihood that you will attract local excavating leads.
Advertise Excavation Companies with Ad Retargeting
Ever search for a product online only to find ads for it all over the web? This is called retargeting, and you can do it for your business.
Retargeting is a way to turn potential customers into paying customers by allowing them to return to your excavating website after they have left.
As they surf the internet, they’ll see excavating ads and be reminded about your business and your services.
Clicking the remodeling ad will bring them back to your site, where they can have another chance at becoming a customer.
Retargeting can help you reach more potential customers, commercial or residential, by keeping your excavating business in front of those who have shown an interest by visiting your website before or even any other digital property.
A Unique Selling Point Can Help You Get Paving Leads
Your excavating business must have a unique selling point or USP if you want to be different from the rest. This could be your level of experience in excavating, competitive pricing, reputation, stellar employees, artistry guarantees, or anything else that makes you stand out.
After identifying your USP, make sure to use it in your marketing materials for your business.
You can look at the local excavating leads generated by your competition if you don’t know where to begin. How can you match their USP? What is more important to your customers than the community you serve? These are just a few ideas to help you get started.
- Eco-friendliness.
- Services specialized.
- Guarantees.
- Service level.
What makes you different from your competitors? If you answer the question, you will get the desired results.
If You Don’t Need Them, Don’t Pay for Excavation Leads
We had discussed Home Advisor and Angi before—in some previous posts—and concluded that they should both be used with caution.
Although they can provide more local leads for your business than you might expect, their quality is often not up to standard.
You want to attract qualified local excavation leads who will eventually become customers. Many lead generation services like Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor don’t deliver quality results. It’s more likely that you will spend time hunting down bad leads than talking to the good ones.
Instead of spending money on unqualified leads, invest in digital marketing for excavation contractors.
Always Prioritize Customer Testimonials and Reviews
Customer trust is everything for a business, and you will understand it once you notice how your competitors are getting more leads thanks to their reputation and how they have worked on it.
There is no better way to bring more clients than to let others tell them how they feel about your business.
Trust in the construction industry is only possible if you have good reviews from multiple sources. This is what new leads will look for when researching your company.
How can you ensure that your reviews are covered? These are some tips to get you started:
- Your website should include testimonials and case studies from customers.
- Make sure that you’ve paid and that Google search campaigns have reviews.
- You can check the status of your Yelp Page, Google Reviews, Angie’s List, and other Google Reviews pages.
- Encourage happy customers to leave reviews on major review sites. Please give them a reward or raffle. To promote your social media channels, create customer testimonial videos.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Excavation 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 Excavation 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 Excavation 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.