To strengthen and grow your design-build business, you have to break through the noise. 

When your prospective buyers start looking for your services, how do you make sure they find you instead of your competitors? Easy, with great marketing. We often see a lot of remodelers and custom home builders missing essential elements in their marketing strategies ultimately resulting in missed opportunities. This is why we're going to share with you the marketing must-haves for your design-build company. And while some may seem obvious, they are no less important to your success.

1. Growth-Focused Marketing Plan

You may be thinking, "I already have a marketing plan", but trust us, there's a difference between having a marketing plan and having a growth-focused marketing plan. You want to make sure all your marketing efforts are actively working to grow your business by getting you more leads so you can make more money. While traditional marketing generally focuses on the top of the funnel, growth marketing meets prospective buyers at every stage of the buyer's journey. 

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a long-term, strategic practice that helps you achieve measurable and sustained growth. It is a holistic, data-driven strategy that makes use of end-to-end funnel optimization to locate, attract, convert, keep, and expand your pool of prospective customers.

How to Build a Growth Marketing Plan for Remodelers and Custom Builders

Once you’ve decided which strategy or strategies will help you achieve the growth you’re looking for, it’s time to build your growth marketing plan. This is where you should start to take a tactical approach to reach your goals. Here’s how to get started:

Establish your goals 

Goals are an important part of running a successful remodeling or custom home-building business. They give you a clear focus, motivate employees, and set targets for your business to work towards. Here at Builder Funnel, we have something we call a company WIG (wildly important goal) where everyone is involved in working to help hit that goal. Each week, we create individual goals that put us on the right track to achieve our company WIG.

Set KPI's to measure success

How can you tell whether your growth marketing strategy is effective?  The best way to determine whether you're on the correct path to attaining long-term success is to align your goals with company KPIs and growth measures.

Evaluate your customer's journey

To best understand your customer's journey, you have to understand where your customers are and how that corresponds to their needs.

• In the awareness stage, your buyer is at the top of the funnel. They know they have a problem, but they may not know what that problem is or how to address it. As a remodeler or custom home builder, you’ll want to show up in search engine results, even in these early stages, to establish your authority and gain the trust of buyers who are starting the journey.

• In the consideration stage, they are in the middle of the funnel. They know they need a solution, but they’re still looking at all the options. Your goal will be to consider your competitors and educate your buyers on the pros and cons.

• In the decision stage, they’ve reached the bottom of the funnel. They’re ready to make a purchase, and depending on how you’ve met their needs throughout their journey, they just might end up choosing you. This is why establishing a like, know, and trust relationship with your customers is so important.

Brainstorm ideas and tactics

Brainstorming is a great way to get creative and spark new ideas. If you’re looking to brainstorm some tactics that will build momentum as you build and implement your growth marketing plan, round up your teammates and use their brainpower!

Set a budget

How much you spend on your company's growth marketing depends on a lot of factors and how much you can afford to spend. Ultimately, in order to achieve growth, you’ll want to focus on maximizing your ROI. Look beyond just the cost of implementing your growth tactics, and think about the value they will bring to your business.

Measure your efforts and adjust

Measuring your efforts lets you see whether you’ve made a dent, are at a standstill, or have fallen behind. This information helps you to know whether or not you need to make an adjustment so you can get back on track. Without any type of progress indicator, you may find yourself lost in overwhelm or thinking you’re doing better than you are.

If this is feeling a little too much, don't worry! We can help! We've been creating growth-focused marketing strategies for ourselves and for our clients for over twelve years, and we can do the same for you. Check out our Remodeler Marketing Blueprint to see how we can help you grow your remodeling or custom home-building business with guaranteed results.

Marketing Mistakes Design-Build Companies Should Avoid, Especially #4 [Youtube Video]

A lot of experience comes with a lot of mistakes. We've been there and done that, and we want to make sure you don't make the same mistakes. Watch our video on the top marketing mistakes design-build companies should avoid!

2. Lead-Capturing Website

Part of building an efficient lead generation strategy is by actually capturing your leads and this is where your website comes into play. Typically this happens by using lead capture forms or lead capture pages. These can come in many forms but the most common would be your contact us form or a landing page to download a piece of premium content. If your website doesn't have a way of capturing leads then not only are you underutilizing your assets, but you're probably not going to make much money.

How to Know if You're getting enough leads

An easier question to answer would be how to know if you're not getting enough leads. If you feel you're having infrequent or inconsistent sales meetings, prospective buyers stop engaging with you, or you have a high bounce rate or low open rate then you probably aren't getting enough leads. Some great practices to live by are to always make sure your website is answering your customer's questions, you're creating content that puts you as an industry expert, and you're nurturing your leads through the entire sales cycle. 

5 Ways to optimize your remodeling or custom building website for lead generation 

Optimizing your website for lead generation is a no-brainer. But unfortunately, it's not as simple as throwing a CTA button on all your website pages and watching the leads pour in. Instead, you need to take a more strategic approach. Here are five ways to optimize your website for lead generation:

1. Add forms to the pages that get the most traffic.

2. Offer e-books to download premium content. 

3. Personalize your CTAs.
4. Don't be afraid to test new tactics.

5. Measure the performance of each lead generator.

3. Video MArketing

You need a video marketing strategy — this idea isn't new. What is new is how important video has become on every platform and channel. It almost makes it impossible not to be involved in creating videos for your brand. The best part? Creating videos is more cost-effective and easier to accomplish than ever. Today you can shoot a high-quality, 4K video, just with your smartphone. 

Video marketing is the practice of using videos to promote and market your remodeling or custom home-building services. They are powerful at helping to increase engagement on your digital and social channels, educate your customers, and reach your audience with a new medium.

How to Create a Video Marketing Strategy

Before you set up, record, or edit anything, you need to start with a video marketing strategy. Why? Because without a clear purpose you nor your audience will know what to do and that wastes a lot of time.

Choose Your Target Audience

Each of your videos needs to speak to a specific audience. This helps to make sure you're aligning the content and copy you create to be as targeted as possible.

Determine the best platforms to distribute your videos

This helps you to think about what people on that platform are looking for. Users typically enjoy seeing user-generated content on Instagram, customer testimonials on YouTube, company announcements on Facebook, and humorous clips on TikTok.

Decide the type of content your audience enjoys consuming the most.

Is it how-to videos, industry trend reports, or project spotlights? It’s important to communicate a message with your videos. To make things easier, look through your past website pages and social channels to see which types of content received the most engagement. Then take these highly favored pieces of content and turn them into short, easily digestible videos. 

Track & measure your video efforts

It's important to define the goals you want to achieve with your videos so you can determine the metrics you need to track in order to know if you've been successful. View count is great to track if your goal is to increase brand awareness. Play rate helps figure out how relevant or appealing your video is to your audience. Social shares and comments are good indicators of how relevant your content is to your target audience.

8 Types of Marketing Videos for Remodelers & Custom Builders

Before you begin filming, you need to decide what type of video you want to create. Here's a list of eight types of marketing videos remodelers and custom builders can create:

1. Explainer Videos
2. Customer Testimonials
3. Project Spotlights
4. Team Building
5. Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality (of floor plans)
6. Industry Events
7. Industry Trends
8. Educational Videos

4. Social Media Presence

Social media presence refers to the visibility your business has on social media platforms. The stronger your presence, the more trust you can build with your audience. Social media is not just for posting. You can use it to listen, monitor, and analyze your audience's behavior. This information is not only great for your marketing team,  but it's also free. 

Importance of Having a Social media Presence

Having a strong social media presence allows you to better understand your audience so you can create content tailored to their interests and needs. Doing so builds trust, and once you have that, you're one step closer to earning your audience's business. Connecting with your customers on this level helps you get to the base of their needs so you can better serve them with your service.

How to Increase your social media presence

Building your social media presence is always a work in progress but at its core, it's all about staying in tune with your audience. Here are a couple of ways you can actively start to build your business's social media presence:

Engage your audience.

Social media is arguably the closest way of contact you have with your consumers on a regular basis. Try to take it one step further by creating opportunities for your followers to connect with your brand on a deeper level. This could mean encouraging them to start a conversation in the comments, answering "this" or "that" quizzes in your stories, creating polls, or even answering Q&As.

Stay active and be consistent.

Social media is a game of visibility and you don't want your company to become forgotten. You have to play the long game and this is where consistency comes into play. Don't take the 'easy' way out by paying for views and followers. If you find yourself running out of content or ideas, download our Social Media Checklist which has plenty of content ideas just for remodelers and custom builders!

Leverage trends & "buzz" content.

Trends are the fuel that makes social media go around. Trends can boost your brand awareness and help you generate bursts of traffic. It's an opportunity to think outside of the box and join in on something you already know your audience will enjoy.

Optimize your profiles for SEO.

You'll want to optimize your social profiles to make it easier for your target audience to find you. Include a few keywords in your profile bio, use your logo as your image, add any relevant hashtags, and always be sure to clearly explain what you do.

Leverage user-generated content (UGC).

Your own content can only take you so far on social media and lately, users want to see more UGC than ever before. UGC is content that is created by users, rather than companies and is reposted on a company's account. Start asking your customers to post videos or photos of their latest project so you can repost it or have your employees share details about their job on their personal accounts which you can then repost as well. 

Promote your social accounts on other platforms.

Be sure to include links to your social platforms across all channels, both digital and offline. Think business cards, the bottom of your website, in your email signature, and across all your other social channels. 

Everyone has heard the phrase “You have to spend money to make money.” However many remodeling and custom home building companies tend to underspend on marketing, thinking that by not spending they are saving. Taking this approach will only slow you down. Your budget helps you align your marketing strategies with your business goals and therefore funnel money into marketing campaigns with the highest return on investment