How to choose between marketing ideas for builders
If your last five enquiries all had half the budget they needed, another social account will not help you; the first two lines of your home page will. If the enquiries are good and you never hear back after the quote goes out, the problem is your follow-up, and no amount of traffic will cover it.
The three groups below are sorted by time, not by importance. The first ten take an hour or less and use what you already own. The next nine need a director, an estimator or a supervisor to sit down with a writer or a camera. The last six need a brief, a capped budget and a date. A builder with a broken contact form should not be booking a photoshoot.
Count your own hours as money. Free is not free when it takes your estimator a day. Where a job needs outside help, get a written quote in Australian dollars with GST and image usage rights spelled out before anyone starts.
This week: ten fixes using what you already have
Give each one to a single person with a finishing line. All ten fit around a live building programme, and several take less time than deciding what to post.
- 1. Fill in your own enquiry form from your phone. Twenty minutes. A surprising number of builders find the notification landing in an inbox nobody has opened since the site launched.
- 2. Rewrite the first two lines of your home page so they name the project type, the suburbs and roughly where your builds start. “Quality custom homes in Brisbane” describes two hundred businesses.
- 3. Clean up your Google Business Profile: categories, service area, hours, current photos. Half an hour, no cost, and it is often the first thing a referred client sees.
- 4. Ask for a review at handover, by name, with nothing offered in return. Google prohibits incentivised reviews, so just ask while the client is still happy.
- 5. Put your QBCC licence number, your HIA or Master Builders membership and your Houzz rating on the home page where nobody has to scroll to find them.
- 6. Rewrite your first reply to an enquiry. Say what happens next, what you need from them and when they will hear back. Forty-five minutes once, used every week after that.
- 7. Write a real caption for your three best projects: the block, the constraint, the response. Photographs of finished kitchens do not explain themselves.
- 8. Write the one sentence you want an architect or a past client to repeat when they refer you, then send it to five of them.
- 9. Add two columns to your enquiry spreadsheet: how they found you, and whether you would have wanted the job. Three months of that will decide your budget for you.
- 10. Run the free Clientforce website check. It is five questions rather than a technical scan, and it takes a few minutes.
This month: nine ways to make the work make sense to a stranger
These need somebody in the business for an hour or two. Book that time before you commission anything. A writer cannot invent the detail that makes your experience worth reading.
- 11. Publish a process page with the stages named, the deposit percentage stated and honest timings for design, approvals and construction start. Half a day.
- 12. Write up one hard block: the fall, the access, the retaining, the staging. That is the page a person with a similar block reads twice and then forwards to their partner.
- 13. Answer the cost question you get on every first call, with the date, the assumptions and the exclusions written down. Flascon’s knock-down rebuild cost guide ranks second in Brisbane and has never sold anything directly.
- 14. Replace the contact form with an enquiry that asks about the block, the project type, the budget range and the timing. Two to four hours if your site is easy to edit.
- 15. Build a photography checklist for handover: exterior, the details that were hard to get right, wide shots that show rooms in context. Write it once, use it on every job.
- 16. Film two minutes on your phone explaining a trade-off you talked a client through last month. Caption it, because most people watch with the sound off.
- 17. Cut the suburbs you cannot service properly from your service-area pages and say plainly how far you travel. Fewer wasted site visits.
- 18. Put together a two-page introduction pack for architects and referrers: what you build, where, three relevant projects and who to call.
- 19. Sit down with the last five jobs you did not win and sort them into price, timing, fit and slow follow-up. Those four need four different fixes.
This quarter: six jobs that deserve a proper brief
Choose one. Give it an owner, a written scope, a capped budget and a review date. Six of these at once is how a good year of marketing turns into nothing finished.
- 20. Rebuild the website around the projects you want next, not the services you happen to list. Get a scoped quote, and keep every page that already ranks.
- 21. Book a planned photography session and brief the photographer on the gaps in your portfolio, not the rooms that photograph well.
- 22. Write three linked guides: a block question, a cost question and a process question, all ending at the same enquiry.
- 23. Send a quarterly email to past clients, architects and consultants with one project and one useful answer. Consent and a working unsubscribe link are legal requirements here, not politeness.
- 24. Run one tightly scoped Google Ads campaign to one relevant page with a monthly cap. Kill it after eight weeks if the enquiries are not projects you want.
- 25. Walk the path from first contact to signed contract with the whole team and mark where it stalls. That is how you choose next quarter’s list.
The construction marketing ideas to leave alone
Do not buy followers. The number proves nothing to a block-owner in Bulimba, and anyone who checks can tell. Stock photography of houses you did not build is worse, because it promises a capability you cannot show. Discounting to win a custom build attracts the client who will argue about every variation for the next eleven months.
Broad lead-generation campaigns are also the wrong first move while nobody is recording where enquiries come from or which ones were any good. You will buy more estimating work, not more contracts. Keep a stop list beside your action list: the subscription nobody uses, the account nobody maintains, the monthly report that has never once changed a decision. Stopping one of those usually frees enough time to finish something on this page.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best marketing for home builders? The thing closest to your weakest point. For one builder that is a portfolio three years out of date, for another it is a service area that says “south-east Queensland” and means five suburbs. Referrals, search and guides all work, but only when they arrive at a website that qualifies people and an enquiry somebody answers the same day.
How do I advertise my construction work? Show work you have permission to use, be clear about what your role was, and make the next step obvious and small. A knock-down rebuild client and a developer want different pages, so send them to different pages. Reach is only worth paying for once the enquiry it produces can be handled properly.
How much should a builder spend on marketing? Price the fix, not a percentage. Work out what it costs to solve the specific problem you have, separate the one-off assets from the monthly work and the ad spend, and include your own time. Then check it against your margin and how many builds you can actually run at once.
Where to start this month
Three finished jobs beat twelve started ones. Keep the rest of the list for when the evidence points somewhere else.
- Pick one fix from this week, one explanation from this month and one job for the quarter.
- Write the owner, the time, the cash limit and the result you expect beside each of the three.
- Finish the smallest one today and test it from a phone before you tell anyone it is done.
- Set up Google Search Console if it is not already running, and open it once a month.
- Read your enquiry log after eight weeks and let it choose the next three.