Paving Marketing Strategies to Scale Your Business

Paving Marketing Strategies

A consistent and comprehensive digital marketing strategy can help your paving company not only navigate the difficult period of economic recession but also scale up your business. This guide will equip you with the necessary tools to plan and execute paving marketing strategies.

Similar to many construction-related markets, the paving industry has been experiencing a post-pandemic recession. Caused by increased interest rates and the general state of the economy the current market situation can prolong for an extended period.

In this guide, we discuss the current state of the art in construction-related industries in Canada. In short, after a short period of recession, everyone is expecting growth spurred by Trudeau’s plan to build 3.9 additional homes. We are yet to see if this projection is true.

For now, as a paving contractor, you need to make sure that your business survives the recession and attracts new customers. Paving marketing will help you achieve these goals.

Are you interested in growing a contractor business? Here are marketing materials that can help you succeed:

• Roofing Marketing
• Roofing SEO
• Contractor Marketing
• Contractor SEO
• Construction Marketing
• Landscaping Marketing
• Landscaping SEO
• Home Remodeling Marketing
• HVAC Marketing
• Plumbing Marketing
• Windows & Doors Marketing

Planning a Paving Marketing Strategy

In this section, we discuss how to plan a marketing strategy that will help your paving business in lead generation and customer acquisition. Remember that you can revisit each step of your strategy and adjust it as you progress in strategy building and implementation.

Step 1. Set General Goals & KPIs

Goals and KPIs are essential in building your paving company marketing strategies. They help you plan your marketing activities accordingly.

Your paving company’s marketing goals should be clear. Here’s a bad example: “more leads.” Here’s how you can improve it: “400 leads by the end of the second quarter.”

Another important aspect of your goals is that they should be realistic. For example, 2000 leads in 1 month is an unrealistic goal for paving contractors.

Step 2. Define Paving Marketing Budget

When planning the budget you need to take into account not only the cost of the work of strategy implementation but also the tools you will be using for website design, SEO and PPC.

You also need to remember that the general recommendation to any business, including paving companies, is that customer lifetime value should be thrice as big compared to customer acquisition cost.

Step 3. Choose Marketing Channels

Choosing the number of marketing channels depends on the resources your paving company can allocate. It includes both budget and workforce.

Marketing channels include:

1. Website
2. Email
3. SEO
4. PPC
5. SMM

If your paving company cannot focus on all channels at once, we suggest starting with website and PPC or website and SEO.

Step 4. Identify a Long-Term Plan for Each Channel

The plan for each channel should explain how your paving business achieves your marketing goals using this particular channel. For example, if you chose the website and SEO, and your marketing goal is 100 leads per month, you need to plan lead generation using the website from traffic to conversions.

Step 5. Assign Roles

It is important that each member of the marketing team knows their responsibilities within your paving marketing strategies. They need to understand the goals they work towards, the ways to achieve these goals and the KPIs to assess their work against.

Step 6. Choose Tools

Tools will help automate your paving company marketing efforts. Though some tools might be pricy they save hours of skilled labour. One of the ways to reduce the tool cost for your paving business is to hire a professional online marketing company.

Step 7. Review Paving Marketing Strategy

Revisions are essential both at the stage of planning and implementation. Your paving business will be able to compare the set KPIs against the achieved ones, understand what worked well and what didn’t and adjust your online marketing strategies accordingly.

Remember, this work requires a big deal of flexibility and quick adaptability as many things can change literally overnight.

Now, let’s review online marketing strategies for paving companies.

Professional Website for Paving Business

Website is the cornerstone of paving marketing. In many cases, it’s the first impression of your paving company that your leads will get. Make it matter.

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The times when it was enough for a website to match certain aesthetics are long gone. Today, it’s a default expectation of your ideal customers.

Here are three essential things for the websites of paving companies:

1. Seamless and fast performance
2. Mobile friendly design
3. The ability to convert leads
4. Serve SEO needs
5. Provide essential information to potential customers

Your SEO specialist, web designer and web developer will closely work to speed, performance and mobile versions. We discuss how the websites of paving companies can serve SEO needs in the next section of this guide.

In this section, let’s discuss how your website can provide information to your customers and how to design it in a way that brings more paving leads.

We suggest paving companies using the following architecture for their websites:

1. Home Page
2. Individual pages for paving services
3. Pages for each large municipality within your service area
4. Gallery of your completed projects
5. Blog with tips and tricks for paving
6. Contact page.

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Tips to convert more leads for paving business website:

1. Add reviews and testimonials of your customers
2. Add your ratings on different ranking platforms
3. Add book an appointment CTA
4. Create a widget to ease the appointment booking process
5. Make your telephone number available on each page (make it a button).
6. Service area map.

These elements will help paving companies get more leads from your website.

Paving Search Engine Optimization

Having a website isn’t enough if you want your online marketing efforts to bring results. Your paving business needs a long-term SEO strategy to get your website to the top of search engine results.

You need to focus your SEO efforts on several areas:

• Keyword research
• Technical SEO
• On-page optimization
• Off-page optimization
• Local SEO

Let’s take a closer look at each area.

Keyword Research

To get to the top of the search results page your paving company’s website needs to have pages dedicated to certain focus keywords.

Keyword research enables you to find those keywords based on three main parameters (volume, difficulty, and intent). Many SEO tools enable you to check these parameters for the chosen keywords.

1. Volume.

Volume shows the number of searches per month in a certain region. For example, people search for a “paving company” keyword 320 times in Canada alone. In comparison, there are only 20 searches for an “asphalt paving company.”

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2. Difficulty

Difficulty shows what is required to get to the top of the Search Results Page. For low-difficulty keywords like asphalt paving contractors, a well-structured content piece is enough. However, for a keyword like “paving stone installation,” you’ll need 22 backlinks.

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3. Search intent

Search intent shows why people are usually looking for a particular word. For example, “how to install paving stones” has an informational intent, which means that people are interested in learning how to learn about it.

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The keyword “asphalt paving contractors” has commercial intent. It means people are looking for providers of asphalt paving services. Finally, there’s a transactional intent. It means that people are ready to take a certain action.

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Your goal is to pick the keywords with the best difficulty-to-volume ratio.

Technical SEO

Paving companies should pay special attention to technical SEO. These are works that include:

1. Creating clear website architecture
2. Interlinking website leaving no orphan pages
3. Improving navigation with pagination & breadcrumbs
4. Creating a mobile version of the website
5. Increasing page speed
6. Removing duplicate content
7. Creating XML sitemap & robots.txt file
8. Manual indexing of pages in Google Search Console
9. Improving URLs of the pages
10. Creating redirects to avoid 404
11. Getting HTTPS.

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Many of these activities will improve the UX of your website. It will not only help your users but also improve your rankings as Google prefers websites with good UX.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the strategic placement of keywords in the necessary places. Here are the main guidelines:

1. Place 1 focus keyword per 100 words of your text.
2. Place the focus keyword in H1, the first paragraph of your text and at least one H2, alt text, meta title & meta description.
3. Look for LSI keywords and place them in your text, headers, and ALT text.

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Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is basically reputation management coupled with backlink management. Mentions in digital mass media and building brand recognition will help your off-page SEO.

For an SMB engaged in construction, however, building a strong (inter)nationally recognized brand is hard. What you can do is manage your backlinks.

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You need to acquire links that refer to your website pages from other domains with high authority. At the same time, you need to disavow the links from shady businesses.

Local Search Engine Optimization

Local SEO is a great way to gather clientele within your service area and is paramount for successful internet marketing. There are two things that can boost your local search optimization.

First, you need to create service area pages for your paving business. Each service area page should be built around a certain local keyword (e.g. a certain large municipality in your area of service). This will drive paving leads from your region and will help you sift out clients that don’t match your geography.

Another good way to develop your local search optimization is to create a Google Business Profile. Once your paving business gets a Google Business listing, it will appear on Google Maps driving even more paving leads.

Content Marketing

Once you’ve finalized your keyword research, you can begin forming the content strategy for your paving business. In one of the previous sections, we discussed the pages that your website needs. Apart from that, you’ll need to post blogs related to paving services regularly.

To form a content strategy, you also need to understand several essential aspects of the content creation process.

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Content Management

Similar to SEO, it’s a long-term game. You need to regularly post new pieces and update the old ones. Sporadity will not serve your goals. Your paving business needs a plan and a clear process that describes each step of content creation from keyword to published piece.

Goals & KPIs

Content must serve certain goals and thus have clear KPIs. Writing for the sake of writing is art, and there are better ways to become a patron of arts for paving companies. The goals of the content are traffic generation and conversion.

Your paving business can achieve the first goal by SEO-optimizing your content piece. We discussed it in detail in the SEO section of this guide

To convert visitors, your blog post should follow a simple logic. First, you describe the pinpoint of your potential customers. For example, the driveway of their house is in shambles. Next, you offer a number of solutions from driveway repair to asphalt-paving the driveway anew.

Finally, you talk about how your asphalt paving company can help fix their problem. Place a button with a clear CTA that will lead your potential customers to the respective service page. You can also place a widget for appointment booking.

Relevance

Your content must be relevant to your potential customers. It means that you need to know the people in need of your paving services. Who are these potential customers? What’s their average age, income, and background? What are their pain points? Why do they need a paving contractor in the first place?

You also need to remember, that in order to hire a paving company, some people need to first look into DIY options. Others will want to understand how you do your jobs. That’s why many paving contractors choose to share DIY tips in their blogs.

Such blogs will also help your SEO and marketing efforts.

Content Clusters

Content clusters are a collection of website pages related to a particular topic. For example, your paving company provides a range of services like stonework, asphalt paving, repair, and maintenance.

Each of these services is a separate cluster. Furthermore, some paving contractors divide stonework by the type of stone they use.

Each cluster has a “centrepiece.” In most cases, it is a service page. All other pages within a cluster will refer to it. It will tell Google crawlers that this page is the most important within a cluster. It will also direct the traffic to this page.

Here’s an example of a content cluster with asphalt paving company as a main cluster page

• asphalt paving cost per sq ft
• driveway asphalt paving
• diy asphalt paving.

PPC Advertising for Paving Companies

Paving contractors will benefit a lot from PPC advertising. In a nutshell, PPC is a type of banner ad placed on various websites, web applications, and social media, where the ad owner pays for a click on the ad.

Benefits of PPC for online marketing for paving companies:

1. Exposure and brand recognition
2. Driving traffic to the website
3. Getting quality leads
4. One of the highest ROI in internet marketing

Tips for using PPC in online marketing for paving business:

1. Create a landing page for your campaign.
2. Study your clients and set your target audience accordingly
3. Track your progress and try tweaking the campaign.

Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is a good channel for lead generation, however, it doesn’t fit all paving contractors. The best way to utilize email marketing campaigns is for client retention & upsell or for B2B companies to reach to paving leads.

If your company is a small contractor that works with individual clients, it will be hard for your company to use email marketing to retain them or upsell. Usually, people look for paving services once in a long period of time.

Here are some basics of using email in online marketing for paving companies:

1. Purchase paving leads from a seller or collect them directly on your website.
2. Create a newsletter featuring special offers or discounts.
3. If you work with other businesses, try to avoid flashy marketing emails, and stick to business communication.
4. Use CRMs like Mailchimp, HubSpot, or Salesforce for your email campaigns.

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Paving Marketing Ideas to Spur Results

In this section, we discuss several marketing ideas that will help you boost lead generation for your paving business.

Work on Your Reputation

Build your reputation by asking your clients to leave more positive reviews on Google and reviews aggregator websites. This will also help your Google Business Profile to rank higher in local search results.

Make sure you add positive reviews on your website as one of the talking points in favour of your paving business.

Get to a Business Listing

Online business listings remain one of the best internet marketing ideas for paving companies. Create profiles on directories for paving companies and contracting businesses. It will give you backlinks to your website from a reputable domain, direct traffic to your website, and ultimately help you get more paving leads.

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Listings are also good for your reputation management since many people trust them. Furthermore, these websites enable customers to leave their testimonials. Client reviews build credibility for your business.

Hire Paving Marketing Company

Many paving companies are SMBs. It means that they can hardly afford a large in-house marketing team. In many cases, the owner of a paving company has to run digital marketing on top of managing their business.

One of the ways to fix the issue is to entrust your online marketing to a reputable Digital Marketing Agency with experience in working with paving contractors.

dNOVO Group can help you in many areas of online marketing for paving companies, including:

1. Plan and implement paving marketing strategy
2. Build a converting website
3. Increase traffic through SEO efforts
4. Bring more paving leads via PPC
5. Consult the social media marketing

Are you ready to grow your paving business? Book a free one-hour consultation with us.