Generating leads for an Australian building company

👋 Introduction

This week's Hi Social is from one of our subscribers, an agency based in Australia, Clck Digital.

I met the business owner, Damien, on a Facebook Group, and that's how this case study came about.

They are an agency, also based in Australia, who help businesses sell high value products.

This is a great, in-depth case study for you.

Please read through carefully to understand this agency's strategy, and how this strategy could help your clients or business.

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📣 About The Company

Their customer is a bespoke home builder in Australia.

They came to Clck Digital with some problems for them to solve. They include:

• They only had a handful of leads come in each month.
• They needed a way to generate a predictable number of leads each month.
• They were having trouble setting themselves apart from other home builders in the area. They needed a way to stand out from their competitors.
• The business's sales team did not follow up on leads effectively.

This case study is broken up into different steps that Clck took to solve their client' problems.

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🏗 Step 1: Building The Platform

The first thing the agency did was set up HubSpot's all-in-one sales and marketing software for their client.

This would allow them to plan effectively and replace all the tools they were using unsuccessfully, and provide several other benefits:

1. A way to have all marketing assets in one place, including email marketing, lead gen landing pages, ad management, social media, and more.
2. A single source of truth when it came to tracking and reporting results. They could see the entire customer journey in one place.

3. Automation tools that would free up sales reps' time and nurture leads with effective content on autopilot.

4. "Closed loop" combined marketing and sales tools so sales reps could see marketing activity along with sales activity in the CRM.

They also worked closely with the home builder's team to understand their needs and challenges, and to train them in getting the most from their new all in one sales and marketing platform.

Requirements for this step: HubSpot Marketing Pro software license.

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👾 Step 2: Creating The Strategy

Clck then created a plan for the building company client that would use inbound and content marketing to achieve several goals:

1. Increase organic rankings by publishing content that answered their customers' biggest questions.
2. Set them apart from their competitors by growing their brand and establishing them as the "go to" expert in their industry.
3. Provide their sales team with resources to share with prospects, giving them something to say other than "just checking in".
4. Educate and engage leads about the company's process and excite them by showing them completed projects.

For example, they would blog about the differences between the way this home builder approaches design and what separates them from other builders.

They wrote posts about how much you should expect to pay for a custom designed home, and whether customers could get finance on certain types of homes such as kit homes.

At the same time, Clck performed conversion rate optimisation on their website, testing different content offers in different places, and using HubSpot's "Smart CTAs" to show different offers to people from different sources (e.g. email vs social media) based on their customer lifecycle stage.

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The most popular lead gen landing pages generated tens of thousands of leads and hundreds of customers with an average sale price of over $300K.

Requirements for this step: Content strategy roadmap; calls to action; landing pages; blog platform; conversion rate optimisation.

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📈Step 3: Incoming Results

Clck promoted the content they created for this boutique builder using paid and organic strategies, including:

1. Paid search - Google ads to attract people actively searching for keywords around custom home building.
2. Social media - regular posting to social media, as well as paid social to drive traffic to blog posts and lead gen pages.
3. SEO - building links to key pieces of content to boost domain authority and rank higher in search across the board.
4. Email marketing - As their email list grew, more and more people came back to the site from email updates.

By amplifying the content in this way, Clck ensured that as many people as possible saw the right content at the right time in their journey.

Using clever ad targeting like "Lookalike" audiences and retargeting previous visitors, coupled with compelling and relevant content, they were able to get a low cost per lead from paid search and social.

At the time of writing this case study, the client is generating, on average, 59 leads per day through their website alone, mostly from organic search and social (i.e. free leads now that the system is built and optimised).

Requirements for this step: Google Ads strategy; Facebook page and ad account + strategy; SEO strategy for driving organic traffic.

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🍿 Step 4: Managing The Incoming Leads  

For the leads that were now being captured, it was important not to leave them hanging indefinitely.

Clck created a lead nurture email drip sequence that would take our best content and put it in front of people who had just signed up.

To do this they calculated the average time between someone going from an early stage lead to a customer, and mapped out content across that time period.

If they published a great article 6 months ago, someone finding the site today might never see it. So they used the power of email automation to get these key pieces of content in front of new subscribers at the right time.

The way we did this was to create a 10-part email drip sequence, with each email around 3-6 days apart. This meant that for the first few months after signing up, contacts would get helpful articles educating them about custom home building and the company's process.

Every few emails there would be a customer success story, and occasionally an invitation to visit a display home or take a virtual tour, but only after providing lots of helpful information first.

Tip: For email and social media, a good ratio of providing value vs "selling" is around 4:1.

This automated email nurturing achieved three things:

1. It educated contacts about the product so they could make an informed buying decision.
2. It achieved the 10+ touches required to build trust with a customer before they are ready to buy.
3. It brought contacts back to the website to read the content and engage with product pages once again.

After the email drip sequence finished they still needed a way to keep engaging contacts for the 6+ months sales cycle on buying a home.

The way we did this was to send out an email every Saturday morning with that week's blog post.

This would bring literally thousands of people back to the website each week to read the latest article, a percentage of whom would go on to browse product pages on the site and move closer to purchasing.

Requirements for this step: Email copywriting; HubSpot's email marketing tools.

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🎉 Results

In the words of this home builder's Managing Director, "the results were amazing":

1. Website traffic increased from 8K visits per month to more than 25K visits per month.
2. Email list growth to more than 29,000 subscribers (despite deleting hundreds of inactive subscribers each month).
3. Conversion rate on the website of visitors into leads increase by 273%.
4. More efficient sales team who could now spend more time dealing with inbound leads who are ready to buy and less time "following up".
5. An automated lead generation and sales machine that can be scaled up and down at will.

All of these changes worked together to dramatically increase this home builder's annual revenue.

The building company went from around $8M turnover in 2015 to $26.3M turnover in 2019.

This allowed them to supply hundreds of families with affordable, sustainable homes.

Most importantly, this growth allowed them to provide hundreds of new jobs in their local community and contribute to worthwhile community causes.

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🚨 Takeaways

I asked Damien from Clck Digital to supply me (Garry) with some takeaways from running a campaign like this. He said:

1. Content marketing takes some time to show results, but when it's done right it can have a snowball effect.
2. This campaign worked so well because nobody else in their industry were answering common questions their customers had, such as finance for modular homes, can you move a modular house again later, etc.
3. I think it's also a great example of making small changes across a range of different "levers" in a business - e.g. the classic idea if you increase traffic by 10%, conversion rate by 10%, close rate, customer value, etc. it all adds up to something greater than its parts, which in turn can result in high growth for the business.

What I personally love is that this strategy could be used for any high value product or service, not just home builders. Do you have clients who sell high value products?