About BuildTech Construction

BuildTech is a team of building contractors based in Dublin & Mayo and specialize in house extensions.

Farnan Culkin (BuildTech's owner) founded BuildTech in 2016 and became one of the fastest growing construction companies in Dublin. They’re a team of 17 and have offices in Dublin & Mayo.

Visit BuildTech website

The Challenge / Pain Points

BuildTech has been profitable since 2018, with a revenue of €5 million in 2021. The company wanted to grow their revenue to €7 million in 2022. They were mainly relying on word of mouth & billboard advertisement.

Since Covid-19 caused a lot of uncertainties, the team wasn’t sure if they could hit their target. Their growth has plateaued and they needed to do something different to close additional sales.

Below is a snapshot of how their website used to look like:

BuildTech also wanted to focus more on full-home renovation and deep retrofits. Their old website wasn’t reflecting this accurately and was mainly focusing on kitchen makeover, small electrical & plumbing jobs. The leads they were getting were mainly for small jobs which wasn’t their business focus. One of their lead qualification criteria was the jobs need to be atleast €100,000 in value.

The Solution

BuildTech partnered with Social Gravity to help them with their digital marketing and SEO. After an initial analysis, it was evident that their website needed a complete redesign. It was not optimised for Construction SEO and the User Experience (UX) was poor.

To sum it up, it wasn’t a clear reflection of their business and it wasn’t generating any new leads for the business.

We then reverse-engineered their sales goals and identified what exactly needs to be done to help BuildTech achieve their sales objectives.

‍Here’s a breakdown:

Additional revenue to hit budget: €2M

Average close rate: 18%

Average contract size: €100k

The above sales KPIs helped us identify that they’ll need to close additional 20 jobs compared to previous year to hit their sales objectives.

18% close rate means we would roughly need 110 new leads from the new marketing campaign.

We put serious effort in our websites to increase conversion rates and get about 5% conversion rate on average. That means, we’d need to drive about 2,200 targeted visitors throughout the year to hit the sales goals.

The Results

While we could bring these 2,200 visitors through construction, Farnan wanted to have a long-term approach with their marketing strategy and decided to use SEO as the main driver of traffic.

Since we had the estimations of what we needed to achieve, it looked very achievable with a solid SEO plan, as we’d only need about 200 targeted visitors to their website every month who are looking for home renovation, extension or deep retrofit.

This is how their new website looks:

The new website was built keep SEO in mind and we built dedicated pages on their website to target different services they offer:

Every page on the website was targeted with a unique set of keywords, which is part of our Digital Breakthrough Program.

Only three months after the launch, the website started to rank for home renovation & home extension related keywords, which resulted in about 300-350 visits to the website, and they started to notice an increase in the leads they’re getting.

We then consistently worked on the website & content strategy to hit 500 sessions per month and was able to achieve it in just over 5 months.

At the end of 2021, we looked into the analytics and they were able to generate additional 180 leads from their website. Since we had call tracking & form tracking enabled on their website, we were able to track

• How many leads they got exactly
• Where are those leads coming from
• How many leads were genuine enquiries

While BuildTech got a decent ROI on the SEO campaign already, it didn’t stop there. By the end of 2022, we saw a big surge in their SEO traffic resulting in more than double traffic compared to 2021.

Below is a screenshot from their Google Analytics for last 30 days: 

In the last 30 days, they generated about 4.5k sessions from just SEO, and a total of 5,000 website sessions - resulting in 176 qualified leads as confirmed by Farnan in a recent performance meeting. 

BuildTech saw a 8X-10X return on the marketing spend and were seeing a consistent increase in the traffic & conversions. The long term ROI would be much bigger than this.

This is what Farnan had to say

“Worked with a few agencies before, but Social Gravity gave special attention understanding our business and which market we’re focussing on. Their program is well-structured and one of the best I’ve seen in the market. Highly recommend!”

Farnan Culkin

Owner – BuildTech

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