Every agency page about construction lead generation says the same three things. Leads are the lifeblood. Quality beats quantity. They are data-driven. Not one of them tells you which channel your work should actually come from, or what happens to a good enquiry once it lands.
This page does both, in that order. The four channels compared honestly, including where each one stops working. The part almost everyone gets wrong after the enquiry arrives, which is cheaper to fix than anything else here. And the one number we judge construction lead generation on.
For most construction businesses the answer is two of the four channels running at once, the slow one building while the fast one pays the bills.
Fastest to start and cheapest per lead in our experience, but the leads are colder because you interrupted someone rather than answering them. Best for volume and for testing message. Stops the day you stop paying.
The most expensive click and the warmest lead, because the person went looking. Organic takes four to six months to build, then costs very little per lead. Paid search is instant and never gets cheaper.
Immediate, predictable, and you are one of four quotes on price. Useful for filling gaps, poor as a foundation, because you are renting a relationship.
The best leads by a distance and the ones you cannot turn on when you need them. Everything above exists because this one is not controllable.
Most construction firms do not have a lead generation problem. They have a lead handling problem, which is cheaper to fix.
A lead answered within an hour converts far better than one answered next morning. Being on site all day is a real constraint, so the fix is an immediate holding response and a fixed time each day to ring back, not a promise to be more responsive.
Four questions on the phone before you spend an evening on a quote: what the job is, roughly where, when they want it, and whether they have had other prices.
Construction decisions take months, and most quotes are sent once and never mentioned again. Two follow-ups, at a week and a month, recover work you already paid to generate.
If you cannot say which channel produced the last ten jobs, you cannot decide what to stop paying for. One spreadsheet column is enough to start.
Cost per lead is the number agencies report because it flatters them. Cost per job won is the number that decides whether the work was worth doing, and it is the only one we will defend on a call.
The difference bites hardest when a channel looks cheap. A lead at a few pounds that almost never converts costs more per job than a dear one that usually does, which is how a report can show a falling cost per lead while the diary empties. So before any of the four channels above gets more budget, we want two figures from you: your conversion rate from enquiry to job won, and your margin on an average job. Those two decide your ceiling per enquiry, and the ceiling decides which channel is worth buying.
We would rather publish that arithmetic than describe it. The sum is worked through end to end, with a ceiling you can put your own numbers into, on what a trade lead should cost.
Ask any agency, including us, for cost per job won. If the answer only ever comes back as cost per lead, nobody is tracking far enough down the funnel to know whether it is working.
It varies by channel and job size. On a live account of ours, paid social averaged £4.64 a lead over three years, with campaigns ranging from £2.04 to £53.13. Search leads typically cost more and convert better.
Yes, more slowly. The Google Business Profile, service pages, location pages and reviews produce enquiries at very low ongoing cost once established. The method is in our guide to SEO for builders.
Generating more leads into a process that drops them. Fix the follow-up before increasing the budget.
Send us where your last ten enquiries came from and what happened to them. We will tell you which channel is paying, which is flattering the report, and what we would change first. Half an hour, no charge.
For the wider view, the channel-by-channel breakdown is in digital marketing for construction companies, and what we do as a construction marketing agency is on the main page.
