What is Zapier and How Can It Benefit Your Construction Firm

Automate Your Marketing With Zapier

Your construction firm relies on your website to generate new leads. Inbound marketing allows you to communicate and engage with visitors, as well as generate new leads and close sales. It's a great cost effective way to develop your brand, but to be effective it requires a fair amount of time and effort.

In order to take your customer from first contact through close requires management as you guide and nurture that visitor through their buying process. For many businesses, this is where the process can fall apart and fail. Failing to properly nurture and manage the relationship through poor contact management or infrequent engagement can lose you the sale and a potential long-term client. This is where automating the process can turbo charge your lead nurturing and bring up your close percentages.

Automate Your Marketing Efforts using Zapier

One of the biggest benefits of inbound marketing is that because it is a digital medium, you can react to inquiries immediately, nurture prospects through your lead funnel and automate a major part of the process! To be effective, inbound marketing requires daily upkeep from posting to social media, to adding conversions to your mailing list, creating introductory emails, follow-up nurturing emails, blog posts, announcements and much more. Imagine the time and manpower you could save if you automated many of these tasks. Today, you can do exactly that! One application makes automating repetitive manual tasks easier and more efficient is called Zapier.

What Is Zapier?

Basically, Zapier is a web-based application that connects and manages other web-based applications. Using simple “trigger and action” scripts Zapier allows you to automate repetitive tasks between applications like Salesforce, Trello, Wufoo, and Basecamp. This can save you tremendous amounts of time, making lead nurturing more efficient, and freeing your time to focus on your core business initiatives. 

Let's look at an example:

“CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, so by definition, a CRM is an app that helps you manage your relationships with current and prospective customers. Your email and address book already do that, in some ways—your email links related messages together, and lets you find all messages from a contact with a quick search, while your address book can hold as much info about your contacts as you want. Even the old-fashioned Rolodex was a CRM of sorts.”

— Zapier

If your construction firm uses Salesforce to generate and manage incoming contacts and Trello cards to manage your follow-up and projects.  Salesforce is a customer relationship management software. Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. You simply create a Zap to link the functionality of these two web-apps.

What Are ZAP’s?

“TrelloI is built around brightly colored boards, “cards” that act like digital Post-it Notes, and lists to organize those cards however you want. You can drag the cards around, jot down notes and checklists, and add colored labels or photos to keep things organized—and you can even toss old cards in the trash when you’re done.”

— Zapier

When a new Saleforce contact is created, create a new card on a Trello board.

You create this Zap using drop-down menus to choose the trigger app (Salesforce) and the action app (Trello). You can use static text and customize fields to script your action to meet your needs. In this case, every time a contact is added to Salesforce, Zapier also creates a Trello card for that contact. If five leads or contacts are added to Salesforce, five Trello cards are created. Without any additional effort or time, data flows seamlessly from one application to the other automatically. This not only saves time, it virtually eliminates human error like forgetting to add a contact to Trello.

The Deep Functionality of Automatic Data Migration

Zapier web-based applications cover all kinds of tasks from project management and social sharing to social media monitoring, web development, lead generation, lead nurturing, file management and much more. This functionality allows you to automate using Zap chains that can move a task through several steps. Let's look at an example of what Zapier can do for your construction firm.

For Example:

You are currently offering a white paper titled “The Benefits of Using a Design Build Firm for Your New Kitchen Construction.” Visitors are interested and converting in order to receive your free white paper. You use a Squarespace form and gather email addresses. You can create a chain of three Zaps that take that address from your website thru sending your first introductory email.

• Zap 1: Squarespace form information goes to a MailChimp list

• Zap 2: Contact Gets a Tag and is sent an email campaign

• Zap 3: Tagged contact gets sent to your CRM

Using these three simple Zaps, you have taken your prospect from conversion, to your CRM, to your MailChimp mailing list, to beginning the nurturing process by sending a personalized introductory email.

This is a really simple illustration of the power of automation. You no longer need to manually harvest email addresses and spend time adding them to your CRM, then to your mailing list, then creating and mailing a piece to begin engaging with your prospect. Beyond creating the initial Zaps, this is all completed with no additional time on your part.

Automating these repetitive manual tasks frees your time and your staff's time to focus on core business tasks and growing your business. Because Zapier supports over 500 applications you can achieve tremendous depth to your automated tasks taking a prospect from conversion right through the nurturing process until it's time to contact them via phone. Automating your marketing process allows you to grow your construction business 24/7/365. Here lies the true power of automated inbound marketing!

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About Michael Conway

I'm the owner of Means-of-Production, a marketing firm that builds Squarespace websites. I design sites that help you get found online, attract better prospects, and capture leads. If you need help with a Squarespace site that you're working on click here to view my calendar and schedule a call. I am a Squarespace Specialist and Authorized Trainer. Together we can improve your site so that it grows your business.