Commercial paving leads in St. Cloud and the Twin Cities — Diversified Paving review

Diversified Paving has been around long enough to know what works and what doesn’t. We’re a union shop (I.U.O.E. Local 49) serving central Minnesota — St. Cloud, the Twin Cities, and the surrounding region — with asphalt paving, concrete, parking lot striping, and seal coating for commercial and residential customers.

The work is good. The problem has always been keeping the schedule full enough on the commercial side. Residential work fills in around it, but commercial parking lot jobs are higher-margin and we wanted more of them.

What we tried that didn’t work

Yellow Pages was already useless when we started. Google Ads brought in residential price-shoppers. Print ads in local business journals got us about three calls a year, none of them serious. Direct mail to property management companies got read maybe one time in fifty.

The common thread was that the commercial decision-makers we wanted to reach — property managers, retail center owners, small commercial operators — were not paying attention to any channel we knew how to use.

The SMS shift

SmarterOutbound’s pitch was that the channel that works for these buyers is text message, not anything else. They verify the contact numbers, they handle the compliance, and they write messages that don’t sound like spam.

We were a tough sell at first. I didn’t want to be the company sending unwanted texts to people. They walked us through their opt-out handling and the verified-business-number sourcing and I agreed to a pilot.

Results

The pilot produced more inbound replies in the first three weeks than our direct mail program had produced in the previous year. The replies were from real property managers asking for real quotes. Most of them had a specific property in mind and a specific timeline.

The work mix shifted in our favor. Commercial parking lot resurfacing, striping renewal contracts, multi-property maintenance arrangements — the kind of work we built the business to do. Less of the residential one-off driveway work we were taking to fill schedule gaps.

Why I’d recommend it

A union paving shop with 20 years of work behind us shouldn’t have been struggling with commercial lead generation. The reality is that the buyers changed how they buy, and our marketing didn’t catch up until we hired someone whose entire job was figuring that out.

If you’re in this trade and your commercial pipeline is feast or famine, this is the channel I’d look at first.