An Excavation Marketing Plan That Fits on One Page: Month-by-Month Template for a Small Outfit

Search for a marketing plan for an excavation business and most of what comes back is written for a site contractor with an estimating department, or for any small business at all, which in practice means a shop with walk-in customers. A rural outfit with an excavator, a skid steer and a dump truck needs something narrower: a page that says what to do each month, built around a season when the ground decides your schedule.

This is that page. Copy it, put in your own county, your own builders and your own rates, and keep it where you will see it.

The reasoning behind each step (why a handful of people decide most of the work, why the machine on the lot is your biggest sign) is in our longer piece on excavation marketing for a rural company. This guide is the plan itself.

The plan on one page

A marketing plan for a small excavation business needs four parts and nothing else.

1. The goal, stated as the work you want. Not "get more jobs". Something you can check by the end of the season, such as: "Become the first call for two more builders, and fill the weeks between their jobs with driveway and drainage work inside the county."

2. Who decides your work. Write the names, not the categories. For most rural outfits the list sorts into:

• Builders and general contractors, usually the largest and steadiest share.
• Other trades who need a machine: septic installers, well drillers, plumbers replacing a line, the electric co-op.
• The township and road department.
• Homeowners and farms, for driveways, ponds, drainage, footers, demolition and the culvert that washed out.
• Land and real estate agents who hear about lots and farms before anyone else.

3. The calendar. What you do each month, below.

4. One number. Machine hours billed as a share of machine hours available, checked monthly. If it is rising, the plan is working. If jobs are rising and that number is not, you are busier on small moves without being better off.

The month-by-month calendar

### December: write the plan

• Put the goal and the one number at the top of the page.
• List last year's work by who decided it. Builder, trade, township, homeowner, agent. In most outfits a short list of names accounts for most of the year, and that list is your market.
• Next to each name, write when they plan their work and who else they use.
• Review your machine rates with this year's real costs and billed hours. If you have never built them up from your own numbers, here is how to price excavation work.

### January: visit the builders

• Call or stop in on every builder and general contractor on the list. Ask what they have starting in spring and when. You are not pitching. You are finding out what is coming while there is still room on their schedule for you.
• Send the builders you already work with your rates for the season in writing, with the reason for any change in one sentence, before they plan around last year's number.
• Have a current certificate of insurance ready to hand over the day anyone asks. Builders remember the sub who made them chase it.

### February: get findable before the thaw

• Check your Google Business Profile: the counties and towns you serve, each service listed separately (driveways, ponds, drainage, septic excavation, footers, demolition, land clearing), and photographs of your own machines on local jobs.
• Check your website answers what a builder or homeowner looks for after somebody says your name: what you do, which towns, that you are insured, and how to reach you. Our excavation website checklist covers the pages, and these examples show what the good ones have in common.
• Go to the township meeting where the road and culvert work for the year is discussed. You learn what is coming and who is bidding it, in a room with almost nobody in it.

### March and April: the ground opens

• Stop by the supply house and the equipment dealer. That is where you hear which lots are being cleared and which jobs are starting before they start.
• Letter the machines as well as the trucks, readable from the road. An excavator sitting on a lot is seen by every car that passes for the length of the job.
• Answer every call the same day, including the ones you cannot take. A homeowner told "not until June, here is why" will often wait, and a builder told the truth about your schedule trusts the next date you give.

### May to August: let the job site do the selling

• Show up on the day you said. Finish to grade. Call the builder the same morning you hit rock, water or a buried tank, while the schedule can still move. This is the marketing for builder work, and none of it costs anything.
• Leave every site clean: topsoil back, tracks cleaned off the road. A finished site is an advertisement to everyone who drives past, and so is a rutted one.
• Put a yard sign out on homeowner jobs where the customer agrees to it.
• Ask homeowners for a Google review once the job is finished and looks right, with a direct link so it takes them a minute.
• Add photographs of the summer's jobs to the profile and the website as you go, not in a batch next winter.

### September: the fall window

• Homeowners want drainage, ponds, driveways and footers done before the freeze. Put a short post on your Google Business Profile and in the town group saying you are booking fall work and what kinds.
• Ask the other trades on your list (septic, well, plumbing) what they have before winter that needs a machine.
• Find out when the township sets next year's road and culvert budget, and what is on it.

### October and November: close out and count

• Finish the fall jobs and leave the sites clean before the ground freezes. The last job of the season is the one people see all winter.
• Write down the machine and truck hours each job took next to the hours you bid. It will tell you which kinds of jobs you underprice, before you price next year.
• Note which builders kept you busiest and which work came from a name you did not know in January. That is next December's list.

What is not on the plan, and why

Social media campaigns, pay per click ads and lead services are not on the calendar. They can work for a large operation in a large market. For a rural outfit whose buyers can be counted on two hands, they mostly buy calls from strangers outside your area, while the work that matters is decided by people you can visit in an afternoon.

If you do want to try a paid channel later, try it the same way you would bid a job. Write down what it costs, how many booked hours it has to produce to pay for itself, and the date you stop if it has not. Then check the one number.

Keep it on the wall

The plan only works if it gets read in March, when the phone starts ringing and every day is spoken for. One page, pinned up where you plan the week, with the month's three or four jobs on it and the one number written at the top, is all it needs to be.