These guides are written for owners and senior staff of construction firms: the people who decide what to bid, who to hire for marketing, and how much to spend. Each one is built around a decision you actually face, uses arithmetic you can check, and is meant to be useful whether or not you ever call us.
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How to set a construction marketing budget from your bid log
A builder's marketing budget should come from five numbers: average contract value, net margin, hit rate, backlog in months and the contracts you can take on. This guide shows the formulas and two worked examples.
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How to qualify homeowner enquiries before the site visit
Custom builders and renovators lose more time to unqualified enquiries than to a lack of them. This guide shows how to sort enquiries by budget, readiness and fit before anyone drives to a site, without putting good clients off.
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How to build a prequalification package owners actually read
A prequalification package is your firm's case for being invited to bid. This guide covers what to include, how to write project sheets that prove capacity, and how to keep it current without starting over each time.
Construction marketing budget maths
How to set a construction marketing budget from your bid log replaces guesswork with five numbers: average contract value, net margin, hit rate, backlog and capacity. It shows four formulas and works them through for a commercial GC, a custom home builder and a renovation firm.
What you'll learn:
- what one extra contract, and one extra invitation to bid, is worth to your firm
- how to cap marketing cost per opportunity so most of the profit stays in the business
- why backlog should set the throttle, and the mistake of cutting marketing to zero in a busy year
- when improving hit rate or response time beats spending more
Best for: any owner about to approve a marketing budget, or reviewing one.
Building a prequalification package
How to build a prequalification package owners actually read treats prequalification as a marketing document, not paperwork. It covers what owners really check, how to write project sheets that prove capacity, and how to keep a master library so tailored packages take an afternoon.
What you'll learn:
- the five concerns behind most prequalification questionnaires
- a project sheet layout that answers the owner's question before they ask it
- why your package and website must tell the same story
- common mistakes, from irrelevant projects to unchecked references
Best for: commercial, industrial and institutional GCs, construction managers and subcontractors who want more invitations to bid. It pairs with our B2B pipeline service.
Qualifying homeowner enquiries
How to qualify homeowner enquiries before the site visit is for custom home builders, renovators and design-build firms who spend too much time on projects that never go ahead. It gives a five-point check, a first-call script, a three-group sorting table and a follow-up routine that respects Canada's anti-spam law.
What you'll learn:
- how to qualify on your website and in your ads before anyone calls
- how to raise budget early without putting good clients off
- what to do with the "planning" group that will build in two years
- the four numbers to track each month
Best for: residential builders who already get enquiries and want better ones. It pairs with our homeowner ads service.
How to use these guides
Start with the budget guide; it sets the frame for everything else. Then read the guide for your main buyer: prequalification if you sell to owners and procurement teams, enquiry qualification if you sell to homeowners. Many firms need both.
The figures in each guide are illustrations chosen to make the arithmetic easy to follow. Replace them with your own bid log, contract records and financial statements. If something in a guide doesn't match your experience, we'd like to hear about it.
Who writes these guides
The guides are written under Ali Sedighi, MBA, who leads Marketing.Construction and has more than 17 years of marketing experience. They draw on the method behind our published results from HVAC work and on how construction firms sell to owners and homeowners. Each guide shows its update date, and we revise them when something changes.
What these guides don't cover
They don't offer legal, safety, financial, bonding, permitting or real-estate trading advice. Where provincial rules matter, our region pages link the official bodies so you can confirm your obligations with them directly. We are a marketing and business consulting service, not a contractor, and these guides stay within that lane.
If you'd rather talk through your own numbers, contact us by call, text or email.
Frequently asked questions
Are these guides free to use?
Yes. Read them, share them with your estimators and project managers, and use the formulas and templates in your own business.
Do the guides apply outside BC?
Yes. They are written for construction firms anywhere in Canada. Where a provincial detail matters, such as builder licensing or language rules, our region pages link the official sources.
Will you add more guides?
We add guides when we can write something genuinely useful that we can back up. Each guide shows its last updated date.