How to Make Your Construction Marketing Strategy More Effective
You will be spoiled for choices when you search for guides on how to create a strategy for marketing your construction business online. However, there is more to construction marketing than developing a strategy the right way. You need to take some extra steps if you want your business to gain an advantage over its competitors. Here are six ways you can get more out of your marketing strategy:
01
Evaluate Your Branding Before Developing Your Construction Marketing Strategy
Your brand reflects the ideas and feelings people have when they associate with your business. It helps create the idea among your customers that your company provides the go-to solution for their construction-related needs. A brand also helps promote an emotional connection between you and your customers, which makes it more likely for them to recommend your construction services to others and remain loyal to your brand.
Now, just because your brand is based on your customer’s perception of your business, it does not mean you have no control over it. You can intentionally influence their perception through a process known as branding. Branding makes use of the following elements of your brand to achieve this.
Brand voice
This is the tone and choice of words you use in your content, advertising, and other communication channels. Brand voice can create a personality for your brand and make it relatable to your audience. It can also make your message unique and apart from your competition.
Brand identity
This refers to the elements that identify your brand. These include your brand’s logo, fonts and lettering, and color palette. From these elements, you can consider your product packaging (if any), web design, and promotional materials under brand identity as well.
Brand promise
his is how you communicate your company’s unique value to your customers and sets their expectations on the service you provide. You can find your brand promise in your company’s vision, mission statement, value proposition, and brand principles.
Brand positioning
This is where your brand stands in the market and industry according to your target market and stakeholders. Brand positioning is influenced by your services, pricing strategy, and marketing strategies.
How to evaluate your brand
Ideally, branding is done when you just started your business. But, there will be instances when you want to change or freshen up how people see or feel about your brand. In other cases, you might not have given this part of your business in the past a significant consideration but would like to change that now. Whatever the case may be, the best time to evaluate this is before creating a marketing strategy for the coming year or season.
Here are some questions that can help you evaluate your brand:
- Does your brand communicate the values you want to perceive from your brand?
- Does your brand reflect the unique value proposition of your offer?
- Does your brand communicate why your unique value proposition is important?
- Does your team know what your brand means? What does it mean for them?
- Does your brand relate to your customers?
- Do your customers understand your brand without thinking about it too much?
- What do your customers say about your brand? Does it align with how you want people to perceive your brand?
- What does your customer appreciate about your brand? Does your brand communicate this attribute effectively?
- What do your customers think and feel when they see your ad or content?
- What do your customers and team think and feel when they see your logo?
To find high-quality answers to these questions, a simple survey might not be enough. One-on-one interviews and focus group discussions will give you better information on how your team and customers see your brand. However, you might want to consider having a construction marketing agency conduct these discussions. This will encourage them to be more open and honest with the information they share, and minimize any biases in the discussion.
What you can do with the findings of your brand evaluation
After collecting the data, you can now organize these and analyze what you have found. From it, you will find the current state of your brand, which you can compare with your brand goal. You can then use this to determine the areas you need to improve and take corrective action. Aside from this, the findings from your evaluation can also help you discover what part of your strategy is working and which ones are not. From here, you can decide which elements should be updated, dropped, or scaled up.
02
Create Buyer Personas to Relate to Your Target Market on a Personal Level
Without knowing who you are selling to, you cannot create an effective marketing strategy that will help you achieve your goals for your construction company. This is why a marketing strategy always identifies the business’ target market. However, if you want to relate to your audience on an individual level, it is not enough to know your target market. This is where buyer personas can help you.
So, what are buyer personas?
Buyer personas are generalized and semi-fictional profiles depicting your ideal customers in your target market. These profiles are created based on surveys, interviews, and customer interactions. Aside from demographic information, these profiles contain detailed information on your customer – including their preferences, interests, pain points, motivations, personality traits, likes, dislikes, interests, and habits.
How buyer personas can improve your marketing strategy
Buyer personas give you a better understanding of your customers, and this translates to the following benefits for your construction marketing strategy:
1. Personalized messaging and content
Buyer personas enable you to classify your target market into smaller groups according to the different personas you have created. You can then create marketing campaigns that are more effective for a particular buyer persona. This makes it possible for you to create ads that use their language and are located in their preferred channels. You can also create more valuable and effective content since you can address their pain points and relate to them through their interests. More importantly, you can create calls to action that are more effective by addressing their specific needs and desires.
2. Achieve higher ROI from your marketing channels
Since buyer personas enable you to create targeted messaging and content, you will not only target the right audience but also have effective copy or content in your marketing campaigns. This makes it possible for you to attract more leads of higher quality, and this results in closing more deals without spending more on your campaigns.
3. Overcome their common objections
Buyer personas let you in on your customer’s pain points and concerns about construction services. Knowing them in advance will prepare you on how to address these when they bring this up during a sales presentation. You can even address this in your content or landing page, which could lead them to take action on your offer.
4. More efficient marketing and sales activities
Buyer personas make your marketing campaigns more efficient since you can target the right audience with the right message, which results in a more favorable result. This also leads to fewer sales calls and a shorter turnaround time for closing each client. Both can lead to more clients gained and lower spending for every new client.
How to create buyer personas
As mentioned, buyer personas are created through surveys, research, and interviews with your customers, leads, and target market. In these methods, you will be looking for the following information:
Basic demographic information
Age, income, gender identity, location, communication preferences, preferred social media platforms, job, family, and lifestyle
Motivations
Their long-term and short-term goals, challenges, and concerns related to life in general, construction, and your services
Behaviors
Time of day and frequency of checking their email and social media, their use of your service,
Interests
Their hobbies; favorite books, shows, and sites; and their interests and queries related to construction and construction services
After collecting the information mentioned above, you will group those with the same goals related to your business. Each group will provide the information to create a buyer persona. You will build the characteristics of each persona based on the demographic, motivations, frustrations, challenges, interests, and personality traits of the majority. The more realistic you make your buyer personas the more effective your efforts to personalize your marketing campaigns.
If you are creating buyer personas for B2B construction marketing, you will not be making a profile for each type of business you may have as a client. Instead, you will be making a profile for the decision-makers in the businesses you are targeting in your commercial construction marketing strategy. Each persona will be based on their position and the type of business they have.
03
Maximize Your Use of Digital Marketing Strategies
Digital marketing is a significant contributor to the success of any marketing strategy. This includes your construction marketing strategies. So, if you want to achieve the best results from your marketing strategy, you need to optimize your use of digital channels in your marketing mix. Here are some benchmarks to see if you are maximizing the potential of digital marketing for your business:
You are using marketing automation tools.
Marketing automation tools take care of repetitive marketing tasks. This leaves your team with more time for the creative and executive side of your marketing, which results in higher-quality discussions and decision-making for your marketing campaigns.
You are taking advantage of the data available to you.
There are marketing analytics tools out there that collect and organize the data from your digital channels. These tools will provide you with a report you can use to improve your efforts in each channel. These improvements will not only lead to better results but also in improving the efficiency of each channel in achieving these results. Because of this, you will get a better ROI in digital marketing if you are taking advantage of the data and analytics available.
Your brand has a social media presence.
A social media presence is essential for interacting with prospective and existing clients. However, creating a profile on one of the popular social media sites is not enough. You need to be intentional when using social media to achieve your marketing goals. Here are some tips on how to maximize social media for construction marketing:
- Use a social media platform that your target market uses
- Create valuable and entertaining that your target market will love to see
- Use paid advertising to create awareness about your brand on social media
- Implement promotions to build your following on social media
- Reply to the comments on your posts
- Thank your followers for sharing your posts
- Comment with valuable information on posts relevant to your industry
- Follow other profiles and like posts related to your industry
You have your website optimized for search engines
SEO, or search engine optimization, is essential to attract search engine users to your website. Search engine traffic is one of the leading sources of visitors to websites. It also brings high-quality leads to your website since their search has the intent to know more, inquire, or hire for your services. Moreover, SEO makes it easier for your visitors to browse your pages, which can make them more likely to ask about your construction services.
However, SEO is one task best left to a construction marketing company. They can implement SEO following the latest search engine guidelines. You don’t even have to pay for the tools required to optimize your website. Lastly, if it’s part of your construction marketing, link building will not take over your time since they will be the ones to do it for you.
04
Stay Updated With the Latest Digital Marketing Trends
Digital marketing is fast-paced. New strategies pop up with the introduction of new online platforms and technologies. These can change how your customers interact with the channels you use to market your services. These new strategies can also make old ones obsolete. Either way, being clueless about these new practices and technologies can lead to your marketing strategy underperforming.
The only way you can avoid the issues with obsolete digital marketing tactics is to stay updated with the latest digital marketing trends. Here are the different ways you can keep track of the latest digital marketing strategies, channels, platforms, and techniques:
Look out for emerging trends on social media
Social media can give clues on emerging digital marketing trends in different industries. You can connect with professionals and thought leaders in the digital marketing industry to stay updated on their latest thoughts and ideas about their profession. You can also monitor relevant hashtags and topics on Twitter and Instagram to stay on top of the trends in digital marketing.
Look where people are paying attention.
New websites and platforms will emerge that change the current online marketing landscape. To determine if your business can use it, see how your target market responds before spending on it heavily. If it attracts their attention or provides good results, it can be a good tool for promoting and marketing your services online.
Follow marketing blogs
Marketing blogs keep track of emerging trends, best practices, and new data in the marketing industry. You can use these websites to stay updated since they will be on the watch for the next big thing in marketing. Best of all, these blogs can provide different use case scenarios for the latest marketing trends that you may apply in your business.
Set up Google Alert on marketing trends
You can keep track of the latest search results for a specific keyword or phrase with Google Alert. Use this to keep track of the latest search results related to marketing trends in your industry or in general. The latest search results are sent to your inbox so you can browse them at your convenience.
See what your competitors do
You can gain valuable insight by seeing how other businesses in your industry are marketing their services online. These insights can give you fresh ideas to connect to your customers and improve the digital marketing channels you are using. To see what they are doing, it can be as simple as joining trade associations and industry conferences. You can also visit their top-of-the-funnel channels, like social media pages and websites, to see how they attract their leads and generate interest for their services. If they have a sign-up for their leads, you can also sign-up for their offer and see how they handle the rest of the buyer’s journey.
Consult with a construction marketing company
One of the responsibilities of a marketing professional is keeping up with the latest trends in their industry. Consulting them about the latest trends will go a long way in preparation for developing a marketing strategy. Plus, you can ask them questions about applying these trends to your business while considering the specific parameters of your business and industry.
How to adapt your digital marketing strategy to the latest trends
The key to adapting to the ever-changing nature of digital marketing is remaining flexible and open to change. However, you must first test anything new to see if it will do well for your business. When you are testing a new trend for your marketing strategy, your spending on it must not be more than twenty percent of your total marketing budget and your spending on your established practices must remain the same. Once you have determined its viability, you can scale up your spending to full implementation in your digital marketing strategy.
05
Integrate your sales and marketing efforts
Integrating your sales and marketing efforts will lead to better results for both your business’ marketing and sales strategies. It helps your sales team meet the expectations of your prospective clients since they are aware of the promises stated in your marketing campaigns. Since your sales team interacts with your customers directly and frequently, they can provide your marketing team with a better understanding of your customers, which can help in developing more effective construction marketing strategies. Moreover, sales and marketing teams work on different parts of your sales funnel, and integrating the efforts of both teams will create a seamless experience for your clients from the beginning to the end of their journey as a customer.
Here are some best practices for integrating your construction company’s sales and marketing efforts:
- Make both marketing and sales teams accountable by having them plan projects, campaigns, and strategies together
- Put an agreement in place between your sales and marketing teams about their expectations of each other
- Foster friendships between your sales and marketing teams
- Encourage communications and meetings between your sales and marketing teams
- Have both teams share their data
- Incentivize your sales team based on sales and your marketing team based on KPIs
How to adapt your digital marketing strategy to the latest trends
The key to adapting to the ever-changing nature of digital marketing is remaining flexible and open to change. However, you must first test anything new to see if it will do well for your business. When you are testing a new trend for your marketing strategy, your spending on it must not be more than twenty percent of your total marketing budget and your spending on your established practices must remain the same. Once you have determined its viability, you can scale up your spending to full implementation in your digital marketing strategy.
06
Hire a construction marketing firm
Construction marketing companies have worked with and created strategies for other businesses similar to yours. Not only can they provide a wealth of construction marketing ideas but also they have the knowledge and experience to make these ideas work for your business efficiently and avoid the pitfalls they encountered before.
Moreover, even though you already have a team, you can hire them to develop a construction marketing plan for you. Doing so gives your business the benefit of having marketing professionals set the steps for your marketing campaign. Alternatively, you can also hire them for the construction marketing services that your team cannot do.
Do You Need Help from a Construction Marketing Company?
The success of your construction marketing strategy depends on its development and execution. With our help here at Big Market Solutions, your construction business will have a good start with its marketing strategy – from development to execution. Moreover, we have a variety of services for both traditional and digital marketing channels that can fit different budget price points.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation!
