Marketing a construction company is hard. Your customers need to be educated on the products and services you offer, the sales cycle can last weeks or months, and the industry is fraught with terrible companies who bring everyone's reputation down.
But just because marketing in this industry is challenging doesn’t mean it should be neglected.
The opposite is true.
Construction companies who invest in marketing can build strong brands, and relationships with customers and set themselves up to thrive in 2023 and beyond.
The Topics We Will Cover Include:
The Market
The market for construction companies varies widely depending on a variety of factors. For example, home builder sentiment dropped to 33 (MarketWatch) on a scale of 1-100, meaning that most home builders are pessimistic about the immediate future, but as I drive around my city in Southern Utah, I see lots being cleared to develop new residential and commercial building lots. Typically when new home sales slide, renovations also become more popular.
The type of business you run and the clients you are trying to reach have a huge impact on the market factors that are in play.
One thing that's true, though, is whether the market conditions in your area are favorable or not, competition in the construction industry is always fierce. When the market is hot new companies enter the market and attempt to drive down prices. When the market is slow, the best companies have to fight to win the work that is left.
In either scenario, construction companies need to find a way to stand apart from the noise. Effective marketing allows companies to do just that by educating potential customers about their products and services, while simultaneously building a trustworthy brand.
Construction Marketing Strategy
Have you ever tried to build a building without blueprints? Of course not. Modern buildings are complex structures that must adhere to specific codes and pass various inspections before they can be completed.
The blueprints are the detailed plans that help you get from a concept on paper to the final result.
And just like you wouldn’t start working on a building without a plan, you shouldn’t undertake marketing efforts without a marketing strategy.
Broadly defined, a marketing strategy (Investopedia) is a business’s overall game plan for reaching people who have a problem your company can solve and turning them into customers. But this definition leaves out a few important details.
Creating a construction marketing strategy can help you build a framework to determine which objectives are most important to your business, and create plans of action to achieve those goals. From there, you can determine which marketing channels will be the most beneficial for your business to pursue.
How To Create a Marketing Strategy
If you are new to construction marketing, you may not know where to start when creating your marketing strategy.
Before deciding which direction to go, it's important to understand what you want to accomplish through your marketing efforts. You likely have overall business goals in mind, so you’ll need to figure out how you want your marketing strategy to help you achieve those goals.
A good way to start working on this is by conducting a S.W.O.T. analysis. If you’ve been around business, you’ve probably heard about S.W.O.T. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
One thing to note here is determining what resources you can dedicate to your marketing efforts. It may be tempting to pursue every marketing channel, but you may quickly become overwhelmed. It is better to determine a few channels that work best for your business and focus on those.
You may also find that you want to do more, but just don’t have the time or resources to do it all yourself. If that’s the case you may consider hiring an agency. We describe some things to look for when hiring a marketing agency here.
Digital Marketing for Construction Companies
Like it or not, digital marketing is a force that will continue to be utilized across every industry, including the construction trades.
What we have found is that many business owners or managers either don’t fully understand digital marketing and the benefits that it can provide, or they don’t personally use the channels where digital marketing is effective so they don’t think it's worth the investment.
To be very clear, you can be successful, and even very successful, without utilizing digital marketing. Many companies don’t and they go on to live great and happy lives. But for those construction companies that are looking to upgrade their marketing game in 2023, the digital sphere provides plenty of opportunity.
So what is digital marketing?
According to Hubspot, “Digital Marketing, also called online marketing, refers to all marketing efforts that occur on the internet.”
That’s a broad definition, but digital marketing can be broken down into different channels, and we’re going to go into a few of the more popular channels in more detail.
Digital Marketing Channels for Construction Companies
Trying to keep up with every digital marketing channel can be a dizzying task. Rather than listing them all, we’re going to take a deeper look at some of the broader categories that can help your business connect with your current and future customers.
Website
A website is one of the most fundamental pieces of digital marketing for any industry, but that is especially true in construction marketing. Your website is your opportunity to tell the world what you offer and why they should choose to work with your company. And the fact is that a lot of construction companies either don’t have one or have a bad one.
Your website is going to be foundational for your digital marketing strategy. Not only is it one area where you can show visitors who you are and what you’re about, but it's typically one of the last places in your marketing funnel where visitors stop before they become customers. Your website is probably going to be where you direct people from other aspects of your construction marketing strategy. Your advertising, social media, content marketing, and traditional marketing efforts will all likely end up trying to drive traffic to a specific part of your website.
Now, the buying cycle in the construction industry can be complex, so your end goal is probably to have someone pick up the phone and call your business. Good websites provide the information people are looking for to help them determine if that phone call will be worth their time.
In this industry, we hear many owners argue that “no one is going to purchase from our website”, but that’s not entirely true. A visitor might not directly purchase through a website like they would on Amazon or any other eCommerce website. But an effective website can attract people, help them learn about you and what you do, and eventually help convince them to turn into customers.
According to Forrester, 74% of B2B buyers conduct 50% of their research online before making a purchase, and Google discovered that 71% of B2B researchers find a brand by making generic searches online.
So if you don’t have a strong website you are missing out on the opportunity for people to learn about your business, and you won’t be able to help them understand what you do before they reach out to your team.
Here is a good example from Kiewit. They're obviously a large company with a lot of resources, but they're website is clear and easy to navigate with a strong call to action.
Social Media
Social media is largely viewed as a necessary evil in the construction marketing sphere, but there is a lot of opportunity in this space.
We mentioned above that many construction companies either don’t utilize their website effectively or just don’t have one. The same is true for social media. This creates an opportunity for your marketing efforts to stand out.
There are dozens of social media channels your company could use, but some of the major ones include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. If you want to adopt social media into your construction marketing strategy, it's tempting to try to be on every platform.
That can be hard.
Each platform runs its own algorithm where it decides which content performs better than others. People also spend time on each platform for different reasons, so understanding what those reasons are before you start generating content can help you tremendously in the long run.
A post that performs well on LinkedIn won’t necessarily transfer to TikTok for example.
This can make managing several social media channels, even for the same company, very challenging. Trying to create good, fresh content consistently and then tailoring that content for 3 or 6 or more social media channels can be time-consuming and might require more resources than you have.
Before you decide which social media platforms you want to use, you should clearly define what you are trying to achieve with social media as part of your larger construction marketing strategy.
In this example, Lanberg Log Homes builds custom log cabins, and they've decided to utilize the great visuals of their cabins and building process on the platform that best showcases pictures, Instagram.
To determine your goals you can ask yourself questions like “Where are my current customers spending their time online?” “What types of content do my current and future customers want to see?” or “How much time do I have to dedicate to managing social media?”
These can be difficult questions to answer. But by having a clear idea of what you want to achieve and what resources you have available, you can change your perception of social media as a necessary evil and turn it into an effective place to engage with current and future customers.
It seems like every January a virtual avalanche of articles and blog posts are released talking about how email is a dead marketing channel.
Email is not dead.
It is estimated that 36 dollars are made for every 1 dollar spent on email marketing (Constant Contact).
That’s not to say that email marketing is easy money.
It takes time and effort to build your email marketing list the right way, and even when that’s done you still need to create engaging emails that your audience wants to open and read.
Thousands of blog posts talk about how to increase your marketing email open rates and conversion rates, so we won’t go into that here. One more thing we do want to talk about, though is that 59% of respondents (SalesCycle) say their purchasing decisions have been influenced by email.
We’ll continue to touch on this trend, but owners and managers who think the principles that make marketing effective in other industries don’t work in the field of construction are missing out on opportunities and opening the door to companies that employ effective construction marketing strategies.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an area of marketing that can be a minefield for someone that's just getting started. There are dozens of terms, tactics, theories, and acronyms, and each topic you attempt to research leads you further and further down the rabbit hole.
The perceived barrier to entry seems daunting.
The good news is that while the tactical aspects of SEO can be intimidating and downright confusing, the ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimization as part of your construction marketing strategy is to deliver the most helpful content to the people that are searching for your product or service.
It's that simple.
You can spend endless hours researching the Google algorithm trying to determine which aspects of your website need to be optimized to rank higher, but at the end of the day, Google promotes the most helpful content.
Now, it's not easy or everyone would do it. It can be easy to get lost in the tactics and strategies and how-to lists and forget the end goal, which is to help answer your website visitor’s question. It often takes months or even years for your content to reach the top spot in a Google search if it gets there at all. Understanding what problems your content can help people solve is the fundamental pillar that your content should focus on.
So now that we’ve established that SEO for the construction industry is both simple at its core yet difficult to execute, why would you want to engage in something that might take years to achieve a result? Well, for one Google processes 2.3 trillion searches per year and 49% of marketers (Search Engine Journal) report that organic search has the best ROI of any other marketing channel.
The long-term nature of Search Engine Optimization also means that the results you achieve also have a lot more staying power than other digital marketing channels. For example, your blog post or article could stay remain the top result or at least on the first page of results for months or years while the lifespan of a social media post ranges from 15 minutes to about 48 hours (atisfyre). YouTube videos can stay relevant for around 20 days (atisfyre).
So while it may take time, SEO is a strong option to consider as part of your construction marketing strategy. Just like in all other aspects of your strategy, you should consider what your goals are and what resources you have to dedicate to those goals before embarking on the long road to SEO results.
Paid Ads
The last digital marketing channel for construction marketing we are going to address is paid ads. We aren’t going to spend a lot of time here because virtually every social media platform, news outlet, popular blog, and search engine provides some sort of service where you can pay for your message to reach more people.
Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter all allow you to create ads that are shown to an audience that you can choose through individual targeting platforms. Google, Bing, and YouTube allow you to pay to be shown at the top of the page for whatever keywords you choose. A news outlet or popular blog will let you put ads on their web pages for a fee.
The big takeaway here is that there is no shortage of channels where you can pay for exposure on digital media. The real challenge is determining which strategies and channels are going to benefit your business the most. If your business has a local focus, paid Google Ads might help your listing be seen when someone searches for the service you offer. If you’re running a special Facebook or Instagram might help you reach the audience you are trying to target more effectively.
Businesses can do quite well by running paid advertising, but it usually takes some experimentation to get right. The artwork, content, offer and targeting all work together to determine whether the ad will succeed or fail.
Determining what channels to advertise on boils down to what you want to accomplish. In the construction marketing industry, your ads may drive potential customers to your website, where they schedule a consultation or make a phone call. Depending on what you do, some visitors might even be able to make a purchase right there on your website. In other cases, the goal might be to get prospective buyers to download an ebook or attend a webinar.
No matter what you do, having a clearly defined goal will be the key to paid advertising as part of your construction marketing strategy.
Traditional Marketing Channels For Construction Companies
Traditional marketing tactics get left behind in many industries today because of the effectiveness of digital marketing channels. The big social media platforms and search engines provide a lot of data that marketers can use to specifically target certain groups of people in cost-effective ways with digital marketing that is measurable and easy to replicate.
That doesn’t mean that traditional marketing tactics and strategies should be ignored, though.
Traditional marketing can indeed be hard to measure, but we’ll talk about a few channels that are widely used and can generate results.
Word of Mouth
OK so word of mouth isn’t solely a marketing tool, but it is the result that all businesses should ultimately strive for. Performing at a high enough level that your customers tell their family and friends what a great job you did is what every company, especially in construction, should be working towards.
Word of mouth is so powerful that 90% of people are more likely to trust a brand even if the person who told them about it is a complete stranger (SEMRush). It's estimated that word of mouth drives 5 times more sales than paid advertising, and even more importantly, 26% of people will avoid a brand if a friend or family tells a negative story about their experience (SEMRush).
While word of mouth isn’t something you have all that much control over, there are a few things you can do to help encourage your customers to spread the news of your business far and wide. We mentioned the first one earlier, and that is simply doing a great job. This is easier said than done, but no one will promote your business if you’re mediocre or just plain bad.
Secondly, you could consider providing incentives which might encourage customers to remember what a great job you did while they are talking to their family and friends. A referral program where people are paid in money or gift cards can help drive business, but these can be a little bit difficult to set up and manage so you will want to make sure you can dedicate the resources to the program before you proceed.
Print Advertising
Probably one of the most understood forms of traditional marketing is print advertising. Print ads have been around forever and they’re still used with varying degrees of effectiveness. Print ads can be seen in magazines, newspapers, flyers, billboards, and on pretty much every piece of physical marketing that companies generate.
Just like email marketing, industry experts have been saying that print ads are dead for years. While it's true that marketing has been dominated by digital giants like Google and Facebook over the past decade-plus, the print advertising industry is still estimated to generate $46.87 billion in 2023 (Statista) and the billboard industry could generate as much as $8.3 billion (IBISWorld).
So print advertising is far from dead, but it can be difficult to achieve results. One of the major problems with print advertising is the lack of measurable data that print ads supply. You can create landing pages with custom URLs or use unique phone numbers, but unless a customer tells you that they discovered you through a print advertisement, it can be tough to tell if they are working. Our best advice is to pick your print ad slots carefully, and clearly define what you want the ad to accomplish before signing on the dotted line.
Sponsorships
Sponsorships are another great example of traditional marketing. For all the sports fans out there, the end of the year is when college football hosts their Bowl games, which are sponsored and televised nationally. Companies like Chick-Fil-A, VRBO, and Duluth Trading Company all sponsored college football games at the end of the 2022 season.
Sponsorships can be great options, for construction companies especially, to help drive awareness and brand recognition. While college football is a good example of what sponsorships look like, they are very expensive and are out of reach for most businesses.
The good news is that you can engage in sponsorship at various levels, with some costing as little as a few hundred dollars. Sponsoring a little league team, a high school event or a tradeshow are all great ways to showcase your brand in a positive light. Sponsorships at a local level, even for larger companies are a great way to generate one on one interactions with the community you live and work in. These types of connections build a positive outlook toward your business, which in turn helps the community remember your product or service when it can help them solve their problem.
Conclusion
There are a lot of different ways that you can leverage construction marketing to help your business continue to grow and be successful. The channels we discuss here provide an overview, but the picture can become much more complex once you dive into the tactical aspects of each channel.
As you make your way into 2023 and beyond, one of the most important things you can do to set your business up for marketing success is to clearly define what you’re hoping to accomplish with each channel.
It's also important to be specific here.
We all want to “drive more sales” but having an idea of which channels are going to help you do that and how will set you up for better performance.
And remember, there is no easy road with marketing, especially in construction. It takes time and effort to progress toward your goals.
And if you want to engage in marketing but this all seems daunting, we would love to talk to you about developing, executing, and managing your marketing efforts! You can contact us here.
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