When any business aims to elevate themselves above their industry competition, marketing is at the forefront of these efforts. In construction, it is key that you address key focus areas in order to develop an effective marketing strategy. 

At Assured Marketing, we have worked with construction based businesses and we have often found that they do actually have many of the key elements for successful marketing available, but that these efforts are not optimised or being managed ineffectively. 

In this week’s blog we’re going to address 5 of these key focus areas that constructors should pay attention to above others when it comes to honing their marketing efforts and really enhancing their business’ reputation above that of the competitors.

Identify & Effectively Communicate Your USPs

Construction as an industry can often simply appear as just pro-forma, without many qualities that can set them apart from competitors. However, just as any business there will always be Unique Selling Points (USPs) that set a company apart from others. 

In construction this could be anything, from an emphasis on the way staff are trained to actively demonstrating an environmental cause. Through correctly identifying the way in which you can do business differently will often provide you with your strongest marketing content that you can then develop a marketing strategy around.

As defined in a recent article by GrowthBusiness, a USP (when well crafted) can really help you communicate a more effective brand message as persuasively as possible to your customers. Often leading them to choosing you over your competitors as they feel more comfortable buying from a company with a more personal touch.

Once a USP has been correctly identified for your business, the next step is to work on the best way of communicating this to potential customers, be it residential customers or other businesses. Ensuring that the USP is highlighted on all internal/external communication is a great starting point. Using a branded footer that emphasises the USP on written documents is common practice when trying to ensure that the USP is part of your marketing strategy. 

Run Well Optimised Paid Ads

Paid advertising is by far one of the most effective ways to quickly target a business’ ‘ideal customers’ in the current climate. This remains true for construction based businesses. Rather than simply creating huge amounts of promotional content and pushing it aimlessly at groups of people, using paid ads – either on Google or on Social Media – can help open channels of communication with interested parties.

Given that users of these platforms will use search engines and social media more and more to find preferred construction or facilities management companies, being shown in front of your competitors on these platforms will greatly improve your chance of securing business over your competitors.

When it comes to PPC it has been found that those users who arrive at a construction business through a PPC Google ad are 50% more likely to purchase than those who arrive through other channels. 

However, simply setting up ad campaigns across digital platforms won’t work immediately. Any construction business needs to ensure that campaigns are correctly optimised for their audiences. On Google this means ensuring that the correct keyword search terms are being bid for and that irrelevant keywords are marked as negative to avoid wasting budget. On social media it means that businesses should pay careful attention to audience interests and which kind of users need to be targeted in regard to them actually being interested in the services that the business provides. 

Often if a business has the budget, they will make the decision to commission a PPC agency to run their ad campaigns for the, These agencies will bring the experience and knowledge of how to run effective campaigns and can free up time from administrative tasks for the business. 

Showcase Stunning Projects From Start To Finish

The construction industry offers some of the most engaging visual content to those who are interested in it. From time lapse videos to photography collections of projects being completed, these are often the greatest trust signal that a construction business can have. Yes, reviews are great (and we’ll get to that later) but they often fail to tell a story in the way that visual demonstrations of projects can.

A potential customer will always want to see the quality of work that a construction company can provide, therefore utilising this method of gathering visual evidence of previous projects can tick the box of trust in the mind of the consumer.

Whilst, commissioning a photographer or videographer for these services are the best ways to ensure quality in the content, often simply having the staff on site document well taken images to use in promotional content can be just as effective. Use the content and caption that goes with it to tell a story to the customers. What was the project? How was the end result achieved? etc.  

Use Your Website’s Blog To Your Advantage

This is an area that is overlooked by most industries, but certainly is not utilised enough in the construction sector. Blogging is one of the best ways to help provide more authority to a website – especially when combined with guest posting – but is also an amazing way to help provide informative content to potential customers. 

When considering that companies that utilise blogging as part of their marketing strategy are 13x more likely to generate a return on investment (ROI) on their efforts, it can be seen that this is certainly a method that construction companies should be using to set themselves ahead of their competitors.

What should also be considered is the vast amount of informative and helpful content that these businesses can offer content consumers. With a range of experts that can offer advice on how to carry out various construction tasks and answer many FAQs that users will have regarding construction, the content will come naturally. 

Generate & Showcase Positive Reviews/Feedback

As mentioned earlier, alongside visual proof, reviews are one of the biggest trust signals for businesses in the construction sector. As an industry that requires customers to be constantly reassured of the quality that can be delivered, ensuring that previous projects are proven with positive feedback from clients is essential to secure more work.

Whether you implement a feedback form for clients or simply encourage them to leave online feedback on the businesses Google, Bing and Social Media listings/pages having these social proof’s will really make the sales journey for potential customers much more friendly. 

It would always be advised that feedback forms are used over simply asking for reviews to be left as this gives a business the control over what areas of the project are addressed in the feedback. It also gives the chance for the business to respond to any negative feedback professionally and control any damage that could be done from these negative reviews.