Marketing a construction company is no longer a foreign concept. As the industry evolves, the players must keep up also.
Content marketing for a construction company presents a dynamic way to demonstrate your industry expertise, build brand credibility, while providing innovative solutions to common problems experienced by your target audience.
Below we have put together a simple content marketing guide to steer your construction company in the direction of winning. And winning every time.
Continue reading to get a glimpse of how you can enhance your brand awareness strategy through content marketing.
Understand your customers and what they are looking for
Effective content marketing for a construction company demands that you know your customers. This is crucial because only your customers can help you generate more leads and more sales.
Understanding your customer needs presents a great opportunity to provide them with quality service. Service focused on the customer in turn results in lasting customer relationships. Such relations with the customer yield more business for your construction company in form of referrals.
Successful construction companies always seek to learn the following about their customers:
- Who are they?
- What do they do?
- Why do they buy from us?
- When do they buy?
- How do they buy?
- How did they find us?
- What do they like about us?
- What do they expect from our brand?
- What do they think about our competition?
By answering these questions about your customers you understand them better. Understanding them helps you relate with their needs and preferences.
This then provides a sure foundation to create a branding message that resonates well with their needs.
Once your customers discover that you are offering exactly what they are looking for they won’t have a reason to abandon your service for the competition. Always have that in mind when developing a content strategy.
Take advantage of the existing resources
One such resource is your existing customers. A loyal customer is an asset you always want to have as part of your business model.
They probably have interacted with your brand several times before and therefore understand the benefits it provides. For that reason, they wouldn’t mind providing positive reviews for your service. Such testimonials come in handy when building an active portfolio for your construction business.
An active portfolio presents your business with higher chances of landing your next project. Most people rely on reviews to select a service for the first time. In fact, nearly 90% of consumers read online reviews before physically visiting a business or making a buying decision.
But how are these customer relations built?
According to the authors of Journal of Advances in Civil Engineering, customer relations are established right from the implementation stage of a construction project. Therefore, this is the single most crucial stage to aim at building a long-term relationship with the customer because a first impression speaks a lot about the future of your brand.
A project manager should not only stick to management duties. They ought to wear the marketing hat as well and commit to key marketing responsibilities. Project managers turned marketing managers have a critical responsibility of factoring in customer value in all their communication with the client on site.
This will help them anticipate any challenges or probable areas of conflict with the client and resolve them early enough in the process.
With such a work ethic on display, the customer is more likely to review your service in a positive light long before the project ends.
Beyond just reviewing your business, the client is more likely to call you for a repeat business. Wouldn’t you like that for your construction company?
Use project pictures and videos
Pictures and videos present a creative way to enhance your visual marketing. Apart from standing out at first sight, project visuals are also easy to remember.
Combining well-researched written content with remarkable visuals is more likely to resonate with your target audience over time. Visual presentations are good for enhancing learning and can be digested faster than text alone.
Analyzing the statistics around video marketing for example, stresses the significance of combining text with appealing visuals.
Note that 86% of businesses are now actively subscribing to video marketing as a competitive tool. Moreover, 93% of marketing agencies that rely on video marketing observe that it forms an important part of their overall marketing strategy.
This is largely attributed to the fact that video marketing greatly assists the audience in understanding the use of a product or service.
But what makes project pictures and videos tick? Here are a few tips to consider:
- Don’t just post pictures, caption them correctly as well
- Put an interesting story behind your pictures to resonate with your audience’s preferences
- Use high quality images and videos
- Be creative with your project video by telling a compelling story
- Sound clear and concise in your video, but thorough
- Post highly interactive pictures and videos for quick engagements
Remember, your video or picture should be able to present a flawless sales pitch. Ensure it conveys the objective of the company, while being personal with the audience’s needs. Address both angles, though briefly and creatively.
All news is local
Successful construction companies appreciate the importance of being part of their local communities. Some ways to make worthwhile contributions locally include making monetary donations, holding fundraising events, sponsoring local projects, offering free expertise for community construction projects, as well as making commentaries on local issues.
These are noble ways of boosting the company’s PR. However, moderation is encouraged.
While declaring a stand on certain issues, the construction company must carefully consider its stand on topical issue affecting the society. That may even include hiring an experienced team that will maintain a consistent and coherent position.
Why is hiring such a professional team important? Because they:
- Do it in a way that doesn’t harm your business through lost customers
- Fully understand the reputational, ethical, environmental, and legal consequences of a given stand
- Only target local issues that align to your construction company values
- Deeply research and examine opportunities for taking a stand before proceeding with it
- Know how to resort to nonviolent and unprovocative ways of taking a stand
- Understand the right associations to partner with in declaring a common stand
Consistency and coherency is key in securing your brand reputation in the market. A professional team being an external party tends to be more objective in such local participation. They have been undertaking PR efforts long enough to understand the strategies that work.
Create a list of FAQs
Successful construction companies always strive to answer all the FAQs that customers raise. This is key in upholding lasting brand credibility.
Construction frequently asked questions (FAQs) describe the common questions your target audience ask themselves before finally deciding on a given construction service.
Such questions address audience concerns around project identification, planning and scheduling, project scope, cost estimates, as well as a deeper analysis of the construction project’s needs.
Notably important is ensuring you provide only fact-based FAQs. That means, providing valuable information to your audience to aid them in making a quick and informed purchasing decision. This saves a lot of time for both your teams and your audience.
An important tip to remember is accompanying your FAQs with some blog posts below them. These follow up blogs will assist greatly in answering the FAQs in more detail and providing clarity on technical aspects of the construction service your company provides.
Below are some of the commonest questions a typical homeowner or property developer will want answered before hiring your construction company:
- How much will it cost?
- Will I require a building permit for the project?
- What is the project duration?
- Will I need to close my business during a renovation?
- How long has your construction company been in business?
- Will you subcontract any of the job?
- Do you have references?
- Can you provide some of your project samples?
- What is your specialty?
- Do you require upfront payment?
- Do you have insurance in case of damage to my property during construction?
- Is your company a member of any professional association?
- Will you issue me with regular updates on the project?
- Do you provide a guarantee on your work?
- What is the daily project schedule?
- Does your contract have a termination clause?
Answering these questions in the simplest and most direct way adds more points to your brand credibility. Be sure to remain straightforward and maintain a tone of authority when responding to the questions.
Speak as an expert in the field
Your construction company must project a voice of authority, experience, and expertise in the construction field.
An authoritative brand voice carries clarity, accuracy, and subject depth. Its main goal is to educate and inform.
But how do you uphold an authoritative voice throughout your content? Here is how:
- Focus on educating your audience-with facts
- Aim at conveying a professional and unbiased opinion
- Avoid jargon by simplifying complex brand messages in clear and concise structures
- Seek to empathize with your audience in your message delivery
- Be as objective as the content itself by keeping out personal emotions
If this sounds like a lot to do all by yourself, consider talking to a professional content writing agency.
More specifically, to maintain a consistent authoritative brand message, we strongly recommend hiring specialist construction company content creators.
They possess the expertise to consistently deliver high quality content that commands authority from your audience and portray you as a construction expert.
Help the industry
A successful construction company should aim at assisting the industry altogether. They can make this contribution by distributing industry trends, statistics, reports, and by conducting relevant industry research whenever an opportunity arises.
If the construction company is seeking for partnerships with subcontractors or other market players, sharing and expanding the body of knowledge in the industry can earn the company significant industry connections.
And why are these connections important?
In this article published by the Journal of Advances in Civil Engineering, the authors observed that the construction industry is characterized by extreme competitiveness, high risk, and usually low profit margins.
They also observed that contractors get jobs through transactional (competitive bidding) and relational (through created networks) methods.
In competitive bidding, more workload and low profit margins are common. In relational transactions however, profits are much better and risks are lower.
That tells you maintaining healthy relationships especially with business network entities is very crucial for the construction industry.
Below are some benefits industry connections yield:
- Landing repeat business with the same client and significantly lowering associated transaction costs
- Relating well with suppliers and subcontractors lowers the service costs by combining efforts to deliver projects
- Close relations with the government provide foreign project acquisition support
Lastly, maintain a firm online presence
According to a recent online assessment, only 45% of construction companies are actually growing. That means, the rest 55% are either stagnant or on the verge of collapse maybe.
But why the restricted growth?
Lack of a vibrant online presence of course. A redundant online infrastructure doesn’t amuse your target audience at all. What good is an effective content marketing strategy if you fail to constantly engage your audience with it?
Did you know that 96% of consumers rely on online searches to research and locate local products and services? Are you also aware that 90% of buyers run to the internet to seek home building solutions such as new design-build projects?
The surest way for your website to remain useful to the ever increasing number of audience out there is to uphold its vibrancy. A vibrant online presence is an effective way to remain competitive especially when combined with quality content.
Want to get noticed easily? Work with our content marketing team to remain relevant and active online. Become a leading construction company by working with the best in the content marketing landscape.
Take that leap!
You can entrust to us all your content development needs. Our teams are not only able content experts, but also reliable, efficient, and fast. We always deliver quality content on time.
Our range of content writing services spans across blog writing, newsletter writing, website content writing, and social media content writing services.
You can relax knowing that a reliable team is handling all your content needs behind the scenes. Focus on delivering quality construction projects as we focus on delivering quality content marketing for your construction company.
A reliable team you can trust!