Have you wondered at some point, “How do I increase sales in my construction business?” There is a lot of competition for construction work out there and it can be a struggle to take your business to the next level. Because so much of your time and effort goes into bidding jobs, dealing with employees and contractors, ordering materials and overseeing projects it can be overwhelming to try to think about marketing your business.
Next level marketing these days relies heavily on Digital Marketing. Because the marketing world is ever changing and because most contractors are already overwhelmed with their construction projects, you can still put your business at the forefront of digital marketing in the construction industry. Doing so would certainly boost your business and over time would become a major source of growth, brand recognition and earned trust with clients.
The truth is that Marketing has seen more change in the 21st century than it did during the whole of the 20th century. The transformation into the digital age is not just about video games, cell phones and Amazon.com; it impacts every aspect of our lives. The internet has transformed how businesses do almost everything they do. This is particularly true about how they market their products and services to potential clients and customers.
So, for those contractors who may be struggling to get a handle on the digital marketing world, we are offering you six construction marketing strategies to jumpstart your efforts.
Six Strategies for Digital Marketing in the Construction Industry
1. Make Sure Your Construction Business has a Great Website that is Mobile Friendly
This is the place to start because your business website is the hub for all digital marketing in the construction industry. It is where you will be sending potential clients, it will track your activity, it will be the engine for your digital marketing strategies, and it will include calls to action to get visitors to your site to give you their information. Ultimately you want all your digital marketing to lead potential clients to your website. So when they get there you need for them to have a good experience, to be able to read all of the information, to send requests, to make calls to action, to contact you, etc.
You can have a beautifully restored 1965 Ford Shelby Mustang, but if the engine doesn’t run it’s just a museum piece. The next five strategies are awesome ways to boost your business but if potential clients can’t read your website on their phones, or if the website takes too long to download, or if it just looks old and dusty, then the rest of your efforts won’t help your business grow.
2. Boost Your Search Engine Optimization Budget – SEO
Optimizing your website means making the value of its content, organization and layout clear to the artificial intelligence (AI) crawlers (spiders) that search engines use to collect data. These search engines want to get reliable, helpful and quality information to their users. SEO identifies keywords that consumers use most often when they go searching for information. And then SEO looks for quality content that uses these keywords to offer information back to the searcher.
Great websites weave these keywords into the content of their webpages, blogs, infographic content and links to optimize the quality of their content for SEO crawlers. Strategic keywords are woven into as many places within the web content as possible so that the site will get noticed by Google as well as other search engines. Search engine software scans the content of billions of pages and notes and indexes the use of these keywords. The desired end result comes when a consumer types “best construction business near me” into the search engine and the result of their search gives them your business name, address, phone number, web address, etc. on the first page of their search.
3. Create YouTube Videos with Vital Information
YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. People love to learn from DIY construction videos. Although it may seem strange to create videos that explain how to do the kinds of projects you do, they can actually result in massive sales. Being known for quality work and building people’s trust in your business is Marketing 101!
Whether you offer this information in blogs, newsletter or videos, giving it away for free or for an email address or phone number builds trust. Adding value to your viewers will make them remember you when they are looking for a construction company down the road when their DIY project never gets started or goes haywire.
While informational content is king, visual content (video) is the emperor of content delivery. Well done videos are incredibly effective communication tools for explaining difficult topics and complex ideas in a short amount of time. What is more they are easily deliverable through most digital marketing streams:
- Websites
- SEO
- Pay per click ads
- Social media
- Email campaigns, etc
4. Market Your Business on Social Media
One of the cutting edge areas of marketing is to harness the growth of social media, 60% of small and medium businesses report gaining new customers through the use of social media. The explosion of social media has created wide ranging opportunities for getting your business message spread far and wide. This growing medium provides lots of benefits including:
Brand Exposure
Growing your brand and familiarity with your potential customers is essential. People very often choose a product or service based on their familiarity with it. They have encountered your brand before. Growing this kind of familiarity with your brand through social media is effective, has the potential to reach a global audience and does not have to cost a lot of money.
Fish where they Bite
It seems crazy but the average person today spends 2.5 hours on social media daily. This is where people are interacting with others and increasingly are getting information and receiving advertisements. Staying relevant means going to where people are engaged and active. By building a presence on social media, answering questions and building relationships you will be fishing where people are biting.
Become the Go-To Expert
By providing excellent content, advice, answers to questions, relevant sources and friendly service you can create a following on social media in which you are the go-to expert in your field. If customers return to your page for quality content and pass that information on to their “friends” your list of clients will grow and their trust in your business will increase. More trusting contacts will lead to higher sales conversion rates.
A strategy for construction companies is to start with Facebook ads. This is because FB allows you to hyper-target your audience through specific qualifiers like: net worth, location, specialty, etc,. Give Facebook ads a try to boost your marketing in the construction industry.
5. Get on Web Directories
Web directories are an easy way to increase your presence online. The problem can be identifying which of them will be the best fit for you to invest your time and energy to create your construction company profile. It works best to identify web directories that your target demographic might use to locate a new contractor, sites like these could be helpful::
Yelp.com
AngiesList.com
Contractors.com
It is essential that you fill out these directory submissions completely and that your crucial information like your website, phone number and email address are correctly entered so that potential leads can contact you.
6. Use the Remarketing Tools Available
Behind the scenes of your “how to increase sales in construction business” strategy is something called remarketing. Remarketing involves those ads that pop up on your computer after you have visited a website that uses remarketing tools. It’s a digital marketing strategy that is highly powerful and effective because it reminds visitors to your website to come back again. Setting up a remarketing campaign isn’t as intimidating as it sounds and can be a great way to bring back visitors who had forgotten to call or message your company.
People lead busy and complicated lives and they don’t always remember to follow up on some of the things they intended to do. Remarketing is a great way to offer busy people a second or third chance to follow through with their intentions. And setting up a Remarketing campaign is not as difficult or complicated as it may sound.
Conclusion
Hopefully these six strategies for digital marketing in the construction industry offer you and your construction business some valuable information for getting to the next level with your digital marketing. The next step for you will be integrating all or some of these ideas into the nuts and bolts of running your business. There will be a lot of new tasks and responsibilities to complete to integrate these ideas into your overall marketing strategy.
The good news is that you have options. You can take on the challenge yourself, you can hire a marketing guru for your business, or you can contract with a team of marketing experts who will walk your business through the strategic process.
Or you can approach a full service marketing agency with your goals in mind, and work with them to hone your brand, design an overall marketing plan that is tailored to your company, and let your marketing agency develop and grow your quality inbound leads for your business.
Here at zo agency we work to build long term relationships with our clients. We call it Tribe!
We will work diligently to discover your vision, your passion, your needs, your hope and dreams for your business and then will create an overall marketing plan that meets your needs and fits your budget. Visit us today at www.zo.agency
