Construction & Engineering Companies: How to Build A Marketing Strategy Like Your Construction Site
As a construction/engineering professional, you’re an expert in your field. You follow the same steps each time you take on a new project. Similarly, building a marketing strategy for a construction/engineering company utilizes a series of steps that can be repeated for a successful project. When marketing your company, build your strategy like a construction/engineering project: start with a blueprint, a solid foundation, and framing to increase your prospect list and client base.
Start with the project requirements.
The first step to building a marketing strategy is understanding the problems you’re solving, and the goals you’re trying to reach. Ask a series of questions:
- Why is it that you are looking to build or start using a digital marketing strategy?
- Are you lacking qualified leads?
- How is your website traffic? Is it the right traffic?
- Where is your marketing now and where do you want it to be?
Understanding your needs and goals is essential for the next step: creating a blueprint.
Draw up the blueprints.
When building any project, the blueprint gives the engineers, contractors, and vendors the full-picture plan of how the project will come together. For your marketing strategy, the next step is to write up the content plan based on the goals you’ve identified, in order to align all members of your team in working toward the same goals. Content includes web pages needed, blogs being posted, any educational content that needs to be produced, and social media planning. While it may seem overwhelming at first, we recommend focusing on the most important goals first.
Build upon the strong foundation of your company.
Everything you build needs a solid foundation; it sets the tone for the entire project – the squared edges, the level flooring, the straight walls…you know the drill. Your website is like the foundation of your entire marketing strategy – and it effects the quality of your business’s brand in the long run.
To have a sustainable, reliable brand, you need to make a great first impression. Your company’s positive attributes are conveyed through a clear company name, strong logo, and obvious message that relates to your customers and leaves a positive impression. Your website needs convey the brand. It also needs to have a responsive design with a clean, clear layout that is easy for a prospect to navigate. Your brand identity is the connective tissue between your services and a consumer that drives relevance and appeal. At the end of the day, your goal is simple: impress your website visitors with your competitive advantage – and that advantage is connected to your brand.
Once you lay the foundation, move on to the framing.
In our building analogy, I equate framing with producing buyer personas. What are those? Well, I’m glad you asked. Your buyer personas are representations of your ideal customers – fictional characters that help to guide you as you produce content for a specific customer who may buy from you. Just like framework guides the meat of the house – the walls, windows, roof – the buyer personas guide the major content you’ll produce for your strategy – the blogs, eBooks, videos, and more.
Let’s look at Jimmy the business owner:
Jimmy’s Story: He owns a manufacturing company and is experiencing serious growing pains within his operations. He is looking for a contractor to help him design and build a safe and more efficient building. One of his concerns is construction management. He will be very involved in the process & with the subcontractors. He will be very picky with quality assurance and his biggest objection you need to be aware of is maintaining a timely schedule with good communication throughout the process.
Analysis: Jimmy the business owner will care about many different things and have different problems than a persona looking to build a fitness center, for example. The fitness center-building persona will care more about the physical environment like air conditioning, lights and the physical design or feel, where as Jimmy cares about proper communication and maintaining a timely schedule. Both of these personas would be different from a client looking to build a multi-family home… you see what I am saying. Understand your personas and their needs and build your marketing strategy towards their specific problems or challenges.
Once this research is complete, you are ready to implement a marketing strategy that will provide sustainable long-term growth. It’s time to undertake inbound marketing.
There are four stages of inbound:
- Attract
- Convert
- Close
- Delight
After each stage, it is important to measure the success, do this by preforming analytic reports on every tactic you implement.
Continually check measurements and leveling.
You’ve head the phrase “measure twice, cut once,” and it applies here, too. As your strategy gets going and you’re producing all the content you planned, make sure you’re measuring the results to ensure you’re on track for success. If it’s not working – stop! And try it a different way. Don’t waste resources continuing forward with a plan that isn’t meeting the goals it’s meant to meet.
Source: Trending Up
