The complete guide to digital marketing for construction companies
Practical steps you can take to improve your marketing strategy and bring in more clients.
You’d be forgiven for thinking construction is as far away from digital as you can get. After all, you can’t lay a brick from the comfort of a computer screen, can’t mix cement remotely from your smartphone, and sending an email is not going to help you install a steel girder. But by ignoring the digital world, you’re missing out on a wider audience, better clients and ultimately more revenue.
In this blog, we’re going to give you a round-up of the most effective digital marketing tactics for construction companies. By the end, you’ll come away with the tools you need to take your marketing to the next level.
Create and maintain a top-quality website
Your website is the most powerful tool you have at your disposal when it comes to digital marketing. It bleeds into virtually every aspect of your digital strategy and you’ll often direct leads to it from your other channels.
You should think of it as an opportunity not just to show what you’re about, but to tell your potential clients how you’ll make their lives, business, and projects better. This is where benefit-rich copy comes into the equation.
The power of benefits
We’ve spoken before about the power of benefits in web copy and nowhere is it more appropriate than your website. Benefits are the gold standard for any company that wants to convert more leads into clients and marketing for construction companies is no different. Many companies make the mistake of talking about themselves too much rather than talking about what they can do for their potential clients and that will have a knock-on effect on their ability to persuade new clients to sign a contract.
Businesses and the people that run them only care about what you can do to improve their business or their life. For that reason, your web copy should address that need. In short, tell your customers what benefits you’ll bring to the table and why you’re different from the average bear.
The more tailored to your clients needs your website is, the longer your potential clients will stay and read. This is a bit like flicking through photos are a group outing online. You’re more likely to pay more attention to the ones you appear in. This increased dwell time will not only give you more time to convince your reader that you’re the construction company for them, but it will give your SEO a boost too.
Optimise your website for the search engines
SEO strikes fear into the hearts of many non-marketers with its intimidating terminology and ‘technical’ processes. These fears are unfounded. At its heart, it’s quite a simple process but is increasingly important in the internet age. The top result on Google gets 33% of all the traffic. If you’re anywhere below that, one-third of the spoils have already left the game. As you get further down the search results page, your share of the pie gets smaller and smaller until it dries up altogether.
There are several benefits to ranking highly.
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The most obvious is that a higher ranking means more people finding your page.
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Your brand awareness will skyrocket. The higher up in a search you are, the more people get familiar with your brand.
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If you're targeting the right long-tail keywords, you’ll get good quality leads. While more specific keywords will cast a smaller net, the quality of the fish they bring in tends to be much higher.
There are several things you can do to give your SEO a boost. First and foremost, it’ll require some research on the term you want to rank for. You can do this via a tool like Ubersuggest or SEMRush. These platforms will tell you how much a keyword is searched for and how difficult it’ll be to rank for. They’ll also give you suggestions for alternatives and provide you with a means of checking out the websites that currently rank for those terms.
Once you’ve established your keyword, you can set about sparingly peppering the keyword through your web copy (DO NOT overdo this). You can also play with your sites meta titles, meta descriptions and URLs to gain a further edge to your SEO, but the specifics of this are a topic for another blog.
For a comprehensive look at what you can do to get ahead of the game with SEO, check out Backlinko’s definitive guide to on-page SEO.
Demonstrate social proof
As we wrote about recently, social proof is a powerful tool when it comes to convincing potential clients that you’re the real thing. Outside of the digital world, this manifests itself by word of mouth. Businesses feel safer investing in your services if someone they trust has vouched for you.
In the world of digital marketing and your website in particular, reviews, testimonials and case studies are the key to social proof. As part of your project management process, you should be getting testimonials from your clients to share across your online platforms, particularly your website. Even if your potentials don’t read your testimonials in full, they’ll feel safer knowing that they exist and that you’re not an unknown quantity.
Demonstrate your expertise through a portfolio of case studies
Just like your potential clients will be on the lookout for what your past and present clients have to say about you, they’ll also be casting a critical eye over your past work. This is where a varied portfolio of case studies come in handy. If, say, a developer working in the hospitality industry is looking for a construction company to build a new restaurant, they’ll be looking for a construction company with those projects in their locker.
This is where you can get clever. Whatever kind of client you’re targeting, you can cater your case studies to their line of work. Don’t just throw up a few pictures, get into specifics. Get good quality photos of your work and give details about what your client needed and how you provided it. Talk about the challenges and how you brought your problem solving to the project to create a great project for your client. Once you’ve done all that you can top it all off with a quote from your client.
Case studies are important for any B2B industry, but when it comes to marketing for construction companies, it’s one of your most potent weapons for demonstrating your skills.
Analyse your site's performance
Once you’ve got your website to the position it needs to be in, you might think you can relax and leave it alone. Well, you could do that but you risk not capitalising on opportunities to fine-tune your website into a client-attracting machine.
One way you can continuously optimise your site is by using one of the aforementioned keyword tools or try out Google analytics (this one is free) to see how much organic traffic you’re getting to your site. Once you see how your site is performing in terms of search rankings and click throughs, you can start making changes to address any shortcomings or to improve conversion.
Another handy tool is heat mapping software. This software allows you to see what part of your website or webpage gets the most attention, both in terms of clicks and reads. This can help you make decisions on site structure, user experience and clickable links.
Don’t be afraid to get in front of the camera
Video is an underused format that can give your website a massive boost, both in terms of attracting clients and empowering your SEO. People’s attention spans are short and they’re often cowed by lots of text. Video offers a much more accessible option that makes it easier on your audience, allows the personality of your company to shine through and increases the ‘dwell time’ of visitors to your websites – a powerful commodity that increases your position in the search engines.
Build a bank of solid content
Content is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal when it comes to digital marketing. A huge topic in and of itself, we wrote about it recently to show you how you can use it to your advantage. Not only is it another means of driving organic traffic to your site through clever keyword research, but it’s a great opportunity to develop your relationship with your audience and position yourself as a value-adding, helpful company.
Many people think blogs are just another way of showing people what you’re up to or to showcase the pictures of your last company party. Again, this is a poor use of your time and poor use of your blog. Your content should provide valuable insight and answer the questions your audience are searching for. This could be questions about how building regulations affect certain developments or an outline of the options for carbon-neutral heating installations. Once you’ve researched what questions your target audience has, you can start crafting content based on those questions to bring organic traffic to that particular page.
Social Media
It’s tempting to think social media is solely the domain of business to consumer, but there is an active niche for b2b companies to be explored and benefitted from. Twitter, LinkedIn and to a lesser extent – Facebook, are all fantastic platforms from which to build an audience and start a conversation.
Much like your website, you shouldn’t be just talking about yourself. Your aim should be to have conversations, share interesting information and add value to your readers’ experience. This could be as simple as sharing your thoughts about a new piece of technology relevant to your industry or commenting on a new piece of planning regulation. Anything that your target audience would be interested in is relevant.
Twitter is great for sharing short and sharp bursts of information. Its also great for engaging with clients, suppliers and other industry figures. Good quality, respectful conversations should be your aim (in addition to sharing links to any blogs or content you write).
LinkedIn is an excellent platform for construction companies. Like Twitter, you can have lots of meaningful conversations with others (both potential clients and industry figures). Because of the bigger character limit, there is much more scope for bigger posts and bigger posts mean more opportunities to add value.
Facebook has its uses in B2B marketing. However, when it comes to construction companies there are better platforms out there. Notably, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Instagram is a great visual medium for showing off some of your work, but it's more limited in terms of the conversations you can have. It's more of an extended portfolio for b2b constructions companies.
Email Marketing for Construction companies
Email is a fantastic medium for connecting with your audience, keeping your name on the lips of the right people, and getting ahead of the competition. While you’re not the kind of business that will be making many sales via email, there are plenty of opportunities for you to use email to build relationships with your audience and position yourself as the go-to option when they need a construction company.
What not to do
Don’t just use your emails to tell your email list ‘What you’ve been up to’. Remember, your clients and potential clients don’t care that much about you. They only care about what you can do for them. A surefire way to make sure your emails never get opened is to only talk about yourself without adding any value or saying anything interesting.
What to do
Share interesting information with your audience. New building regulations coming into law? Do your research and tell your readers what it means for development projects. Got experience working with new sustainable building materials, talk about it and its implications for the rest of the industry, not just a ‘We did this, look how great we are!’.
Feature your people
A top tip for the content you share across your website and your digital presence is to showcase your people. By putting a face to your service and showing that you’re run by human beings, you become more personable. Construction is an industry heavily reliant on relationships, so by putting your people front and centre, you start the process of your clients getting to know you. Too often, digital marketing for construction is faceless and impersonal, so by putting an emphasis on your people, you’re breaking down boundaries and getting ahead of the competition.
This goes for your website, your social media and even your email campaigns. A few examples might be a video from your chief executive on your home page, an interview with one of your project managers on your blog, or some pictures of your on-site build team for Twitter.
Get your name in the press
This one isn’t strictly digital marketing, but it's important. When you’ve got something newsworthy going on, getting your story out into the press is a great way to grow brand recognition. This is the one medium you can talk about yourself in, but keep it focussed on the news at hand. We recently wrote a complete guide on writing a press release. Be sure to check it out before you start capturing your news and sending it out to journalists.
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So there you have it. Our comprehensive guide to digital marketing for construction companies. If you’re looking for help with your marketing strategy, give Luma a call and we’ll give you the tools you need to grow your audience and bring new clients to your door.