Month: March 2021

Construction companies offer a lot of value to their clients. But, how can construction companies demonstrate their value to generate and retain more leads?

What Are the 10 Steps to a Successful Marketing Plan For Construction Company?

Here are 10 things to do when making a marketing plan for a construction company:

1. Set Your Objectives
2. Identify Your Target Audience
3. Plan Your Budget
4. Check Out Your Competitors
5. Optimize Your Website (SEO)
6. Plan Your Organic Marketing Strategy
7. Invest In Paid Advertising
8. Engage Clients with Social Media Marketing
9. Connect via Email Marketing
10. Track Your Success (Key Performance Indicators)

The best way for construction companies to show their value and obtain new leads is to have a marketing plan. A marketing plan will outline how you’re positioning your company in the market and what channels you’re capitalizing on.

1. Set Your Objectives

One of the first things to do when making a marketing plan for a construction company is to set your objectives.

Not having objectives for your marketing plan is like taking a road trip with no destination in mind. Sure, you may stumble upon some interesting places along the way — but do you really want to rely on chance?

Think about what you want to accomplish with your marketing plan. Do you want to:

• Increase brand awareness?
• Get more leads?
• Boost sales revenue?
• Increase website traffic?
• Get more social media followers?

Set realistic objectives for your marketing plan and come up with a strategy for meeting those objectives. Analyze the market, identify trends, and see where you can capitalize.

The more research and data you collect, the more comprehensive your marketing plan will be.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

Your marketing team should always keep your target audience in mind when executing your construction company’s marketing plan. To figure out who is in your target audience, ask yourself the following questions:

• What kind of projects is your company looking to take on? Private, government, residential, commercial, etc.
• Are you doing B2B marketing, B2C marketing, or a mix of both?
• What kind of budget do those in your target audience have?

Identifying these key elements will help you determine what key marketing messages to form in your campaigns.

This is crucial, since you may find that you have multiple buyer personas in your target audience. If you want to convert these theoretical buyers into actual buyers, you need to elaborate on how your services solve their specific pain points.

3. Plan Your Budget

Once you have the fundamental aspects taken care of, the next step in making a marketing plan for a construction company is planning your budget. The U.S. Small Business Administration says that, generally, small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate between seven and eight percent of their revenues to marketing.

That means if your company makes $1 million in revenue, you should expect to allocate between $70,000 and $80,000 to your marketing budget.

Keep in mind that your total marketing budget needs to cover aspects like:

• Paid advertising
• Marketing tools
• Paying marketing personnel
• Building and maintaining a website

It’s incredibly important to stay on budget with your marketing efforts. If you go over budget, you have to dip into the company’s revenue to make up for it, and that doesn’t look good to investors or company leadership.

It’s also important that your marketing efforts provide a solid return on investment (ROI), so focus on marketing efforts that positively impact the bottom line. If your efforts don’t provide the right ROI, you risk your budget getting slashed.

4. Check Out Your Competitors

If you aren’t paying attention to your competition, you risk losing business to them.

Plain and simple.

Part of the marketing plan for your construction company should include keeping tabs on your competition’s marketing initiatives and observing what messages they’re putting out into the world.

Competition analysis can make a huge difference in your marketing initiatives.

You can launch these efforts by identifying who your top competitor is and evaluating their website, paid advertisements, and content. From there, you can get a sense of how they’re positioning themselves and the types of marketing messages they’re generating.

From there, you can plan your marketing countermoves. For instance, if you find out they’re targeting certain keywords in their paid advertising strategy, you could target those keywords in your own paid advertising strategy.

Keeping up with your competition’s marketing initiatives lets your target audience know that there are other companies to consider for services.

5. Optimize Your Website

When coming up with a marketing plan for a construction company, one of the best ways to generate valuable traffic that could turn into valuable leads is to properly optimize your website.

People need to be able to easily find your website in our digital age. Statistics show that 88% of consumers research online before making a purchase either online or in-store. If they can’t find your website, they’ll seek services elsewhere.

Make sure your team is focusing on your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. You can do this by:

• Identifying what keywords you want your construction company to rank for
• Using alt tags
• Publishing relevant content on a consistent basis
• Making sure there are no 404 errors or broken links on your site
• Optimize your meta descriptions

You can also boost your SEO by focusing on your local SEO strategy. Local SEO refers to the practice of boosting search visibility for businesses that have physical locations. So, if someone were to search “construction companies near me”, you’d want to rank in that query by utilizing local SEO.

There are multiple ways to boost your local SEO, including:

• Setting up and maintaining a Google Business Profile listing
• Getting clients to leave reviews of your construction services online
• Creating content that’s unique to your area

If you properly optimize your website and continuously post relevant content, Google will reward you with visibility. The more visibility your website has, the more people will be able to find your services faster.

6. Plan Your Organic Marketing Plan For Construction Company

Organic marketing is an incredibly valuable marketing strategy that, when done right, can drive brand awareness and growth for your construction business. Organic marketing is just as it sounds: it’s the process of generating traffic to your website naturally, meaning you don’t have to pay for these efforts.

It includes:

• Writing blogs
• Creating engaging social media accounts
• Publishing case studies
• Allowing guest posts on your website
• Utilizing hashtags on social media to broaden your reach

Organic marketing is crucial for building long-term brand awareness and growth for your construction company. For instance, consistently posting on your construction blog will tell Google that you’re an authority in your space and that you post relevant content, and therefore your visibility may increase.

While organic marketing is important, it can take time to build up. This is definitely a long-term strategy that may take months (or even years) to achieve key marketing goals. That’s why it should be used as a complementary strategy, not a sole strategy.

7. Invest In Paid Advertising

Paid advertising, on the other hand, can quickly provide the results you’re looking for in your marketing campaigns. Paid advertising is exactly how it sounds: it’s a strategy that requires you to pay in order to get your company’s name in front of people.

Traditional advertising (TV ads, radio ads, and newspaper ads) is considered paid advertising, but many companies are putting a priority on paid digital advertising. That’s because statistics show that traffic brought through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising yields 50% more conversions than organic advertising. Generally, paid advertising is found to yield higher conversions and a greater return on investment than organic marketing.

When planning paid advertising as part of a marketing plan for a construction company, consider investing in the following:

• Facebook ads
• Google ads
• Display ads
• Instagram ads
• YouTube ads

Do your research before you invest in these ads, though. Targeting the wrong keywords & audiences can cause you to burn through your paid advertising budget and waste money. Research what platforms your target audience is on and come up with targeted campaigns that speak to their needs. When done right, paid advertising can get you quick and high-yielding results.

8. Engage Clients with Social Media Marketing

If your construction business isn’t marketing on social media, you’re missing out on a chance to build brand loyalty and reach new clients. Statistics show that web users are now spending, on average, 142 minutes each day on social networking and messaging platforms. If you want to reach the masses and build your company’s brand, you must focus on your social media marketing strategy.

An important thing to remember with social media marketing is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy. It will depend on who your target audience is, what platform they use, what kind of content you’re posting, and when you’re posting that content.

For instance, if you’re trying to target CEOs of large companies to try and land construction projects, you may want to double down on your LinkedIn strategy since your target audience may be most engaged on that platform. Or, if you’re targeted small business owners, you could post more content on Facebook. Do your research on which platforms your target audience engages with most and go from there.

Also, don’t be afraid to incorporate video marketing into your social media strategy. Video remains a top medium for content consumption, and when optimized for your social channels, video marketing can lead to incredible conversions. Don’t be afraid to test the waters and get in front of the camera.

9. Connect via Email Marketing

As you come up with a marketing plan for a construction company, you should make it a priority to use all your owned channels. These are channels that your construction company has complete control over. Email is one of those owned channels, and it has the power to bring in a lot of business.

Email marketing is known for having a good return on investment, but the key to getting that return is to be strategic with your email marketing initiatives. One way to do this is to segment your email list. Here are some examples of segments you can use:

• New leads who haven’t worked with your company
• Previous clients who may have other projects coming up
• Seasonal clients
• The role each of your contacts has in their company
• Engaged leads vs. non-engaged leads

Segments allow you to create target messages that resonate with each lead’s specific needs. You can monitor your email efforts by looking at data such as open rates, click rates, and conversions. If they aren’t meeting your email marketing goals, then you know to adjust your strategy. 

10. Track Your Success

It takes time to make a marketing plan for a construction company. You want to make sure that plan works, right? One way to do that is to set key performance indicators (also known as KPIs) for your marketing initiatives.

KPIs measure the success of your efforts by outlining key measurements. Examples of KPIs for marketing plans include:

• Number of conversions
• Cost per channel
• Weekly/monthly leads generated
• Weekly web traffic per channel
• Average time of conversion

Your company should set marketing goals and come up with KPIs that can help them measure their efforts. Make sure the KPIs promote growth, but are still within the realm of possibility. The last thing you want is to have a goal that isn’t reasonable and, as a result, leaves your marketing team feeling defeated when they don’t meet it.

Final Thoughts

Construction companies have to get creative and strategic with their marketing efforts if they want to stand out from the competition.

These efforts should aim to do three key things: build their brand, attract new leads, and show the world how they provide value. If your marketing efforts do all this, you’ll see the results in your revenue.

Contact now Mediaboom to prepare an outstanding marketing plan for your construction business!