There are more than four million construction companies in the United States. This includes general contractors, remodeling companies, material suppliers, engineering firms, and real estate developers. With such a number, staying competitive in the field becomes challenging, especially for startups. Regardless of the size of your business, construction companies should leverage digital marketing to stay ahead of competitors.
Most construction companies are used to operating in the physical realm, making it tricky to handle the digital world. While this is true, an estimated 96% of B2B clients prefer interacting with vendors and manufacturers through the internet. You should consider the following digital marketing strategies to grow your construction company.
1. Identify Your Target Market
Source: marketingdonut.co.uk
While this may seem obvious, identifying your target market is important to digital marketing success. Before kicking off your construction marketing, you should be sure of your customers. Otherwise, you will reach out and market your construction services to the wrong group. Without a proper target market, your business won’t get business and generate revenue, even with an excellent SEO or content marketing strategy. Click here to learn more about roofing SEO for roofers.
The best way to identify your target market is by building a buyer persona. A buyer persona highlights the specific features of your target customers, such as interests, buying behaviors, demographics, age, gender, and pain points. Such information helps digital marketers understand the different customer buying patterns and suitable marketing campaigns that the customer can respond to.
You should start by reviewing the already existing clientele. Group them into customer persona cohorts and identify specific unifying characteristics. Marketing experts recommend that digital marketers should review their buyer personas yearly. Customer behavior, underlying interest, and other key identifying features change regularly. Evaluating annually allows you to maintain the right group.
2. Invest in Local SEO
Construction companies and other local businesses that haven’t leveraged local search engine optimization (SEO) miss out a lot. Optimizing your site and local listings is the best way to bring local leads to your construction business. Using the right strategy can improve web traffic and direct qualified leads to your sales funnel. Below are key tips for improving local SEO:
- Update your contact details everywhere – the best way to increase visibility on search engines to your local clientele is by providing what they are looking for – primarily your company’s phone number and address. You should update your contact details on the company website, social platforms, emails, ads, and landing pages.
- Optimize your company’s Google My Business – Google My Business is a central and important component of local SEO. Optimizing your construction business’s Google My Business makes it easy for local customers looking to outsource their construction projects within your locality. To optimize GMB, upload photos, videos, and other visual elements, encourage customers to leave reviews, and respond to client reviews.
- Create and optimize quality content for your local market – you should also provide valuable content to your local market. However, you should optimize your posts to the local market by targeting local keywords, such as San Jose construction company, writing more content about your local area, such as building practices in your region, and guest posting on local sites.
3. Feature Your Employees in Marketing
Marketing construction companies have always proved challenging because of the competitive environment and underlying customer distrust. There are endless stories of how employees of several construction companies messed up projects due to unprofessionalism. You should strive to surpass distrust among potential customers.
The best and most efficient way is to feature employees in your marketing strategies. Including your employees in paid ads, website, social media, and other marketing strategies improves brand awareness and gives your company a face. Prospects also get the impression that your brand is better and professional.
4. Build an Informative Construction Blog
Most people associate blogging with travel, fashion, and lifestyle bloggers. While these are established niches in blogging, the demand for construction blogs is on the rise. Unlike before, many people are looking for industry experts for advice, recommendations, product reviews, tutorials, and best practices in the construction sector and other industries.
Being in the construction industry, you can provide valuable insights using your first-hand knowledge and expertise. Building an insightful blog establishes you as an industry leader. Over time, as you upload more content to your website, your online presence will expand. If done correctly, search engines will pick and rank your pages better, increasing site traffic.
5. Make Use of Email Marketing
Source: canva.com
Email marketing is a dynamic and overly effective marketing strategy that most digital marketers and construction companies ignore. While it might prove overwhelming and intimidating due to endless automation, customizations, and monitoring, the efforts are worthwhile.
Modern tools have made it easier to customize email marketing campaigns. Surprisingly, email marketing has the highest ROI than other digital marketing strategies. Below are a few tactics to leverage email marketing:
- Have an identified target audience or existing clients – The most challenging part of email marketing is building an email list. Having identified your target audience, find ways of collecting their contact details. Classic methods include providing information as eBooks or newsletters in exchange for email addresses. While this can take time, you can use information from your already existing clientele.
- Integrate email marketing into the sales process – You should also incorporate email marketing into the sales funnel. A good way of achieving this is by creating content that can only be accessed by those who provide their email address.
- Maintain contact with your clients – Keeping in touch with your existing customers is a great way of generating new income and increasing customer value. Since they already did business with your company, they won’t hesitate becoming return clients if you maintain contact. To achieve this, you should send emails occasionally, inform them of new products/services, and send seasonal emails, such as during Christmas or new year.
Endnote
Digital marketing is important for all businesses. Digital marketing strategies, such as content marketing, SEO, and video marketing, have been widely used by construction companies before with great effectiveness. While their efficacy in 2024 won’t change, you should include the tactics mentioned above for digital marketing success.
