Marketing a construction company effectively requires extensive market research, including in-depth dives to understand construction in your geographical area, who your customers are, and who you’re competing with for their business.
The first step is creating a marketing strategy for construction company growth. Without a strategy, there’s a significant risk that you’ll spend more than you can afford on unproven strategies that don’t help you reach your business growth goals.
At Select Funding, we believe in helping our construction business clients, and that includes providing advice about how to spend their marketing dollars. We’re providing this guide to creating a marketing strategy for your construction company to help you achieve your objectives and grow your business.
What is a Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy is a plan to achieve a specific goal, usually to reach consumers and convert them into new customers. In most cases, there is an overall marketing strategy and then more specific strategies that will be used to support the main strategy. For example, your company’s marketing strategy might be to attract new customers to increase your total profits. A strategy within that strategy might be to share videos of customer testimonials and success stories or to target existing customers with an incentivized referral program.
We should differentiate a marketing strategy from marketing tactics. A strategy takes a big picture view of things, providing a roadmap to achieve specific goals and objectives. A marketing tactic is an action taken in pursuit of a strategy or goal.
The marketing strategy for your construction company should include important information about your company and brand, your potential clients, your competitors, and more. We’ll go into more detail later in this post.
What is the Role of Marketing in Construction?
Marketing is the process of promoting your business to an audience of people who are most likely to be in need of your services. With the right construction marketing plan and strategy, you can accomplish the following things:
- Increase company and brand awareness
- Educate potential customers about the services you provide and what you can do for them
- Establish yourself as an authority in topics related to the construction industry
- Answer questions to clarify what you do
- Differentiate yourself from your local competitors
- Convince people to hire you for their construction projects
Said more succinctly, marketing can help your construction company increase its audience, identify qualified leads who are in the market for the services you provide, and convert leads into paying customers. With the right marketing strategy, you can achieve the growth goals you have identified and increase your profits.
What Should Be Included in Your Marketing Mix?
The marketing strategy for your construction company should include detailed information about your company, your audience, and your marketing goals. Traditionally, the key elements are referred to as the four Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion, or the marketing mix. These elements have since been expanded to include additional items, including People, Process, and Physical Evidence.
Here’s a quick overview of what you should include in your marketing mix:
- Product. Your construction company offers unique services and your marketing strategy must explain what you offer and why it is unique or better than what your competitors offer. Another marketing term for this is Unique Value Proposition: the thing that sets you apart from your competition.
- Price. The price part of your strategy is how much you charge for your construction services and expertise. You’ll need to engage in some customer and competitor research to analyze your prices, keeping in mind that you can charge more for specialized knowledge or services.
- Place. For a construction company, place refers to the areas where you market your services. For example, if you specialize in constructing high-end homes, then you’ll probably focus your marketing efforts on communities with a high average income.
- Promotion. The promotion portion of your marketing strategy should include information about where and how you promote your company. For example, you might write informational blogs that relate to your services, amp up your presence on social media channels, or run Google ads.
- People. The people in this case are your target audience, and you’ll need to do some in-depth research to understand who is most likely to need your services. Gathering this information will help you create targeted promotions.
- Process. Your process information should spell out how you do what you do. For example, what is your process for bidding on a job? How do you stay on schedule? Do you have partnerships that enable you to deliver the outcomes that your clients want?
- Physical Evidence. Finally, physical evidence refers to your key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you track your ROI and tweak your marketing strategy as needed.
These seven elements will help you map out a construction marketing strategy that will enable you to reach your target audience with compelling content and ads that piques their interest and inspires them to choose you instead of your competitors when it’s time to find someone to complete their next construction project.
How to Create Your Construction Marketing Strategy
There are multiple parts to any marketing strategy. Here are the steps to create a marketing strategy that will deliver the best possible results for your construction company.
Marketing Mix
The first step is to articulate your marketing mix with the 7 Ps we outlined above: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process, and Physical Evidence.
The reason this step comes first is that it will inform everything else that goes into your marketing strategy by helping you understand what is unique about your company and what you have to offer.
Marketing Objectives
Next, you’ll need to identify your marketing objectives. You may include as many objectives as you like, but each should be a SMART goal: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
A big part of a successful marketing campaign is tracking results and being able to adjust your plans as needed. Setting SMART goals will help you analyze your results and aid you in revamping your strategy if it’s not working.
Marketing Budget
It’s essential to have a marketing budget that you can afford and allows you to pursue your construction marketing ideas. Your budget should include the funds you need to do everything related to marketing your construction company, including hiring new employees, buying digital marketing software, and paying for ads and promotions.
That might sound like a lot, but keep in mind that you don’t need to do everything at once. You may want to allocate a small amount of your budget to one or two digital marketing channels and, if they’re successful and you get the ROI you want, you can reinvest that money in new marketing efforts.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis plays an important role in helping you to identify marketing opportunities. You need to know who your competitors are and what they’re doing to compete for your shared audience.
You should identify each competitor and then dig as deep as you can, identifying which marketing strategies they use and where there might be an opportunity for you to take advantage of something they’ve missed.
Segmentation and Targeting
There’s lots of evidence that consumers respond to content that’s been targeted to their specific personality traits and needs. That’s where audience segmentation and targeting come into play.
In this section of your marketing strategy, you’ll take your target audience and think about the best ways to segment the audience to increase your profits. You should also think about how you will reach each segment you identify with your marketing.
Content Planning and Strategy
Bill Gates once famously said, “Content is king.” He uttered those words long before content marketing was a reality. You’ll use the next section of your marketing strategy to map out a content plan that will help you reach your audience.
The most popular types of content, in order, are video, images, blogs, infographics, and audio content such as podcasts. You should think about which content formats are most likely to engage your audience. From there, you can brainstorm specific ideas that will appeal to the audience segments you’ve identified.
Marketing Metrics
The final section of your marketing strategy is where you will identify the metrics you want to track to measure the success of your marketing efforts. Choosing the KPIs will help you determine whether you’re spending your marketing budget wisely and where you might need to make changes.
One of the most important KPIs to track is your return on investment, or ROI. You may also want to track these:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Conversion Rate
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
- Organic Traffic
We suggest tracking metrics on an ongoing basis. You should identify a benchmark for each based on construction industry research. That way, you can adjust your strategy accordingly if your efforts are falling short of expectations.
Get Working Capital to Fund Your Marketing Strategy
Creating a marketing strategy is an important step along the path to achieving your most important business growth goals and objectives. The steps we’ve listed here will help you create a strategy that targets your audience with relevant and appealing content and give you the mechanisms to track your marketing performance.
Do you need working capital to fund the marketing for your construction company? Select Funding is here to help! Click here to read about our construction financing options and get qualified today.
