As a construction company, you know that marketing is essential to your success. After all, how would potential customers know about your business and the services you offer without marketing?
Content marketing is a powerful tool to help you reach your target market and build brand awareness. When done correctly, content marketing can result in more leads and conversions for your business.
Not sure where to start with content marketing for your construction company? This complete guide will show you everything you need to know, from misconceptions in content marketing to exactly what type of content you should create for your construction company.
What is content marketing?
To understand how content marketing can benefit your construction company, it’s important to define content marketing. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
In other words, content marketing is about more than just creating blog posts or social media posts. It’s a strategic marketing approach that should be thoughtfully planned and executed to achieve specific business goals.
The key is profitable customer action. Too many content marketing initiatives equate to creating content to do something.
That has to stop.
Your construction company’s content marketing should have a specific purpose — generating leads, converting prospects into clients, or getting former clients to generate referrals or reviews.
It should do something for your business.
This complete guide to content marketing for your construction company will show you how to create a content marketing strategy that gets results.
Why You Should Consider Content Marketing for Your Construction Company
There are many reasons to consider content marketing for your construction company. Here are some of the top benefits:
Generate leads: Content marketing can help you generate leads for your construction company. By creating helpful, informative content, you can attract potential customers to your website or blog and encourage them to take action.
This is especially useful if you offer a free consultation or estimate. You can use content to attract leads and then offer to send someone out for an estimate to convert them into paying customers.
Convert prospects into clients: Once you’ve generated leads with your content marketing efforts, it’s time to convert them into clients. By creating targeted content that speaks to your prospect’s needs and pain points, you can nurture them through the sales funnel and encourage them to do business with your company.
When people ask questions, you can already have the answer at the ready. No more typing up the same response dozens of times every week.
Get more referrals and reviews: Content marketing can also help you get more referrals and reviews for your construction company. You can build trust and credibility with potential customers by providing helpful, informative content. And when they’re happy with your work, they’re more likely to recommend you to others or leave a positive review. That helps your business out overall, whether you are a local company or operating nationwide.
Misconceptions in Content Marketing
Now that we’ve gone over some of the benefits of content marketing, let’s dispel some common misconceptions:
Content marketing is too time-consuming: This is one of the most common misconceptions about content marketing. Yes, creating quality content does take time. But it doesn’t have to be a full-time job, and you don’t have to do everything at once. You can simply start with answering the most common questions your leads have about the service you offer.
You can also repurpose content: For example, if you have a blog post that’s performing well, you can turn it into an infographic or a video. And once you have a solid library of content, you can start repurposing and reusing it differently. That way, you’re not starting from scratch whenever you want to create something new.
Content marketing is too expensive: While it is true that content marketing requires an investment of time and resources, it doesn’t have to be expensive. You can probably find most of the tools you need for free or at very little cost.
Most of the time, you just put what’s in your brain on paper. You have the knowledge … disperse it!
You don’t need a big budget to produce quality content. You can start small and scale up as your content marketing efforts start to pay off.
It’s not enough to just create content: This is one of the biggest mistakes companies make with their content marketing. They think they’ll be successful if they just create a lot of content. But it’s not enough to just produce content for the sake of it.
Your content must be strategic, targeted, and aligned with your business goals. Otherwise, you’re just wasting time and resources.
But what if my competitors learn from me: This is a valid concern but also remember, rarely do you know something they don’t. You’re mistaken if you think your competitors don’t know your process or pricing. Think about it, you know who’s the expensive competitor and who’s the contractor that’ll do a shoddy job that someone will have to fix in six months.
Why wouldn’t your competitors know the same thing?
The truth is if you write great content and your competitors do the same, everyone wins. When your potential customers are informed, you have to do less selling because they know what they need.
And the correct way to ask for it.
Content Marketing & Sales Enablement Go Hand-in-Hand
Content marketing and sales enablement go hand-in-hand. For your content marketing efforts to succeed, you need to have a solid sales enablement strategy.
Sales enablement is about equipping your sales team with the training, resources, and tools they need to succeed.
That includes content.
Your sales team should access the same quality content you’re creating for your leads and customers. That way, they can use it to answer questions, overcome objections, and close more deals.
The best way to do this is to create a central repository where all your content lives. That way, your sales team can easily find and use the content they need when they need it.
Does someone have a question about the difference between Skudo Board and Ram Board? You have an answer for that.
Do they not understand why hydroblasting or shot blasting is on their quote? You have an answer for that.
Plus, with a proper CRM setup, one of your goals can be that your leads go down an education rabbit hole, and you can see every single page they’ve been to.
Making it incredibly easy to upsell them.
There is endless opportunity for you here, and getting up and running is not terribly difficult.
The Case for (or Against) Social Media
While social media does fall under the umbrella of content marketing, the problem we see with social media is that it can be a huge time-suck with little return on investment (ROI), and most companies don’t do it well (or have a need to do it at all).
Most company plans for social media are to post and not be social. That and they don’t have a dedicated social media person who can consistently engage with followers and other pages.
So they never see any notable growth on social media.
Additionally, the vast majority of construction companies simply don’t need a social media presence. It’s not where their customers are and would be a waste of time.
However, the argument for social media is not about trying to grow organically but about utilizing paid advertising. When set up properly, social media advertising can generate an incredible return on investment, but that’s for another essay.
Paid advertising is not content marketing.
The Type of Content You Should Create for Your Construction Company
When most people think about content marketing, they think about blog posts. But there’s so much more to content marketing than just blog posts.
Here are some other types of content you can create for your construction company:
Frequently Asked Questions
Creating a page on your website dedicated to frequently asked questions can save you a lot of time.
Instead of having to answer the same questions over and over again, you can just direct your leads and customers to the FAQ page.
Not only will this save you time, but it will also help to educate your leads and customers.
The more informed they are, the easier it will be to sell to them.
Completed Projects & Case Studies
As you complete major projects, be sure to document the process and share the results with your audience.
This is a great way to show off your work and demonstrate your construction company’s ability.
Plus, it can help you to land new projects. When potential customers see your amazing work for other companies, they’ll want to hire you for their next project.
If you’re going to include social media in your overall marketing plan, you can take parts from your portfolio of projects to post.
Educational Guides
In addition to FAQs, you can also create educational guides.
These in-depth, step-by-step guides teach your audience how to do something related to your business.
For example, you could create a guide on how to select the right contractor for a home renovation project.
This would be an extremely valuable resource for your audience and help position you as an expert in your industry.
It would also be a great way to generate leads and sales.
If you include a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your guide, you could encourage your readers to contact you for a quote.
And if your guide is really good, people will want to hire you because they know they can trust you.
That’s where you want to be.
Mediums for Your Content
Now that you know what type of content to create, it’s time to decide which medium you want to use.
Here are some popular content marketing mediums:
Written Content
This is the most common type of content and can come in the form of blog posts, articles, ebooks, whitepapers, etc.
If you’re going to use written content, be sure to optimize it for search engines (SEO). This will help you to rank higher on Google and get found by your target audience. Incredibly beneficial for local and national construction companies or if you’re interested in subcontracting nationwide.
Emails
In addition to articles and brochures, you should consider your email to be a part of your content marketing.
You should create reusable templates that your sales reps and estimators can send to leads or with quotes that link back to your other content.
Another often forgotten about place for promotion is your email signature. You can easily link to your latest portfolio piece or your pricing page, so leads can easily begin engaging with your content marketing.
Video Content
Video content is becoming increasingly popular.
There are many different types of videos you can create for your construction company, such as:
- Testimonials are a great way to show off your work and get social proof.
- How-to guides are a great way to educate your audience and position yourself as an expert.
- Company culture videos help you to attract top talent and show off your brand.
- Project walkthroughs give potential clients an inside look at your work.
- Client case studies are an excellent way to show off your work and generate leads.
- Service demonstrations are a great way to showcase your products and services. Showcase how effective shot blasting is or how to properly frame a house.
Graphic Content
Graphic content, such as infographics and images, is also becoming more popular.
This is because people are more likely to engage with and share this type of content on social media.
Taking pictures throughout a project’s duration can tell a fantastic story, especially when a lead doesn’t exactly know what goes into installing an underground pool or building an addition to their home.
Audio Content
No one ever thinks about how they can create audio and use it for their content marketing. If you have the gift of gab, you can easily start a podcast to start attracting business.
HOWEVER
A trap a few companies fall into is creating a podcast about their business or industry, that’s great if you’re trying to attract other people in the construction industry.
A better idea for local companies is to start a podcast about your city. Restaurants, events, stories, anything that gets people who are in your area tuned in.
And your company just ‘sponsors’ the podcast!
To sum it up, all your content marketing efforts need to make your clients’ lives easier or attract new clients.
Nothing else. No ego stroking, no talking about how great your company is.
Your Getting Started Guide to Content Marketing
Now that you know what content marketing is and why it’s important, it’s time to get started.
But it’s a bit silly to expect a construction company that has never done any of this before to just start cranking out high-quality content.
You need a plan.
Here’s what your plan should look like:
- Pick ONE medium: written, video, images, audio. Regardless of which you pick, you’re going to double up with email. Email is powerful.
- Pick ONE distribution channel: your website, YouTube, etc. Some of the mediums will work better on different channels. Pick something with staying power, not social media, where it’s lost in the timeline after a week.
- Create content that answers your most frequently asked questions. Start here before you get fancy. This will help out your closing rate and thus have a much bigger impact on your bottom line. Aim to answer at least 10 questions about your business.
- Create the corresponding emails for your sales team to use if those questions come up.
- Once that’s dialed in and/or completed, then, and only then, branch off into doing other types of content like video tours or other content.
Again, we’re trying to get the highest ROI for our time here, and helping your sales team will make the biggest impact.
