As the owner of a construction business or one related to it, online marketing can seem a million miles away from your skillset. Yet like any business, the first place people visit when looking for a company is the online marketplace.
They don’t just want to find your contact details either. Potential leads will want to see everything from social media posts to reviews.
If you don’t know where to begin, then help is at hand. Below are the main factors to consider when deciding how to market a construction-related business.
1. Social Media
If you don’t already have a social media presence, your competitors will, and they will be taking your customers. Social media is no longer an option, as it has become the first method by which people find and engage with companies.
From seeing what you are doing every day to being able to send you direct messages, customers want a company that is on social media.
When this is too much to handle on top of your day-to-day workload, hire a company that does it for you. They will scale up and down their services, as you see fit, delivering everything from social media posts to pay-per-click advertising.
Many have extremely reasonable pricing structures so you don’t have to break the bank. Many will also have specialist knowledge for your industry, so you may be able to find ones that deal in roofer internet marketing services or providers of scaffolding for instance.
Give it a go yourself by starting with one platform. This prevents the social media world from becoming too overwhelming and does not encroach on your working day as much. Ideally, a place like Instagram or Facebook is great for construction companies.
As they are image-based, it gives you a chance to show any work completed. All you need are a few snaps of the construction work you have done, then you can upload them.
Do some research and develop a basic grasp of tagging and hashtags. These can be used to make it easier for people to find you.
If you are in a certain area, make sure people know. Likewise, if you are working with other companies, tag them in posts so you can get yourself known by their audience.
2. Advertising
Online advertising is much easier than it seems. Getting the most bang for your buck, which is done by analysing the data and making changes to campaigns as they are in progress, is the hard part.
The most common type of digital marketing campaign is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You post an advert to a social media platform or search engine. This is shown to people you have selected from a range of demographic criteria.
You are only charged if they click on the advertisement which you can use to send them sign-up forms and get their data. You can call them back and discuss working for them and what they require.
The beauty of PPC advertising is that people are only going to click if they are genuinely interested in your product. No one will click on an advert for a company that fits patios unless they are considering having a patio fitted.
This is much better than scattergun approaches which charge you for showing the advert to everyone, many of whom may not be interested in the product anyway.
Alongside this, don’t forget to use the old-fashioned method of physical marketing. While print media is not as frequently used as it was in the past, it still has its place.
The right brochures at trade fairs or billboard adverts in the right place can often cut through the mass of adverts found online much easier, especially if you adopt a hyper-localised approach.
3. Third Party Reviews
Unfortunately, the construction industry is one with a bad reputation. This means people will want to find out as much about you beforehand as they can before they agree to a contract or hand over any deposits. Thus, you need to get to grips with third-party reviews. These can include a range of approaches and websites.
Review aggregators are the most common of these. Trustpilot covers a wide range, but more specialist ones may be like the websites Checkatrade found in the United Kingdom.
You sign up for a plan and post your company. People then review your service and give you a star rating out of five. The better this is, the more likely people will be to hire your construction business.
Google itself has its business section known simply as Google My Business. You must be on there as it is a great help to local companies. Make sure you sign up and update it regularly with contact details, opening hours and websites or social media addresses.
These are just a few of the must-have marketing methods when it comes to construction businesses. There are plenty more, but if you want to get started without help from elsewhere these are the best to use. You can then hire some assistance or employ a marketing specialist full-time.
