5 tips on How to Grow your Construction Business

A digital marketing strategy for construction companies can help you to bring on more construction projects. Integrating construction digital marketing with your traditional marketing can build your reputation, boost your visibility, and achieve more sustainable growth.

Traditional marketing such as business development, capability documents, project examples, and responding to tenders continues to be critical. Today, your customers also research online for information and services making construction digital marketing important as well.

Digital Marketing Strategy for Construction Companies

In this eGuide on Digital Marketing Strategy for Construction Companies we share our 5 best tips on how to grow your construction business with better marketing and better results.

1. Personalised digital marketing plan.

A successful digital marketing plan that is personalised to the construction industry and your construction business will help you to achieve your objectives sooner. It will:

Build the reputation of your construction brand faster
Focus your construction digital strategy and budget on your ideal clients
Be more efficient in using the right combination of marketing strategies and tactics
Personalise your marketing communications to better appeal to your market
Optimise the performance of your marketing and improve your ROI

Business owners can be sometimes tempted to go straight to tactics (without a digital marketing plan) in the belief it will deliver faster results and save them money, but this isn’t the case.

Customising marketing strategies to your construction business and budget through a marketing plan that integrates construction digital marketing with your traditional marketing, delivers a better return on your marketing investment, faster.

The reason it delivers a better ROI is because the marketing plan focusses on audiences, brand story and messages, strategies and communication channels customised to your business and budget.

2. Resilient and reputable brand.

Construction companies look to reduce risk when selecting suppliers as they want their projects to be completed on time and on budget.

They like to deal with contractor businesses that have professional brands as this gives them more confidence of a successful construction project.

So, before you jump into building a new website and elevating your profile on social media, it is critical to get the branding fundamentals in place.

To build and a resilient and reputable brand involves:

A professional looking logo and marketing material that builds trust
A brand story that explains what your clients value most and why it is different
Branded work clothes and vehicle signage that keeps your brand top of mind
Core values lived by your team that bring your brand story to life

3. Construction company website

Historically, contractors promoting their construction businesses have used traditional marketing strategies such as business development, capability documents and tenders.

These traditional strategies continue to be critical, however there are also strong opportunities with construction digital marketing to help you leap ahead of your competitors.

Some industries have a high level of competition online (in terms of keywords and visibility). It is harder for companies in these industries to get a high level of online visibility.

There are significant gaps (opportunities) online for construction businesses to increase their online visibility and develop a competitive advantage online before your competitors do.

The first step is to build a technically well-built website that is easy to find on Google, simple to navigate, and contains information that is relevant to your ideal clients.

Important webpages to include in a construction company website include services, capabilities, completed projects, about us and leadership.

The marketing communications on your construction company website need to explain your brand story, what you do well, why you are different and answer any common questions they may ask.

When writing the marketing communications for your website it is important that you include some basic keywords to help you come in up some Google searches.

Choose a reliable and fast web hosting supplier. Poor quality web hosting can result in Google penalising your construction company website and if your site loads slowly people will go elsewhere.

4. Strong online visibility.

Building the reputation of your construction company by boosting your online visibility involves more than building an effective website.

Once your website is built, you need to use digital marketing channels to promote your brand and encourage people to visit your website.

Some of the digital marketing channels include search engines, social media, paid online advertising, online public relations, and email marketing.

The type and number of digital channels that you use will be influenced by your objectives, regional focus, your marketing budget, and who you have available to do the marketing.

Channels to use for digital marketing for construction companies include:

Google My Business (and local SEO) for local area organic searches
Google My Business reviews and responding to reviews
SEO and/or Google Ads for your website
Google Remarketing Ads targeting people who visit your website
Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube
Online public relations’ media releases
Newsletters, Blogs and Videos

Different digital marketing channels support different marketing objectives. For example, social media is great for awareness and staying top of mind and Google My Business is great for lead generation. This doesn’t mean you should just focus on Google My Business as they work together to build trust and drive leads.

Digital marketing is not a strategy to do in isolation to your traditional marketing. To achieve better results requires integrating your digital and offline strategies together. That’s why you need to start with a marketing plan that is customised to your construction business.

Examples of how to integrate construction digital marketing into your traditional marketing:

Add your capability document on your website and your LinkedIn corporate profile
Use branding signage on your vehicle that matches the design on your website
Ensure the communications in your tenders are consistent with your online content
Join BNI and undertake referral networking (for smaller businesses)
Apply for industry specific awards and promote successes online and offline
Undertake public relations and share the editorials via social media

5. Insights and measurements

The digital medium helps you to develop deeper insights about your ideal target markets so that you can achieve more sustainable growth.

Examples of tools to access insights for your construction digital marketing:

Google Analytics helps you to continue to improve the ROI on your website by giving you information about visitors, content, channels, and conversions
Social Media insights helps you create a better content strategy by showing you what content works best for your construction business
Moz or SEMrush helps improve your visibility with organic search by identifying keywords to suit your marketing.

Measuring your marketing will enable you to make continuous improvements. This require the expertise to understand what measurements to use for which strategies and channels.

It is also important to understand that different measurements are required for the different stages of the marketing journey (awareness, interest, acquisition, and loyalty).

Here are some examples of measurements:

Awareness: fans, reach, engagement, website traffic, website bounce rates, keywords ranked and domain authority and links
Interest: leads direct and leads from website
Acquisition: % proposals converted and $ project revenue
Loyalty: Client feedback / debrief, Google Reviews and Net Promoter Score.

Grow your Construction Contracting business with Better Marketing & Better Results

An effective digital marketing strategy for construction companies requires expertise in both digital marketing and traditional marketing as well as experience in the construction industry.

Sustainable Marketing Services can help build the reputation of your construction company, boost the visibility of your brand online and offline, help you to bring on more projects and achieve more sustainable growth.

Sustainable Marketing Services is an award-winning Brisbane digital marketing agency with a long history of delivering sustainable success for our clients.

Book a complimentary meeting on 07 3446 5837 or via email us here.