1. Understand the Benefits of Content Marketing for a Construction Company
Content marketing for construction companies isn’t just blogging; it’s the cornerstone of your business’s online presence and is present in every part of your digital marketing strategy—from SEO to search engine marketing.
So, what do we mean when we talk about content marketing? We’re actually referring to a long-term strategy that focuses on using high-quality content to build strong relationships with your audience. This content falls under three categories: paid, owned, and earned media.
The main benefit of content marketing is profitable consumer action. Although there are other advantages, such as lower customer acquisition costs, lead generation, improved customer retention, brand awareness, positioning your construction company as an industry leader, and greater visibility in search engine results (SERPs).
Content marketing typically generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs as much as 60% less. This is because content marketing follows an inbound methodology whereby each piece of content you create directly or indirectly illustrates your services or products as a salve for your customer’s pain points—either overtly or subtly.
Content Marketing vs. Content Strategy
In a nutshell: A content marketing strategy is the blueprint you develop to roll out your content. A content strategy is the planning, development, and management of your construction business’ content. This includes your articles, website copy, brochures, FAQs, transaction emails, and social media engagement—absolutely everything.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is the process of promoting your content to attract, acquire, and engage and clearly defined target audience with the objective of driving profits. So, content marketing is a marketing approach that uses content to deepen your relationships with your customers.
Construction company content marketing helps you win a customer’s trust by providing them with the information they’re searching for online, and through a strategic process, sways them to do business with you instead of your competition.
2. Learn What Makes a Good Content Marketing Strategy for Construction Companies?
A successful content marketing strategy has three core elements; brand focus, user experience, and distribution. It includes your website, blog, email, and social media content.
By nature, content marketing is mostly inbound because it nurtures leads to contact you, rather than cold calling where you’re reaching out to them. A good content marketing strategy creates pieces of content to attract potential customers at different stages of the marketing funnel and moves them through the different phases, namely awareness, interest, consideration, intent, and purchase.
Additionally, it also utilizes on-page SEO to improve your web page’s search rankings and earn organic traffic. Keyword placement in headings, meta descriptions, image titles, and body copy all form part of effective content marketing.
Create Content for Your Target Audience
Another important aspect is target audience consideration. Content marketing is customer-centric. It’s premised on showing how your construction business can solve its customers’ problems. So, who are you creating your content for?
Are you a maintenance company appealing to commercial property managers, or do you work as an independent contractor with residential clients? This changes the kind of content you create. We should also mention that most construction companies segment their target audience into different types of buyers.
For example, in the case of independent contractors, their clients may be people who live in apartments, condos, and bungalows. Perhaps they appeal to families where both parents work or single mothers who don’t have time or the inclination to take care of maintenance.
Get in touch to see how our content marketing solutions can take your business to the next level
3. Create Different Types of Content Marketing
Website Content for the Construction Industry
Your website content needs to clearly communicate what your business is, what it does, and why it’s the best construction company for the job. When prospective customers arrive at your website, they need to find what they’re looking for fast.
Use FAQs to answer questions about your services and products—both visitors and search engines love this type of information. Have a clear ‘about us’ section, and make sure your contact details are easy to find.
Then, of course, you’ll also want to showcase your services, which you can do on separate pages. A portfolio section is useful to provide proof of work, as well as a blog, where you can publish content related to what you do.
For example, let’s say a potential client stumbles upon your blog on social media and learns about DIY vs. professional remodeling. After reading your blog, they decide to click on your remodeling page and view high-quality images of your remodeling projects. This convinces them to email you for a quote. Can you see how good content marketing works?
Blog Content for Construction Companies
What exactly your construction company blogs about will depend on the nature of your business. A good place to start is with FAQs. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it alleviates you from having to answer repetitive queries, and secondly, you can bet your clients are typing them into Google.
FAQ blog posts establish your construction company as an expert and are great for SEO because they help search engines like Google understand your business. Including long-tail keywords ensure your blog posts are keyword rich and match user intent, helping you to improve your position on organic search results.
For example, here is a frequently asked paver question: What are the benefits of natural stone pavers? You can turn this into an entire blog. Just remember to keep the copywriting crisp and follow SEO best practices.
Email Content for a Construction Company
With email marketing, we often employ what we call drip marketing. This tactic involves sending out emails to clients based on a schedule or individual user actions. For example, if a potential client requests a quote, you might email them with a seasonal discount.
However, even with this content marketing strategy in place, you still need to create engaging content. Here’s how to compose an email that gets more qualified leads:
- Make it personal: Write emails you’d actually want to read. No one likes receiving promotional content that sounds robotic.
- Create urgency: Readers are more likely to act when there’s a sense of urgency. A classic example is offering a discount for a limited period of time.
- Use a call to action (CTA): A CTA is a prompt that demands action like “buy” or “download.” There’s no point in sending any email if the goal isn’t to nudge readers further down the marketing funnel.
- Make it readable: Keep text to a minimum and make use of “white space” so your email is easy to read. Few people read emails. Most scan the body of content, looking for things that attract their attention, so be sure to include high-quality images and strong headers.
- Keep it simple: The ideal email is between 50 and 200 words and usually centers on a single theme or topic.
Social Media Content for Construction
The type of content that works best on social media platforms depends on the platform. Although you’ll probably be glad to know social platforms are excellent for sharing your blog posts and other types of content marketing like videos.
Successful social media posts condense information into easily digestible snippets of content that are long enough to grab viewers’ attention but short enough to leave them wanting more. While the content length is much shorter, even so, you still direct visitors back to your website.
Some interesting facts about social media posts: Videos get 1200% more shares than text and images. So, rather than posting simple text updates, you’ll want to include images and/or videos. In addition to sharing blog posts, “How-to,” and “Before and After” pictures or videos can sell your services and help build your social media presence.
4. Develop a Construction Content Marketing Plan that Works
You need a successful inbound marketing strategy, so you can plan, manage and optimize your digital channels for lead acquisition and increased sales. According to Semrush, 78% of content marketers in 20 industries across 40 countries have a documented strategy.
Below are the steps you can take to develop your construction company’s content marketing strategy:
4.1 Determine Your Goals
Surprisingly, construction companies invest in content marketing for multiple reasons. Do you want to improve brand awareness? Is it important to increase traffic and leads before winter? Every successful marketing campaign has clear S.M.A.R.T goals, so you’ll need to determine yours.
S.M.A.R.T is a mnemonic acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. It’s a framework used widely in business and by marketing professionals to ensure goal-setting achieves good results.
4.2 Audit Your Construction Company
Next, we recommend conducting a SWOT analysis to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to your competitors. This is essential to your content marketing campaign because it provides insight that helps build the best content marketing plan for your business.
4.3 Determine Your Audience
We touched on this earlier. You have to determine your target audience, so you know to whom you’re tailoring your content. Geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral are four levels of segmentation that can help you define your construction company’s primary target audience.
4.4 Set Your Budget
A well-devised marketing budget aids your content planning process and provides a clear sense of direction for the management of your marketing strategy. It determines which marketing tactics fit within your means. Average marketing budgets across industries tend to fall between 6% to 14% of a company’s total revenue. B2B companies often spend more because their sales cycles are longer.
4.5 Figure Out Your Focus
From email marketing to blogging and search engine marketing—there are many tactics to include in your construction company’s content marketing plan. Most companies combine all for the best results, although they tend to weigh in on one or two more heavily than the others. It’ll take some research and experimentation to find the right mix. And if you’re feeling overwhelmed, we’ve provided inspiration below.
Content Marketing Ideas for Construction Companies
Your content needs to make your customer’s life better. It has to have authority and hindsight and follow the three content marketing pillars: be relevant, be of value and be consistent. With that in mind, here are some simple ideas that can elevate your marketing efforts.
Include Cost Calculators
Once a client has become interested in hiring your services, they’ll want to know the cost. Tools like cost calculators offer immense value because they offer personalized responses to user questions, such as how much would a bathroom addition cost?
Start an Email Newsletter
Not all your customers will be on social media all the time. Email marketing is an effective way to communicate directly as your messages are delivered straight to their inboxes. This is especially true for commercial clients like property developers who may be interested in hiring you in the future.
Publish Q&A Videos
We know consumers love watching video content. Sometimes, it’s easier to answer an FAQ via a short video instead of blogging about it. Better yet, you can answer the question and provide more detail via your blog. Short videos are great for social media and YouTube. You can also embed them into your emails and social media posts.
5. Entrust Your Construction Content Marketing to a Professional
The truth is, at any given point, the vast majority of your prospects probably aren’t ready to make a buying decision. Content marketing allows you to cut through the noise and create a meaningful emotional connection with your customers. Even if your potential customers aren’t ready to hire you, you can still engage with them, so you stay top of mind.
Comrade Digital Marketing is full-service digital marketing with skilled strategists and content creators. If you need help creating content for your construction company, then contact us today. We’ll gladly level up your content marketing efforts and improve your sales.
