Construction Companies: Avoid These Common Marketing Mistakes

You’re a construction expert. Marketing? Not so much.

Don’t worry; we’ve got your back.

We’ve talked to the construction business owners in our network to find out the most common marketing mistakes NOT to make and get advice on how to prevent them.

Marketing Mistakes Construction Companies Should Avoid

NOT Defining a Target Audience

Perhaps more than any other industry, construction companies are diverse. They build many things for many kinds of people and businesses.

Defining your niche is critical to marketing success.

The only way to connect with prospective clients is to understand them, their needs, and how your construction business can serve them. If you haven’t defined your target audiences and created detailed customer profiles and marketing journeys for each of them, do it before you launch any more marketing campaigns. It’s the only way you’ll be able to meet prospects where they’re at and deliver messages that will convert them into clients.

NOT Branding the Business

Many construction business owners think branding is for things like boutiques, packaged goods businesses, and food companies, not construction firms.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

In the crowded construction space, you must brand your business to explain what it does, who it serves, and what makes it unique at a glance. Today’s attention spans are short, and people have to “get it” quickly, or they move on.

Come up with a logo, tagline, key messages, images, elevator speech, colors, and other brand elements that help people “get” your business fast and want to learn more. For instance, a home-builder’s logo could feature a graphic of a house, warm colors, and a tagline that expresses comfort and value. A company constructing skyscrapers would want a contemporary logo in cool colors and a tagline that conveys engineering expertise. See the difference there?

Developing a brand with an experienced branding agency could be the best investment you make in the future of your organization.

NOT Automating What You Can

Many aspects of marketing are time-consuming and tedious – for instance, posting regularly on social media, sending out emails, maintaining client and prospect information, and proofreading copy. The good news is that many of these tasks can be automated, cutting the time you spend on marketing in half. Some of the top marketing automation solutions include:

• Hubspot can handle most of your marketing needs in a single solution.

• Grammarly is able to find most of the grammar and spelling mistakes in your copy.

• ActiveCampaign can make it easier for you to stay in touch with clients and other people on your contact list.

• Mailchimp can help you streamline email marketing and certain other tasks.

• Thryv has been designed exclusively for smaller businesses to make promoting themselves simpler.

• edrone is a powerful marketing automation tool that’s also easy to use.

Do your research when selecting marketing automation software. There are many, many options available. It’s worth doing your due diligence to find the absolute right one to meet your business marketing needs.

NOT Asking for the Sale

Even construction companies that do solid marketing make a common mistake: They forget to ask for the sale.

Whether on their website, in emails, on social posts, or at the end of sales presentations, they don’t explicitly explain what prospective clients need to do to move ahead in the sales journey.

This is a relatively easy issue to fix. Navigate through your marketing and sales journey as a prospective customer would. Regularly ask yourself: Do I know what to do next? Any time you’re not sure, fix the issue to make things clearer. As an added check, ask a few people in your target market to go through your marketing and sales process with you. They may find issues you don’t see.

NOT Focusing on the Marketing Experience

Construction companies deliver great experiences for the users of the things they build. Unfortunately, that often is not the case with their websites and other digital marketing assets. Ask yourself:

• Have you updated your website in the last few years?

• Is it optimized to work across all types of equipment, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops?

• Does your brand look good and communicate effectively online?

If you answered NO to any of these questions, it could be time for a digital update or overhaul, depending on how serious the problem is. People today are unwilling to deal with any online issues. It’s too simple to move on to a competitor with a better digital experience. Optimizing your website, social media sites, and other digital properties is a wise investment in the future of your construction company.

NOT Paying Attention to Consumer Response to Your Marketing

In a lot of construction companies, marketing is guided by the personal opinions of the owner or leaders of the business.

While there may have been some validity to that approach years ago, there’s too much data available today to depend on personal opinions.

When you launch a campaign, leverage social media, Google ads, Google Analytics, internal sales, and other data to determine whether your marketing efforts are working or not. Even a business owner or leader convinced about how right they are about marketing will be swayed if their data shows that consumers aren’t responding to campaigns.

Finally… Expecting Tech to Solve Everything

Construction business owners and their employees aren’t marketers by trade. Because of this, they often resort to tech solutions to solve all their marketing problems.

The truth: Marketing is both an art and a science. While tools like Hubspot and Mailchimp can streamline marketing for busy construction business owners, it’s essential to get help from strategists, writers, designers, data analysts, and other marketing professionals. Today’s construction service purchasers are savvy, whether they’re seeking help to make repairs, build a home, develop a strip mall, or construct a bridge. They’ll only respond to polished, professional marketing that speaks to their unique needs in a way they understand.

While there are certain aspects of marketing that construction business owners can handle, it can be a big mistake not to use professionals to help you with developing strategies, writing and graphic design, monitoring metrics, and any other aspect of marketing you may be unfamiliar with.

You wouldn’t trust a marketing professional to construct a building. The same is true of construction professionals doing marketing.

Check it out:

4 Ways Construction Companies and Contractors Can Market Themselves More Effectively