If you're starting a new construction company, one of the first things you need to do is develop a well thought out marketing plan. This may seem intimidating to someone who isn't versed in marketing. However, I'm here to tell you it's not as hard as it might seem. Follow these six simple tips and you'll be on your way to marketing success...
1. Hyper-target your demographic.
In order to make sure your marketing budget is being spent properly, you want to be certain that you are targeting the right people. Target the wrong demographic, or a demographic that is too big, and you could be wasting a lot of money.
One way to hyper-target your demographic is with Facebook Ads. The Facebook Ad platform makes it simple to niche down and show your advertisements to a very specific audience. For example, you could target couples who have just bought homes in the area that make over a certain amount of money per year and show them advertisements for your remodeling services.
2. Understand the region you're targeting.
Marketing isn't just about understanding the people you're targeting but also the environment in which those people live. When developing your construction marketing plan, you will want to take into account your surroundings. Here are some questions you should ask...
- What is the average home value? This will give you an idea of what types of services you should be providing.
- What is the average yearly take-home salary? This will help you understand how to price your services and if you should offer financing or payment plans.
- How many homeowners have families or pets? This will give you an indication as to whether you should offer specialty services (e.g. pet fencing, pool safety fencing, outside dog homes, etc).
Much of this information can be found for free via online databases and survey data from the government.
3. Diversify your strategies.
Marketing is an investment and the key to any successful investment is diversification. This insures that you don't have your eggs all in one basket and also allows you to capitalize on various different strategies at once. The hard part of diversifying is determining what the ratio should be between the strategies you choose. This all comes down to testing. The big three marketing strategies are: traditional, digital, and automation (which is a subset of digital).
4. Invest in a well designed website.
Your website is the digital store-front of your business. When prospective leads are doing their initial research and come across a site that loads slowly, isn't optimized to be viewed on mobile devices, and/or is visually unappealing, they will leave and most likely end up on a competitors site. There are a variety of things you will want to consider when designing your website for maximum leads, such as having: a clear call to action, balance between text and image, and social proof in the form of testimonials/reviews.
5. Conduct a competitive analysis.
What often goes overlooked during the creation of a marketing plan is the competitive analysis phase. A competitive analysis allows you to uncover what your most successful competitors are doing to bring in more leads, reverse engineer their strategies, and use that information to create your own marketing strategy.
Conducting a competitive analysis doesn't have to be hard or tedious. It can be as simple as calling up a competitor and posing as an interested buyer. This simple phone call will allow you to figure out how they price their work, their strategy for handling leads, and any incentives/deals that they offer.
6. Get reviews and testimonials.
Word of mouth marketing is incredibly important when it comes to construction companies. In fact, you'll find that almost all of your new leads have done some form of research in verifying your qualifications as a contractor. Most often, people rely on the word of others when it comes to this verification process. This is why getting testimonials and reviews are key to success when it comes to marketing your business. For every customer you service, be sure to ask them to review your business on Google My Business and Yelp (the two big, and most important, online review sites).