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Digital marketing for the construction industry, especially for contractors, can be tricky. And due to a hyper-saturated competitive market, contractors need to choose their digital strategies wisely.
Luckily, if you build a solid online foundation (and don’t worry, it’s not too late), you’ll set up your contracting business for a prosperous future.
So, how do you stand out online?
First of all, the key is to realize that being online and developing a strategy isn’t going to be an option much longer. We’re at the point of no return. Everything is headed to the digital realm, so you may as well embrace it.
And as the younger, more tech-savvy generation emerges and replaces the old ways, your online business presence, and marketing strategy will be the key to your business’s future.
Ready to learn the six digital strategies your business needs to thrive online? Good. Here we go.
1. You Don’t Only Need a Website, You Need a Good Website
We’re no longer at the point where a website is optional for contractors.
Facebook is great, and you should use it regularly, but your business needs a website and a good one. Why?
Because a solid website is the cornerstone of any digital marketing strategy, regardless of industry, it serves as a digital storefront and a company’s primary online representation. For the construction industry specifically, here’s why a robust website is essential:
- First Impressions Matter: Potential clients often research online before hiring a contractor. An outdated or poorly designed website can reflect badly on the company, suggesting a lack of professionalism or attention to detail.
- Portfolio Display: A website allows contractors to showcase their completed projects in detail. (More on this below.) High-quality images, videos, and descriptions can provide potential clients with a clear understanding of the company’s capabilities.
- Lead Generation: A well-optimized website can be a potent tool. Features like contact forms, chatbots, pop-up forms and call-to-action (CTA) buttons can help convert visitors into potential clients.
- Information Hub: It provides a centralized platform for all relevant company information, from services offered and areas of specialization to contact details and client testimonials.
- SEO Benefits: A good website is crucial for effective SEO. When optimized correctly, it can drive organic traffic and position the company at the top of search results for relevant keywords.
- Integration with Other Digital Efforts: Whether it’s content marketing (blogs), showcasing customer testimonials, or linking to social media profiles, the website acts as a hub that ties various digital marketing strategies together.
Given its importance, a solid website isn’t just another strategy but the foundational platform on which all other digital marketing efforts are built. In fact, a well-built site alone can get you more business.
So, from here on out, we’ll show you how every other strategy listed below dovetails into your website.
Let’s start with something every contractor must have: a portfolio.
2. Showcase Your Projects with High-Quality Visual Content
Construction companies regularly use Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube to highlight their completed projects.
And they should. Social media is very important, especially considering the high number of social media users and the fact that many people use social media to verify a business.
Construction is inherently visual. By leveraging visual platforms, construction businesses can showcase the tangible results of their work. This not only builds brand credibility but also helps potential clients visualize the potential outcome of their projects.
Visual content can also demonstrate your company’s quality of work by showing attention to detail and level of expertise. Keeping that in mind, cell phones may be good for some things, but take care to capture your best work with the best equipment.
Taking pictures on your phone and posting them on your social channels is a great practice, but don’t restrict your efforts to social media alone.
A well-rounded, high-quality website portfolio can give your company an edge. On a website, you have the ability to add longer videos and higher-quality photos and highlight time-lapse videos of your construction process or timeline before-and-after shots of a renovation.
As an added bonus, you can optimize pictures on your website for search engines by adding image descriptions. These allow Google to “see” your pictures and boost your website’s page ranking. In other words, over time, it will help your website’s SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
Speaking of SEO . . .
3. Leverage Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Local Focus
SEO can be a complex, long-term digital marketing strategy. The key is to break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks. A great place to start is with Local SEO.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is the strategy of optimizing your website to rank higher for local organic (non-paid) searches.
So, if you’re a plumber in Tampa, Florida, not only do you want your name to pop up when a potential client searches “plumbers in Tampa,” but you also want to pop up when someone in your local area searches “plumbers near me.”
The idea here is that most construction projects are location-bound. When someone needs construction services, they often search for providers nearby. Local SEO ensures that when a potential client in the vicinity is searching, they find your business in the top results.
Sounds logical, but how do you boost your local SEO so your potential clients will find you?
A big component of SEO, including local SEO, starts with your website. This goes back to our theory that you need a website and a good one.
For several reasons, a well-built and written site will naturally rank higher in search engine results pages. Some of these reasons are technical, but just as important is the content on the website and how it’s written.
At the very least, good website content must focus on the keywords your business wants to rank for, like “plumbers in Tampa,” and it must be engaging. Nobody will read a bunch of unclear, hard-to-follow babble that doesn’t quickly give them the information they want.
Aside from your website, another way to boost your local SEO is to make sure your Google My Business (GMB) listing is up-to-date, with reviews, hours, and relevant images. This is particularly important for service-based contractors that focus on certain geographic areas.
Google likes active GMB listings and will rank them higher, especially if they have a lot of positive reviews. Make sure you include GMB when you post on your social media accounts. And don’t forget to reply to comments and thank your customers for their positive reviews.
Another way to build your local SEO with your website, your GMB page, and your social media accounts is to practice what is known as content marketing, our next digital strategy.
4. Engage in Content Marketing with a Focus on Education
Content marketing is the creation of content, like blog posts and videos, intended to educate potential customers. Its purpose isn’t to sell but rather to provide helpful information as well as brand recognition.
The theory is that the content helps build trust and also positions the company that creates the content as an industry expert. Also, regularly updating and adding content builds a company’s SEO.
Sounds good. So how do you do it?
The best course of action is to create educational content. Our plumber in Tampa may create a blog or video series on common plumbing issues and how to fix them.
But that in itself isn’t enough. To maximize their efforts, our plumbing company then needs to develop a strategy to create relevant content and post it consistently. That’s where keyword research and an editorial calendar come into play.
Keyword research can be both time-consuming and in-depth and also requires software like Ahrefs, with the goal being to discover what a company’s potential customers are searching for and then develop content geared toward those searches.
An editorial calendar is more or less a rundown of what will be posted and when and should be based on keyword research findings.
Together, this comprises a content marketing strategy.
That was a rather quick overview of content marketing, and by no means all-encompassing, but the takeaway should be this: your contracting business will most benefit from creating educational content if you have a plan to release it.
And if you have a good website (which you should) with an attached blog, start there. Regularly posting on a blog will also build not only your local SEO but your SEO in general.
Now, where most businesses lose the muse is in the long run. They can’t figure out what to post, leading to a drop in content, ultimately ending in no content.
Think about it: how often have you scoped out a company’s blog only to notice they started strong and then completely stopped posting?
Fortunately, there’s a way to fix this. The first step is to utilize what’s mentioned above, keyword research, and an editorial calendar. These two strategies take the guesswork out of the subject matter.
But the real secret is to narrow down the types of content to post to four or five different categories. For example, our plumbers could create these five types of content on a regular cycle: how-to articles, videos, industry news or advancements, product reviews, and testimonials/case studies.
Once they have the subject matter from keyword research and they know the different types of content they’ll post, all that’s left is to lay out a calendar and create the content.
One thing that’s worth pointing out here is the last type of content: testimonials/case studies. It was chosen for many reasons, among them being it’s easy to create, but the main reason is this: testimonials and case studies can significantly boost leads.
Let’s take a closer look at why.
5. Utilize Customer Testimonials and Case Studies
If a business is going to survive in the construction industry, no matter its size or offering, then it must build a solid reputation. Period.
One of the quickest and most effective ways to do that is with testimonials and case studies.
What’s the difference?
A testimonial is an endorsement, usually a few sentences to a paragraph, whereas a case study is a more in-depth look or “study” on how a business’s product or service helped provide a solution to a problem of a particular person or business.
For example, a satisfied customer may give our Tampa plumbing company a testimonial saying something to the effect that they were on time, did the job quickly without issues, and were both courteous and reasonably priced. That’s a solid testimonial.
But on the other hand, let’s say our plumbing company just finished repiping a nursing home. Sure, they could ask for a testimonial as soon as the job is complete, but this is an excellent opportunity to create a case study.
Why is a case study better?
The testimonial is an endorsement of our plumbing company, while the case study is an explanation of how the plumbing company helped a particular client (the nursing home) overcome a problem.
The trick is to be specific. In this case, the plumbing company must highlight certain things, such as only working when the residents weren’t at home or using insulated barriers to keep the noise down. Anything that shows how their process, materials, etc., helped directly solve the problem with a positive outcome.
See how this exceeds the typical testimonial? The next business that needs repiping and reads the case study will immediately see how our plumbing business helped solve that specific issue.
The more case studies you can create to highlight the exact problems that your business fixes, the better. Nothing is more encouraging for your potential customers than seeing exactly how your business solved their problems successfully.
So, when it comes to testimonials and case studies, every contractor needs both.
Written testimonials and case studies are a great addition to a website, social media, or other marketing. . .
But if you can capture them on video, they’re PURE GOLD. The reason?
People love videos. They’re easy to watch, and when potential clients can see and hear from others who’ve had positive experiences with a construction firm, it significantly boosts the company’s credibility and reliability.
Plus, when strategically placed on your website, video case studies and testimonials can keep visitors there longer, which boosts SEO. Videos can also increase leads and give your business a step up on your competitors.
After the successful completion of your next major project, create a detailed case study highlighting the challenges, solutions, and results. This can be supplemented with video testimonials from satisfied clients.
How do you get those clients? With our last digital marketing strategy. Ads.
6. Invest in Paid Ads with Precise Targeting
If you want to expand your contracting business quickly or even just pick up a few more customers, there aren’t many more effective digital marketing strategies than ads.
And what makes an ad effective is precise targeting. Let’s dive deeper into what “precise targeting” means.
First, every business needs to identify its target audience. Going back to our plumbing company, we can’t just say our target audience is “anyone who owns a house.” Yes, homeowners would be our starting point, but we need to break it down further, so let’s include our location, Tampa.
Now, our ideal clients are homeowners in Tampa. Not bad, but still vague.
Next, let’s think about who most needs plumbing services. Most likely, people who bought a new house wouldn’t need plumbing services, so now we’re looking for homeowners in Tampa in established neighborhoods. Better, right?
After some quick research, we’ve identified some neighborhoods. After a little more investigation, we’ve identified a few neighborhoods of mostly professional families in their late 30’s to early 40’s . . .
See where this is heading? Our plumbers can target those people with ads by building a complete picture of who they’re selling to. They know where their potential customers live, the average age, etc. The key is to build out a solid picture of your target audience. After doing so, the next step is deployment.
Our plumbers know who they are targeting, so now they need to figure out where to find them. Social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook make sense, so that’s where they start. But what should the ad say?
We all know what plumbers do, but saying “Complete plumbing services 24/7” is too broad. An effective ad strategy is to target a problem. Instead, say, “Live in an older house? Tired of slow drains? Give us a call.”
By doing this, our plumbers have targeted their ideal customer with a specific service. Marketing your services individually can help your contracting business in several ways.
- You can target more than one audience. Our plumbers can target homeowners with one ad and commercial builders with another.
- You can show your expertise for each service you offer. Our plumbers aren’t just plumbers who do everything, they’re “slow drain specialists.” And since people want to hire experts, this makes them stand out.
- You can build a “landing page” on your website for each service where your potential customers end up when someone clicks your ad. This helps your site’s SEO and, over time, will give you more traffic so you can spend less on ads!
When launching an ad campaign, precise targeting ensures that the marketing budget is spent on reaching the most relevant audience.
Remember, your most relevant audience should always be your ideal client for your product or service. Just make sure to separate your ad campaigns if you have more than one service or audience. Otherwise, your campaigns won’t be as effective.
But overall, when developing your company’s digital marketing strategy . . .
It’s Far More Beneficial to Have Multiple Digital Strategies
While each of the above strategies is effective on its own, the most successful construction contractors often integrate multiple strategies to create a comprehensive digital marketing plan.
The thing is, you don’t need to do everything all at once.
Start with your website.
- If you have one, CLICK HERE for a free website evaluation to see how it’s performing.
- If you don’t have a website, CLICK HERE. We can design, write, build, and host a high-quality site that integrates SEO best practices and targets your ideal client.
Next, work on your portfolio and then move on to SEO and content marketing. If you layer in more strategies, ending in ad campaigns, you will have positioned your contracting business to succeed online and ensure you’ll be building your business both now and into the future.
Need help putting together a digital marketing strategy? That’s what we’re here for. CLICK HERE to set up a free, no-obligation consultation.
By: Tyler Blackburn
Tyler is a digital content and copywriter for the construction industry specializing in website content optimization. He prides himself on his fiction/creative writing background, which helps him weave compelling conversion-focused copy and content that connects with the reader. To contact him, CLICK HERE.
