If you own or want to start a construction company, your competitors will surpass you unless you learn to leverage digital marketing strategies. 96% of B2B customers prefer using the internet to do business with manufacturers and merchants. It doesn’t matter whether you sell directly to vendors or other companies.

We will look into the eight top digital marketing trends in the construction industry. These trends will help you start your business right or optimize your current marketing budget. We will also look at how your business can take advantage of these new techniques:

1. Paid search and social media advertising

Most modern advertising platforms provide powerful targeting tools that make them practical for construction companies. Leading tech companies, such as Google, leverage these targeting tools, and you should too.

Depending on the solution used, any company can pay to run ads on search results or a user’s feed using these tech platforms. Ad targeting allows them to select whom they serve these ads to precisely. Depending on the platform, you can run ads based on a user’s preferences, physical circumstances, or the industry in which they currently work.

Tools like this can help you go after your target market with remarkable accuracy. For construction firms, the most accessible place to start is with geotargeting, where you serve ads to individuals within a given geographic location. Geotargeting ensures that your ads only reach customers within a given area that you can perform.

You can screen potential customers by age, income, property types, business or industry, etc. The desired goal is to identify an ideal customer base that fits your typical customer and is likely to convert. Identifying the perfect customer in his way is how smaller emerging firms can gain a foothold and carve out a niche more significant competitors cannot reach.

2. Email marketing

Email blasts are a foundational small business advertising method that your company can use to grow its customer base, care for existing leads, and remain connected with existing clients.

Email campaigns are a very efficient tool for staying connected with current clients and potential leads. A quick email blast lets you update customers on company news, highlight deals or new offerings, and remind them that your brand is there.

Fluctuating email content based on your contacts’ needs and preferences will help construction companies. For example, you can send a combo of weekly newsletters that update all communications on new offerings and business developments. You could also release targeted emails with more specific content based on previous client purchases.

You can also use email blasts for advertising special deals to encourage conversions — like “early-bird” discounts exclusive to potential customers on the mailing list.

Email blasts also enable you to track customer engagement with your advertising — giving you an honest, in-depth look at who is responding well to your marketing. But what if you need more insight? In that case, you can always utilize an email management tool like Outpost to manage your inbox better and troubleshoot communication flaws within your team.

3. Optimized website navigation

Your business’s website is your central hub for your digital marketing efforts. A compelling website helps you secure customers. However, it also means that a difficult or unpleasant website may distance you from other potential clients.

You must optimize your site for ease of use if you want your digital marketing to succeed. Everything on your website should be easy to access, no matter where a user is on your page. This is especially true for finding pages with important information — like business hours, contact information, and product listings.

This new-and-used construction equipment vendor provides a great example of optimized navigation right from their main page. A visitor can easily find everything they might need in the header alone— products, services, and business contact information. Make sure to add these pages to the website header to ensure they will not get lost or disinterested in looking for the information they need.

4. Content marketing

The use of specialized content to promote your brand and build trust between you and your target audience is called content marketing. Often, content means blog posts, articles, or informative graphics, but any educational type of media can work. While most businesses tend to use content like infographics and articles, any form can potentially leave an impact. 

Dallas-based technical services and construction firm Jacobs Engineering Group highlights two different podcasts on the company’s homepage. These podcasts cover what Jacobs considers the most prominent upcoming construction challenges of the next few years. This content is one way Jacobs uses its site to accentuate the business’s foresight and resiliency to potential clients. Other content on the front page also serves to reinforce these characteristics. Though not visible in the screenshot, below the podcast is a link to the Jacobs Climate Action Plan.

More than half of all businesses have begun using the content marketing strategy in one way or another, and you should embrace it too. Content marketing is a valuable tool no matter what values you want to emphasize and is a proven strategy.

If you want your business to start experimenting with content marketing, a great place to start would be by simply publishing short articles on your site. These articles should provide information to your target market or current audience and establish your business’s reputation as trustworthy and reliable.

5. Video

By far, the most engaging content across most social media platforms is video. 85% of businesses use some video advertising for marketing their brand or content. With video, you can do just about anything. You can advertise initiatives, projects, and products launched by your company or brand — and just about anything else. Look at other examples of construction industry video content out in the wild, and look at the social media pages of any significant construction company. Check out how this company does it with video and Twitter.

Video doesn’t mean a single type of content — numerous kinds of video marketing techniques can be effective. Some things will work better for one company and not the other, such as video interviews with current clients. The key is to find what your customers engage with and what works for your business. Maybe for your business, customer testimonials or product tutorials are exactly what you need. Or perhaps a simple product review page or launchpad is best or combined with the former.

Additionally, don’t worry about reaching cinema-level quality with your content. Don’t underestimate small beginnings, and go for authenticity over spectacle. You’ll get better and better with each new release.

6. Webinars and digital events

Hosting digital events and webinars can be a great way to provide valuable information to attendees while building your construction company’s brand. For example, if there is a topic you could present on for around an hour or more, you can create a webinar to share your knowledge on the topic with industry contacts and potential customers.

Webinars can also become hot for generating leads. After the presentation, the list of attendees can net you emails from people who are likely to be your company’s audience and are interested in your business’s products and services.

Another great aspect of running a webinar is that you can post it to a social media platform to drive additional traffic to your website if you record it. Here is an excellent example of a magazine that utilizes a simple landing page to do just that. It simply hosts the information they want to share and makes it easy to find–that’s all it needs to do.

7. Live chat and chatbots

Quickly emerging as one of the most-used methods of digital customer support for business is Live Chat. Having a simple live chat window on their site, companies can offer instant access to customer support representatives if they need information about services, products, or business offerings. 

Chatbots take the whole idea to a new level of usefulness. After asking basic questions, these bots can quickly engage with active site visitors and pass on information to live representatives. Many AI-powered chatbots can even handle basic requests on their own, which is a powerhouse on its own.

Because live chats and bots can engage customers in this way, they can even encourage them to convert — or, at the minimum, inform them about a brand or keep them interested.

8. SEO

A quick Google search is where most people turn nowadays when looking for information. SEO (Search engine optimization) is a collection of techniques you can use to optimize your site for search engines to give it a potential boost in online searches. For example, suppose you show up higher in the search results. In that case, you’re more likely to be noticed by visitors looking for information relevant to your work.

Typically, SEO will mean improving existing content for web search and performing keyword research that reveals what your target audience has been searching for.

An excellent strategy for keyword research is to investigate how your competitors leverage digital marketing on their websites. Do a google search for the terms relevant to your business and see who comes up in the results. You never want to copy their work blatantly, but you can certainly imitate their methods and approach.

You can also significantly increase your results by focusing your content strategy on keywords that other businesses in your niche seem to have overlooked by simply searching for terms that you would think they use. 

Understanding and leveraging marketing trends can help your construction company in big ways. Digital marketing is essential for all kinds of businesses — especially construction companies. Strategies like video, content marketing, and SEO are some of the most popular among construction companies. They will only become more prevalent in years to come.

If you want to compete with top competitors and maximize your marketing efforts, begin implementing one or more of these strategies today. Find ways to inject these initiatives into your overall business plan, and set performance indicators beforehand. These strategies have only recently become popular in the construction industry, which means there are plenty of opportunities for savvy small businesses to leverage them first.

Article Written by: Conor O’Brien