Ainhoa Rodriguez-Muguruza
In their 2021 State of Marketing report, HubSpot found that 63% of the companies surveyed increased their marketing budget in 2021. Surprisingly enough, the results showed that increasing revenue was the least prioritised for their primary marketing goals in 2021. Instead, most companies focused their marketing efforts mainly on improving their brand awareness.
Investing in digital marketing has been a challenge for the construction businesses, considered part of one of the most traditional sectors. 54% of construction leaders interviewed in the Construction Front Line Survey felt that the speed at which the sector had adopted digital technologies had not been fast enough, with 81% planning of hurrying this adoption by the end of the year.
Supporting this data, IDG’s Digital Business Survey estimated that 89% of businesses will be shifting towards a digital-first strategy with the aim to better meet customer requirements. As more companies pursue digitalisation, numerous reports back up its efficiency, witnessing how companies adopting a digital-first approach increase their revenue by 34%.
Digitalising your marketing efforts is now always easy, with 66% of businesses not feeling fully supported when deciding the solutions that could better endorse their KPIs. With that in mind, we have gathered in this article 5 simple but effective digital marketing hacks for construction companies together with the data that proves their success.
#1 Base Your Email Campaigns In Your Personas
According to HubSpot, 77% of marketers experienced an unprecedented increase in email marketing engagement in the past 12 months, making email marketing one of the most reliable marketing tools available. In fact, as shown in Litmus’ State of Email Engagement report, email marketing provides the best ROI, with a £26.12 return for every £0.73 spent.
HubSpot underlined personalisation as key for the success of any marketing efforts and reducing the number of emails sent out! The important role of email customisation has also been highlighted by Conversant Media, sharing that 94% of customer insights across industries considered it “important,” “very important,” or “extremely important”.
With a clear preference for quality over quantity, it is essential to realise that, within the construction industry, not all specifiers look for the same construction solution and, failing to communicate in a way that resonates with them will put them off from researching about your brand and, ultimately, look further into how your construction solution can make their lives a little bit easier.
The more research you devote to developing your specifier personas, the more accurate your marketing efforts. According to Demand Gen, 53% of marketers believe that ongoing, personalized communication with existing customers impact revenue, with Campaign Monitor estimating that revenue increase by a remarkable 760%.
#2 Make Sure You Include These Elements On Your Website
In 2019, the Digital Transformation and B2B E-Commerce Report produced by Sana found that over 84% of construction companies aimed to move their sales exclusively online in the near future. With a solid 98% of architects preferring to research online building products, curating an impeccable online presence has become essential for construction leaders.
If one thing is known about specifiers is that they aim to be self-sufficient while conducting their research. Expecting to find accurate and sophisticated data after a quick glance at your website, specifiers will not doubt a second before they leave your site if they cannot find detailed information they need for a rendering within 1-2 clicks from your homepage.
In fact, 75% of a company's credibility is thought to come from their website design! Ensure that your interface is intuitive and clean, with high-quality media content and downloadable digital files like CAD, Revit and SketchUp readily available. Adding successful stories, case studies, and testimonials is also a must-have to ensure maximum impact.
Specifiers should not struggle either to get in touch with you. Make yourself available! A survey conducted by KoMarketing revealed that 44% of website visitors had left a website if there was no contact information or phone number. Make sure you include your details and enable a link to your calendar so specifiers can book some time with you if needed.
#3 Build a Multi-Channel Online Presence
Whist 86% of users visiting a website are attracted to look at the products provided. It is essential to guarantee that users get to the website in the first place! Over half of social browsers use social media exclusively to research products, and 7 out of every 10 specifiers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend it to their colleagues.
On their Social Trends 2021 Report, Hootsuite published that 1 out of every 2 of the companies surveyed planned to increase the budget devoted to Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn in the following months. 78% of the interviewees believed Facebook to be the most effective platform for reaching their goals, closely followed by LinkedIn.
Despite Instagram having the highest ROI behind Facebook, LinkedIn keeps being considered an indispensable channel for networking and lead generation, especially as data shows that 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members are decision-makers or drive business decisions. Pinterest and Twitter keep rising in popularity but have not yet achieved such an impact.
According to the Sprout Social Index, 57% of consumers will follow a brand to learn about new products or services while 47% will follow to stay up to date on company news. Consumers will continue to engage with a brand after they have followed it on social media, with 91% feeling drawn to visit their website, 89% making a purchase, and 85% feel encouraged to recommend the brand.
#4 Go Niche With Local SEO
As specifiers reach out to Google when seeking new solutions to consider, making sure your website is well positioned is a must! With over 40% of the revenue of building companies coming from purely organic traffic, it has never been more important to ensure that your website keeps a consistent search ranking and that you are periodically optimising and improving your SEO.
Since Google’s Pigeon update in 2014, including local SEO practices in marketing strategies, has become more common. The goal of local search engine optimisation follows the motto of enhancing a site's search visibility, only working more locally, more niche. In fact, 97% of users searching online aim to find a local business, with 78% purchasing offline after their search.
Improving your local SEO can also boost your ranking position on Google. Becoming the first result on Google for a particular keyword will turn your company into the result that 24.4% of all clicks go to when doing a local search! This will increase the number of visitors consistently stepping into your website and drive valuable leads to your construction business.
Together with using the right keywords, building backlinks is another effective tactic to apply. Google’s first results have 3.8 times more backlinks than those below them, giving them greater authority and visibility. As recently revealed by Impact, 55.24% of pages don’t have a single backlink, making this practice a straightforward and quick way to improve the SEO of a business.
#5 Digitalise Your CRM With Software Automation
According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing report, companies are set to invest 26% of their marketing budget in software throughout the next 12 months, mainly focusing on automation and the development of better reporting tools. When asked to construction leaders, 81% share the intention to adopt digital tools before the end of 2021.
The Construction Front Line Survey revealed that building brands actively invested in acquiring internal management software pieces to reduce workload. The result was an increase of productivity by up to 15%! When asked about the perks they would highlight regarding going digital, construction brands emphasized the importance of shared data availability.
62% of the construction leaders consider they would benefit from using digitalised forms to update data to their CRM automatically, 55% would like to have more access to real-time information, and 70% believe faster data flows could help their overall performance. In fact, CRM automation has improved operations by around 20%, as reported by Nucleus.
Digitalising and introducing automation into your CRM can also support business brands reach other goals, such as increasing sales revenue or improving customer engagement. For example, according to an article published on Moosend, 58% of marketers consider automation key for their upselling strategies.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.