Where do I start in marketing for my construction business

This article isn’t going to be an all inclusive attempt at telling you what you should do to market your construction company. Neither is this in a particular order. The recommendations you’ll find in this article can be done in a different order that makes sense to your business. We wrote this as a general application for the many construction companies that we have talked to and that have reached out to us with questions. 

Create a customer avatar 

If you were like most when you started your construction company you took on any and every job. We did! We learned a lot of lessons those first few years. One of those lessons was that not every customer is your customer. If you look back on the jobs that you performed the best, the customer was the happiest, and you made the appropriate overhead & profit, that will give you a good indication of who your ideal customer is. Conversely, the jobs that went South, had upset clients and where you paid for the project are the projects you want to steer clear of. Having a customer avatar will help you avoid the bad jobs. 

Think of attributes of your ideal projects and write them down. These are one to two word phrases that you’ll use to eventually describe your ideal clients. These are things that can pertain to:

• Scope of work
• Location
• Dollar size 
• Customer demographics (male/female, working class/executives, residential/commercial, etc)
• Beliefs 
• Where they hang out
• What social platforms they use

Once you have your list of adjectives you can formulate a short paragraph describing your customer. This is something that you need to firmly understand along with everyone in your construction company. When someone calls your office, your admin needs to be able to gather general information from that individual and then be able to clearly determine if that is a lead worth pursuing. 

In summary: Having a customer avatar helps direct your marketing so that you know who you’re speaking to, how to speak to them and where to go to find them. We created a short form you can use to create your customer avatar: click here to fill it out. 

Maintain a CRM

We did an entire article on the purpose and benefits of a CRM. For the purpose of this article we will highlight the top three reasons why a CRM is key to an effective marketing strategy. If you want more information on this topic go back and read, What’s the preferred CRM for construction companies. 

Two ways to use your CRM for marketing

1. Ask for referrals. We believe that you should be able to extract 1-5 referrals from every past client. If you never ask your past clients for referrals then they are far less likely to tell their friends and family about you. It’s not that they don’t like you; it’s just that they don’t think about you regularly enough. Use your CRM to stay in touch with your clients.
2. Ask for reviews. Could you go out and garner 10 five star reviews today? If you have an up to date CRM, you could use HubSpot to email all of them in minutes asking for a review. Clients in our industry frequently use reviews to weed through potential contractors. Your reviews are a form of marketing for your construction business. If you’re not involved in managing your online reviews, you are missing out on a relatively easy way to get cheap and effective advertising. If you don’t have a Google profile for your construction business, here’s an article on how to create one. 

You need a website

Your customer avatar could include something to the tune of, “Uses Google to search for contractors in their area. They read reviews and base who to call on those reviews. Our customers visit contractors’ websites to learn more about them and their services.” 

Your website can be an effective lead generation tool if you use it to communicate your services & processes and you use it to educate your customers. Your future customers are using Google to answer their questions about their home projects. Google populates websites that are best suited to feed those answers to searchers. You want your website to be a Learning Center for your future customers. Organic, inbound marketing will give you the best ROI for any of your marketing dollars. There’s more on that in an article we titled They Ask, You Answer for Construction Companies.