Many construction companies reach a sticking point in the life cycle of their business. Maybe business is fine, but you're no longer scheduling bigger and bigger jobs. Maybe your yearly revenue has started to flatten, maybe you're having trouble expanding outside of your current region, or maybe you just can't seem to break into that higher investment market you're looking for.
If your construction company has reached a plateau, and you're just not sure how to break out of it, growth marketing might be an ideal solution. Growth marketing is a marketing methodology that focuses on helping you apply your time and resources to the channels, platforms, and tactics that will deliver the best results according to your company's growth priorities.
Today, we're going to dive into the five steps of building a growth marketing strategy for your construction company.
The goal?
To help you:
- Figure out what your goals are
- Determine what marketing tactics can help you achieve them
- Develop a growth marketing plan you can continue to optimize over time for continuous, sustainable growth for your construction company.
This blog will give you an actionable plan you can use to build a growth marketing strategy that delivers the results your construction company is looking for. Let's start at the beginning of any good plan — Step 1.
Step 1: What Does Growth Marketing Success Look Like for your Construction Company?
Growth looks different for each construction company. The key to a successful growth marketing strategy is first identifying what success looks like to you.
Maybe you want to:
- Build more projects
- Sell more building materials
- Open up more locations
- Grow your company's presence in the market
While all of these are great goals, only one or two of them likely apply to your construction company.
Maybe your marketing team is great at pulling in qualified leads, but you're having trouble getting those leads to convert quickly.
Or maybe you have all of the projects you want in your current region, but you want to grow into another part of the country or state.
Whatever is challenging your construction company — identify it.
Then, determine what success would mean to you, specific to that challenge:
- Would you like to grow your commercial projects by 10% this year?
- Maybe you want to expand into two new states this year.
- Or maybe you want to improve your presence in the market for a specific type of project, product, or service.
By identifying what success looks like to your construction company, you can work to build a growth marketing strategy that will deliver the kind of success you're looking for.
Once you know what success looks like to you, it's time to sit down and put some hard numbers to that end goal.
Step 2: Set SMART Goals that Identify Key Growth Metrics for Your Construction Company
If I've said it once, I've said it a trillion times. Set SMART goals that will help bring your construction company closer to that ultimate success you outlined in Step 1.
We've written a lot about SMART goals, from why goal setting is essential, to how to set SMART goals. They are crucial to a growth marketing strategy that actually works to put your construction company on top.
It's important to remember that SMART goals shouldn't be your end goal or your definition of success. Instead, think of SMART goals like stepping stones. They each work to put you closer to your end goal, but instead of taking one big leap, you break that big overarching goal down into smaller steps that are measurable and attainable.
If you want to reach one yearly revenue goal, what kind of sales numbers will you have to reach each month to achieve that yearly goal?
Those monthly sales goals are your SMART goals. Make sure to dive into these goals, and put specific numbers to them that your sales and marketing teams can easily measure.
And most importantly, make sure your SMART goals contribute to what you've identified as "successful growth" in Step 1. For example, if you identified that successful growth means completing 10 more commercial building projects than you completed last year, your SMART goals shouldn't have anything to do with opening up a new location.
Step 3: Does Your Construction Company's Website Support Your Growth Goals?
You'll notice that most of these steps have a theme. Every aspect of your construction company's growth marketing strategy should be aligned to your Step 1 definition of growth success.
Your website is no different.
Let's use the goal from Step 2 as an example. Your overarching definition of success would be building 10 more commercial projects this year. That means you need to complete between 2 and 3 commercial building projects a quarter.
How does your website factor in here?
For this example, your website should work to help you convert your ideal lead for that specific type of project. Key website conversion features for this goal would include:
- Landing pages that speak directly to that ideal buyer's pain points, questions, and concerns.
- Calls-to-action that make it easy for that ideal buyer to get in touch with your sales team.
In addition to key website conversion features, it's a good idea to implement nurturing & relationship-building website content that helps pull that ideal buyer through the sales cycle quickly by answering their questions and addressing any concerns they might have about starting this type of commercial building project.
There are hundreds of ways you can adjust your website to capture more of the right leads, according to your construction company's specific growth goals. These lead generation tactics for construction companies are a helpful place to start. Keep your SMART goals in mind, and implement the tactics that are most relevant to those goals, and you'll have a website that's set up to convert the leads that will drive your growth marketing success.
Step 4: Invest in Marketing Tactics that Will Support Your Growth Goals
Your website is in charge of converting the right leads. If you've completed Step 3, you're set up to convert the leads that will contribute to your construction company's strategic growth.
Now, you need to invest in the marketing tactics that will support your growth marketing goals and bring in the right leads.
Having a well-rounded marketing program is important. I'd never tell you not to invest in content or email marketing. But, when you're marketing to reach specific growth goals for your construction company, you should put more effort into some marketing tactics than others.
Let's look at a couple of examples of what I'm talking about here.
Example #1
Your Construction Company Wants to Grow Your Market Presence
If your construction company is looking for ways to command a greater portion of the market, your growth goals are likely centered around KPIs like brand awareness, consumer engagement, and increasing your authority in the market.
Tactics that would support your construction company's growth goal to improve your market position might include:
- Social media marketing to raise brand awareness in expanded markets.
- Content marketing to increase your domain authority with rich, quality content that shows both search engines and your ideal buyer that your construction company is the go-to resource for your industry.
- Social media advertising to increase your brand's visibility.
- PPC advertising to increase brand awareness for key construction services and products you may not already be known for.
Tactics that would not support this growth goal would be:
- Email marketing
- Content offer development
Even though email marketing and content offers are great growth marketing tactics, they're not supporting your current growth goal of increasing your position in the market. While you should keep developing content offers and email marketing to your leads, neither of these would be your focus in achieving this growth goal.
Your time, resources, and money are better spent on growth marketing tactics that get the word out and improve your authority among consumers who don't already know about your brand.
Example #2
Your Construction Company Wants to Grow Business by Shortening the Sales Cycle
Many construction companies struggle with a long sales cycle. If you're a commercial construction company, you know those projects are long, involved, and require sign-off from many decision-makers. Your growth goals are focused on getting more sales, in less time, and better nurturing the qualified leads you have in your pipeline.
Marketing tactics that would support your growth goal of shortening the sales cycle include:
- Email marketing delivers more of the right content to your prospective buyers.
- Sales enablement supports your sales team with the tools and content they need to make more positive touchpoints with sales leads, in less time. Sales email automation, automatic notifications, and prospecting sequences are all tactics that will support this growth goal.
- Marketing workflows also work to provide the right message, to the right person, at the right time, which works to shorten the sales cycle.
Marketing tactics that would not support your growth goals include:
- Social media marketing
- PPC and social media advertising
- Guest blogging
- Broad-topic content development
Again, these marketing tactics are awesome, but they're not relevant to your current growth goals. If you want to close more of the leads already in your pipeline, then inbound tactics that pull in more leads isn't the way to reach that growth goal.
Instead, we've recommended marketing tactics that help your sales and marketing teams engage better with the qualified leads you already have. If you already have a rich pipeline, you'll see more ROI and benefit from tactics that help your sales and marketing team maintain better engagement with the leads you have.
The key to choosing the marketing tactics that align with your growth goals is looking at your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Choose marketing tactics that feed into those KPIs, whether that's boosting conversions, improving traffic rates, or closing bigger sales.
Step 5: Set Checkpoints to Analyze and Optimize Your Growth Marketing Strategy
The fifth and final step of building your growth marketing strategy is to analyze and optimize. Just like Rome, a high-quality growth marketing strategy wasn't built in a day. Regular analysis and optimization, over time, will help you reach that overarching success goal you set in Step 1.
The fact is, no quality marketing strategy is going to deliver everything you want immediately. That's why we set SMART goals.
Each of those SMART goal stepping stones helps you progress closer to your goal, but they also are a helpful checkpoint for analysis and optimization. When you reach one SMART goal, you shouldn't just set a new one and move on.
Instead, when you reach your SMART goal or come to the end of a month or quarter, take the time to see how you did.
- Where was your growth marketing strategy effective?
- Where are you falling short of your growth goals?
- Is there a particular tactic that's driving great results for your construction company? Maybe next month or quarter, you lean in a bit more.
- If there's a tactic that's not working well, analyze why.
- Is it the wrong tactic for your specific growth goals?
- Is your construction company having trouble implementing it successfully?
The more opportunities your sales and marketing teams have to align and identify what's working and what's not, the more capable your construction company will be of adapting your growth marketing strategy to deliver your team the very best results.
Growth marketing is a strategic way to look at where your construction company is at, and develop specific goals and marketing tactics to reach those goals. With a tailored-to-you approach, you can put more of your efforts into the tactics that can deliver the results you're looking for.
If you're stuck on any part of building a growth marketing strategy for your construction company, let us know. From goal setting to strategy implementation, developing and deploying tailored marketing strategies to deliver business growth is what Evenbound does best. We'd be happy to help walk you through the process or answer any questions you might have.
