How strong is your construction marketing brand?
A construction company’s brand is one of its strongest marketing tools. Potential customers evaluate your company on your brand, which includes your reputation, when selecting a contractor. The strength and awareness you’ve built in the community you serve is essential to stability and growth. It is also critical to maintain consistency in the image and message that create your brand. Consequently, all aspects of your marketing strategy, lead generation campaign, and sales program, must integrate for your brand to be truly effective. However, branding does not stop with your marketing program. It needs to carry through your company for it to connect with customers, both current and potential.
Construction marketing brand and your team
First, your team must understand your brand. It’s not enough that they know your services and capabilities. They should know your company values. In other words, your brand. Let me give you an example of how a brand should be represented by your crews. I was working with a high-end home builder and visiting a job site to oversee a video shoot. I overheard the site supervisor telling a worker to redo a window they were putting in place. When the worker said it was only slightly off, the supervisor quoted the company’s Gold Shield Promise that we had created as part of their brand. By stressing the brand values of the company to the worker, the supervisor demonstrated that somewhat off wasn’t good enough to meet their standards. A company brand that carries through to the jobsite reinforces a reputation for exceptional service, craftsmanship, and customer satisfaction.
Brand awareness
Often, an owner assumes that the market is aware of everything the company provides. However, without regular contact with customers, how can they know about any new services you’ve added? Simply put, they can’t, and the result is less repeat business. Time for another example. A commercial construction client of mine bought a laser screed for a large project’s concrete work and wanted to recoup some of the expense. Our campaign was to promote the laser screed service to existing customers to help defray the cost. Furthermore, we expanded the campaign to other contractors and the laser screed service became another profit center. Remember, your services are also part of your construction marketing brand.
Construction marketing brand and prospects
Your brand needs to give potential customers reasons to contact you to have an opportunity to bid on a project. From first meetings to the closeout, if your brand isn’t present and uniform, you are not differentiating from competitors effectively. Ultimately, this leads to you being in a price war with competing builders. Keep in mind, lowest cost is not always the deciding factor. Owners often choose a contractor they feel they can trust even if the bid is higher if the brand creates that confidence.
Building a construction marketing brand
Of course, repeat business and referrals contribute to growing your sales, but to truly grow you need to win new projects. You need to promote your brand to potential customers. Strategies to build a brand include networking, social media, digital marketing, and advertising. To reach your team, customers, strategic partners, and vendors, consider an internal newsletter to communicate news to this group while reinforcing your brand.
Pappy
About the Author
Paul Kowalski (or Pappy as he is called around the office) spent over two decades working at other agencies before opening Conach Marketing Group in 2008. The early part of his career was working with Fortune 500 clients at different agencies. However, working with smaller clients was his preference. This choice was because of the larger impact on a client’s business growth and the developing closer client relationships.
About Conach
When he was creating Conach, his goal was to bring those Fortune 500 strategies along with years of B2B marketing experience to small business marketing clients. As a result of years of focusing on business to business marketing, Conach specializes in construction marketing, financial marketing, and industrial marketing. Even though we are in Mid-Michigan, Conach provides marketing services to clients across the country. For more information visit conachmarketing.com or contact us or call 989.401.3202.