Content Marketing for Construction Companies

Content Marketing for the Construction Industry

Whether you are a small construction company working on residential projects or a large construction firm working on multi-million dollar and billion-dollar projects, content marketing is a crucial part of marketing for your company.

At Avalanche Creative, we offer evidence-based content marketing for construction companies. Our services are based on data. From start to finish, we help you understand how that data can translate to dollars; qualified leads, brand equity, and more revenue.

Continue reading to learn more about content marketing for the construction industry.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the creation of and sharing of materials to produce interest in a company and its products or services.

Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing, which is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them.

Content Strategy vs. Content Marketing

It’s important to understand the difference between content strategy and content marketing. One must come before the other.

Content strategy is to content marketing what your pie pan is to your pie.

• The strategy holds the whole thing together so you can transport some delicious content marketing.
• You don’t start (or shouldn’t) by trying to make a pie and then placing it into a pan (in the same way that you shouldn’t start producing content without a strategy).
• You build the pie within the parameters of the pan, but first, you need to understand how big of pie it is you’re making and who is going to eat it.
• The pie is what you distribute—your content.

A good content strategy (pie pan) can create all kinds of opportunities for your construction company to generate leads and build your brand’s authority.

What Does Content Marketing Include?

It includes the creation and distribution of content. This can include blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos, images, and just about anything your target audience can interact with.

Before you start doing content marketing, you need to understand and empathize with your target audience.

• What do they care about?
• How do they collect information?
• What are they searching for in search engines?
• What problems do they experience?

This is how you’ll begin to create a strategy for your construction company. Your content marketing strategy should help you make decisions about what content to create.

Custom content that is valuable to your audience takes a lot of time and resources to produce well enough to get valuable results. However, it’s one of the most effective ways to generate leads and establish your brand as an authority.

With great content, you have the ability to drive organic traffic and create demand for your services. This will;

• Increase your website traffic through search engine optimization.
• Increase your conversion rates on your website.
• Lower your customer acquisition costs.
• Create a loyal following that trusts you as the expert.

How Does Content Marketing Fit Into Digital Marketing?

Content marketing is a piece of the pie that is digital marketing. However, I believe it is the most important piece of marketing.

Without good content, you wouldn’t have anything to share on social media, in email marketing, or paid campaigns. Content marketing should lead your marketing campaigns.

Good content will elevate the effectiveness of all your digital marketing campaigns.

Content Marketing Ideas for Construction Companies

Anything your decision-maker might interact with and find valuable on their buying journey could be considered good content.

For construction businesses, that content could be:

1. Regularly sharing recent projects.
   Construction is visual. Take images and videos and show off your work. Create a blog where you host a record of your projects and add some relevance to each post. Mention where the project took place, what type of material was used, who you worked with, etc. All of these items start to help a reader feel like your brand is more personal and helps them visualize working with your company.
2. Writing how-to guides and DIY articles.
   Tell your customers how you do what you do. Seriously. A lot of companies are afraid to do this because they think they’ll lose out on money. Think about this; if someone is interested in DIY (do-it-yourself), they are likely in an investigative state where they may change their mind and instead hire a professional to do their project. If you’re the company that helps them understand how to do something on their own, you’re more likely to be the company they reach out to for help.
3. Creating useful construction-related tools.
   Create a calculator or quiz; something interactive that might help your customer complete a job that they might do before, during or after interacting with you or related to your services.

Example Content Marketing for Construction

One of our clients is a marine construction company. They offer shoreline erosion services to landowners on Lake Michigan.

In early 2019 the Lake Michigan water levels were beginning to rise, which meant there would be more demand for their rip rap rock revetment solutions.

Most of their buyers don’t know what rip rap rock revetment is and don’t search Google with that language. Instead, they search for shoreline erosion related terms.

With our help, our client wrote content for the homeowner all about shoreline erosions solutions – even solutions they don’t offer like seawalls. On those pages and blog posts, where appropriate, they made reference to their service.

This allowed our customer to get more people to their website, engaging with their content, and learning from it. This turned researchers into qualified leads and eventual buyers.

We even took it out a few steps further in the buyer’s journey. Through careful keyword research, we identified that more than 4,000 people search “lake michigan water levels” every month.

We knew that most of the people searching that keyword were probably just curious and weren’t the ideal buyer. But, if even a few were, it would benefit the company.

We created a landing page on their website where we regularly updated the Lake Michigan water levels and this has been a proven strategy that not only gave the construction company more brand visibility but generated leads through their website.

How to Measure Content Marketing

Content marketing can be a difficult investment to measure. Content marketing is not just about lead generation. You could measure leads generated from content you produce from your website, but you wouldn’t be telling the whole story of the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.

Content marketing lives outside of digital.

Imagine this scenario:

1. Someone reads your blog post about preventing roof leaks after researching local roofing construction companies.
2. They then apply what they learned from your post and appreciate your help.
3. A friend asks them if they know a good roofing company and they mention you. Or maybe someone posts in a Facebook neighborhood group, looking for a company and remembers your helpful blog post.

It all started with great, helpful content.

Invest in Your Content Marketing Strategy

Ready to get started on the content marketing strategy for your construction company? We’d love to help.