For construction businesses, marketing is about the activities that are involved in obtaining future work; from strategic analysis and planning, to staff enthusiasm and performance, service delivery and customer feedback. It is aimed at attracting new customers by promising a superior value than your competitors and keeping or growing current customers by delivering satisfaction.
Marketing is an essential tool for construction businesses to survive the constant change in the business environment, new trends of service delivery, an increasing number of construction businesses and intense competition. Social media can play a key role in assisting construction business owners to manage profitable customer relationships.
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I would advise anyone in the construction industry looking into social media marketing to do an assessment of their firm’s internal and external operations with the view of establishing which social media channel they can suitably adopt. The following are some of the apps I would suggest considering:
1. Facebook
Facebook is a social networking site that makes it easy for individuals to connect and share with family and friends online. It is the world’s largest social network with more than 1 billion users worldwide.
It allows you to send messages, post status updates, share photos and links to news and other interesting content online, chat live and watch short videos.
Facebook can be a very nice platform for businesses to connect with their customers online by reading and answering their comments and suggestions online. As a construction business, you can get more creative and share with your customers online what you have been working on in your office. Contracting firms can post site progress photos for their ongoing projects. Professionals, as well, can share photos of the projects they are currently working on.
Whereas as an individual a personal profile is just enough for connecting with your Facebook fans, it is not advisable to run a Facebook profile for a business. The best way to do it as a business is to create a business Facebook page which allows you to have as many followers as you can. I have experimented with this and my Facebook Page is growing every day, with more and more potential customers finding me online.
Unlike a personal profile, a Facebook page gives you more business analytical tools to help monitor the performance of your posts online. You are presented with metrics that can help you make better business decisions such as post engagement statistics. Besides that, Facebook offers an advertising feature for businesses: you can closely target an audience and deliver ads directly to the people most likely to want your products or services.
By responding to customer questions on your Facebook page with in-depth explanations promptly, you can build a community of people interested in your products with the potential of turning them to loyal customers.
2. Instagram
Instagram services are provided by Facebook Inc; therefore, I will not dwell much on it as we have already talked more about Facebook services.
However, unlike the Facebook app, Instagram is majorly a photo and video sharing platform. You can share photos of your work while connecting with your potential customers online.
3. YouTube
YouTube is an online video sharing platform. Content creators usually share videos with their fans on YouTube. It allows users to leave feedback in terms of comments to the uploaded video.
As a construction business, you can share behind the scene videos of your work processes or teach your audience how to solve certain work-related challenges in your field. Make sure to pose with your latest project, use branding to showcase your services and products. You can also do videos that explain in detail how to use your products and how to access your services.
Want to see how it works in real life? Check my YouTube Channel for free!
4. Google My Business
Google My Business is a free tool that allows business owners to promote their business information on Google search and maps. It allows a business to connect with customers, post updates to their business profile and see how customers are interacting with their business on Google.
With a Google My Business profile, Google users can find your business online, click to navigate using maps to reach your physical location and leave reviews about your business.
Both contracting and consulting built environment businesses can create and manage a business profile, which allows them to appear on google maps listings. It also improves their discoverability online via the google search for discoverability – helping news customers with navigating to your physical location.
The site allows you to post a description of your business. Further, you can create a list of your products and services with a very nice description and appealing photos. Users can see the list when they visit your profile; allowing them to leave reviews, connect by making phone calls and recommend your products/services to their friends. It is an awesome way of connecting with potential customers online.
So, why not create a Google My Business profile today for your business?
5. Quora
Quora is a question and answer website where people go to find information. By creating questions and answers to those questions, users of Quora generate the content that is on that site. Therefore, the site is made up of user-generated content.
It allows users to create social networks and follows topics that interest them while focusing on high-quality questions and answers.
To participate in Quora, you need to create an account, add your photo, professional affixes and suffixes, follow topics, post questions and provide answers to other people’s questions. A very interesting feature of this platform is that it enables users to vote on answers to highlight the most accurate information possible. This is made possible by the “upvote and downvote” feature.
As a user, you choose to upvote the responses that you think answers the questions asked better and downvote those that don’t answer the question well. The number of upvotes and downvotes on a particular response will affect its visibility. Top responses have more upvotes. If a response has more downvotes, Quora treats it as invalid and pushes it down (in the list of responses).
How to Use Quora for Marketing Your Construction Business:
As a business, your customers may be on Quora, asking questions about your products and services. Make sure to provide great answers to those questions. It will increase your authority and popularity, which will improve your findability on search engines.
As a professional, you should join and participate in online forums and discussions. I would greatly advise you to follow other users on Quora who are within your industry. When answering questions, make sure to answer those revolving around your industry and comment professionally on the issues that you have knowledge and fall within your specialization.
As a way of setting yourself apart, do not forget to display your professional titles on your account to establish authority. You can opt to include links to while answering to questions on Quora. Although links embedded on Quora are non-follow links (when clicked they don’t open directly), users can copy-paste them on a browser and visit your site. It is a good way of generating traffic to your external site.
6. WordPress
You are still reading this? Well, that’s awesome. Wondering why we are at number six yet the title says five social media apps? This is a bonus for you for reading through the whole article.
WordPress is a very popular content management system useful for people and businesses who want to start and run blogs. With this service, you can their tons of free tools for you to run a blog. Also, with a custom domain, you can use WordPress tools, themes and plugins to build and deploy your website online in a considerably short time without having prior coding knowledge or experience.
I am sharing this information because websites are a very great tool for marketing your construction business. They give you the freedom of choosing what information to publish about your business and the flexibility of adopting any of your favourite designs.
You should consider creating a website for your business. There are tons of tutorials online that can guide you in that process. You can consider starting from here by getting a custom domain name and cheap web hosting (this is an affiliate link).
All the best as you launch deeper into marketing your construction business.
