Worried about your construction business? No worries. Just follow these simple six steps to ensure that your business will grow by making a simple yet effective and efficient construction marketing plan.
As a business owner, it is quite important to develop some kind of strategy to run your company, no matter how small or large it is. Whether you are a tradesman, subcontractor, or general contractor, you have to create an efficient construction marketing plan that addresses your concerns and provides means to your goals, personal and business-wise.
What is a Marketing Plan?
Contrary to what people might think, the marketing process is not just limited to the advertisement of the services and the attempt at increasing your client base. It’s a complex process involving the implementation of the content strategy developed through coordination, and then its promotion to the public. Essentially, what a marketing plan does is the management of the creation of products used by people by bringing them into reality from a mere idea or concept.
Why is The Construction Of a Marketing Plan So Important?
A marketing plan is the most important tool for your business. Without such an important strategy, how are you going to make sure that your product reaches its intended audience? With the help of a marketing plan, you can increase the sales of your company. It never hurts to be proactive and prepare for your marketing just as you prepare for your construction projects. Therefore, no matter how successful your business already is, creating a construction marketing plan will help to boost your sales and online credibility immensely.
Six Steps To Create Marketing Business Plan:
The process, while not that hard, is not a piece of cake. You have to constantly monitor and adjust the whole process according to any situation. Again, promotion and advertisement are not enough. You have to create a strategy on a larger scale for your construction business. Especially in the construction field, you have to stay ahead and ensure the quality of your work. After creating the marketing plan, communicate and discuss it with your staff. And don’t forget, your plan should have enough flexibility to adapt to unexpected situations or mishaps. Be vigilant, and monitor everything constantly.
All you have to do is to follow these simple steps. The result will be an efficient, effective yet easy-to-implement marketing plan that will help your construction business grow by leaps and bounds.
- Determination of your goals and objective
- Performing a SWOT analysis
- Know the market
- Creating the marketing budget
- Developing the construction marketing mix
- Monitoring the results
1. Determination Of Your Goals And Objective:
Before you start anything, it’s necessary to know what your end goal is. So try to determine what you want to achieve from the resulting market plan. Set the goals for the end of the year. Estimate how much revenue you want but are expecting to generate realistically. How much do you want it to grow till the end of the fiscal year? What about your highest grossing product, or service? Note down if you are trying to expand in other territories and creating more sources for generating revenue. Not only that, determine if you want to expand your business to other areas or not.
The reason for doing all this is because if your company is in possession of multiple revenue streams, you have to create a separate marketing plan for all of them that targets that specific sector. Remember, a solid, successful strategy can only be created if you have a measurable and realistic goal that can be discussed and compared with past results.
For each sector, you will find your target personas in different avenues for each sector. For example, suppose you are if you an electrical subcontractor and you need to find the general contractors, you would have to look for them among different unions or the National Electrical Contractors Association. But if you need facility managers as a subcontractor, then you need to search from LinkedIn and other associations such as BOMA. For search engine optimization or SEO, there might be a bit of an overlap and you will look for them on credible resources. But again, for every aspect, for every field, marketing is different and should not be treated as the same.
2. Performing A SWOT Analysis:
Now that you know what you want, you need to figure out your statistics. To be exact, you need to know your business’s intimate details including its weaknesses, strength, threats, and opportunities. And this evaluation can be done through SWOT analysis.
The SWOT analysis contains important information and statistics about your business’s internal and external factors that can potentially impact your firm. By going through this process, you will not only be able to create an effective marketing strategy, but you will also stay aware of others in the competitive market where your company is providing its services. This also has the side benefit of keeping you ahead of your competitors.
To understand the analysis, let’s divide it into different sections.
Strengths:
In what area does your business have the advantage over other competitors? Where is your company strongest? In which aspects is your firm doing better? What about the core operations and processes of your business? How strong are they running?
Weaknesses:
As a business owner, you need to know where your company needs improvement. SWOT analysis will look for any weaknesses in your existing area of operation. But what if you are thinking about expanding to not just other cities, but venture’s too. To understand, suppose that your company is about to enter the industrial sector from the commercial. What then? In that case, you need to know whether your organization is capable of pulling that off or not. Do you have enough resources, credibility, and content on the public websites, including both social media and the official site? For a construction company, do you have enough information to not just pull through that sector, but also become successful?
Opportunities:
On which opportunities do you want to focus? What service can your business provide that is new and innovative? When you are growing your business ventures, which area do you want to focus on? Think deeply. Be innovative, and original. Discuss your ideas with others, in turn; ask for their input and suggestions. Estimate how many sales your business will be expecting. Brainstorming with others have the benefit of providing you the unique concepts and developments, as they go out every day and observe with their own eyes what new trends are going on in the field. This will provide you new and exciting opportunities to run after every day.
Threats:
No matter how strong your business is, doubtlessly it will face some sort of threats, and it is your responsibility to be aware of them. Check if the concept and services of your business are still trending or not. If not, are they in danger of becoming outdated and replaced by newer ones? In that case, what can you do to combat that threat without any loss? How can you keep your team’s morale up and improve your organization with the help of modern technology?
3. Know The Market(s):
The next step in developing a marketing plan is to learn about the market your construction business is operating in. this is the third piece of the puzzle after the determination of your objectives and SWOT analysis, and just like the previous steps, it holds equal importance. Keep yourself aware of the new opportunities present in the market. Update your knowledge regarding the latest trends, and adapt accordingly. Think about any additional revenue stream that might prove to be successful for your business.
Change is perhaps the only constant in the world, so never be afraid to embrace that. Your business is successful in one sector, that is all well and good, but don’t just contend with that. Think about what other sectors you want to enter. What new opportunities you can take advantage of. Embrace the change, and don’t be afraid of the unexpected results. You will not necessarily get the results you were expecting originally, so adapt.
Although, if the construction business needs considerable capital but promises slow return entering a new sector, say industrial one, then take the necessary precautions, and adjust your finances and funds accordingly. If you are afraid to take this risk, and it is a valid one, then go with the slow and steady route. Continue your main operations or core projects that are solid sources of profit, and invest a minimal amount when the opportunity arises in the industrial sector for the business’s growth.
To summarize, review the local construction markets. Keep an eye out for the industry-specific sectors where you are interested in targeting. Create the goal of this market research reasonably with the help of determining objectives and timelines. In the end, the goal of a construction marketing plan is to grow the business in a strategic and profitable manner.
4. Creating The Marketing Budget:
It’s well and good that you are on your way to expanding your business, but do you have enough funds to do that?
Never, ever ignore the numbers. Doing that will come back to bite you at a time when you are least expecting it. Well, that would be a given in such a situation, so it’s more accurate to say that it will impact your business negatively. Note down how much workforce your business requires. Is there enough staff? Is there anyone in your employment that can successfully implement the marketing plan? And if your marketing plan proves to be successful and provides a considerable return on investment, then what about the additional workload? And the resulting sales? Can your business handle that?
Before you rush to invest, consider the size of your business. Is it a small company that takes a few projects per year, or a large organization that is now braving the new sectors and industries? Keep in mind the amount of money you can invest, and the additional costs that may result from growing operations. You can use rough numbers for smaller amounts, but always use a proper budget for increased amounts and sales.
5. Developing The Construction Marketing Mix:
Now that you have gone through all of the above steps, it’s time to think about promotion. Where can you advertise your services to the maximum target audience? Check your official website. Is it up to standards? If not, consider ways to ‘upgrade it’. For that, write blogs, articles, and whitepapers for the specific industry of your business. Build case studies around your construction projects, and if you can’t do all of that yourself, hire someone else to do it (like ME!). This will increase the credibility of your performance on social media, and this way you can make sure your content reaches the targeted personas, customers, and trade publications which will boost your sales. A clever marketing mix consisting of promotional campaigns on digital and other media, good content copywriting will make sure that your message will reach new potential customers.
6. Monitoring The Results:
Now it’s time to reap the profits. But not so fast.
In the fortunate case of your company successfully increasing the revenue by a great amount, congratulations! But don’t stop there. Create new goals. Arrange meetings with your staff, and discuss the results. Look for new ideas or just improvements on the existing ones.
But even if you were not that successful, don’t worry. Look for the reasons for your failure. Why was your business unable to create as much revenue as you wanted? Look for the answers. What’s the most valuable thing you got from the whole situation? Experience! Use that in the future. Take it as a lesson to understand the dos and don’ts I business. You can fail many times, but if you remain steadfast and don’t lose hope and courage, you will be successful. Use these unpleasant experiences to inspire yourself for greater success.
📸 Photo credit go to Jeriden Villegas on Unsplash and Cover Photo by James Sullivan on Unsplash