How To Produce A Construction Marketing Content Strategy

Did you know 93% of businesses use content marketing?
That’s a lot of businesses right? But not all businesses produce good content and it needs to be good – really good in fact – to be worthwhile to consumers.

Find out why 72% of businesses say that content marketing strategy is the key to success and how you can create an effective content marketing strategy for your business – less the headache.

Goal Setting

Setting construction marketing goals provides you with a long-term vision and short-term motivation. It helps you organize your time, team, and resources. And whether your goals are to generate more sales or becoming a keynote speaker, content marketing goals will enable you to create content that is more aligned to focus on achieving them. This synergy builds a focal point and purpose with each piece of content you create so that you can make the most of your content creation efforts.

A Deeper Look Into Goal Setting: KPI’s

Let’s create a hypothetical scenario, lets assume your businesses quarterly customer goal is 10 and to gain 10 new customers will require you to generate 100 website leads, and to generate 100 new website leads will call for 1000 unique website visitors. Recognising your KPI’s will help you allocating resources and choosing the content most likely to achieve your goals. 

Content Auditing 

The next step in creating a comprehensive construction content marketing strategy is to conduct a complete auditing of your content and assets.

What do you do better than anyone else in the industry? What content is over and underperforming? How can you help your audience? Do you need a CMS?

Your goal here should be to identify all the assets your business uses to attract and engage your audience and then to see how effective your content is - identifying the KPI’s which will help achieve your overall goal.

If your campaign which includes a lead magnet sees increased engagement you’ll want to know exactly why it's performing well. Similarly with content which is underperforming. You’ll need to recognise which content to continue with, cancel or optimise to better achieve your goals.

CRMs like HubSpot enables you to track detailed KPI’s for all of the content you produce, simultaneously producing reports in seconds - which would otherwise take you days.

A Deeper Look Into Auditing: Content Plan

A good content plan takes into account any up and coming projects, events or activities you have planned in your calendar that would involve/require content.

In doing this you will identify content opportunities that could help promote and support each activity in a timely fashion.

Understanding Your Audience

Understanding your audience is critical to a successful construction content strategy. Don’t be afraid to go deep here – spend time scoping out audience. Speak to all departments of your business to see if they have any insights which could help you form a greater understanding of your audience.

It is recommended to interview your customers/audience to identify the factors which encouraged them to work with you - or not.

Ask open ended questions like ‘what was your thought process when you were considering a product solution?’ ‘What stood out about the product you choose to specify?’, Glean every bit of insight you can find out about your audience.

You can then use this information to map out the route your audience takes when considering a construction product solution which yours can solve.

Take a our graphic for example ‘The Specifiers Journey’. This graphic clearly and comprehensively maps out the specification process from the specifiers perspective.

By clearly defining your audiences buying process you can create opportunities where content can help your customers find solutions to their queries whenever and wherever they need them – increasing your chances of conversion.

A Deeper Look Into Audience: Habits and Preferences

Is video big in your sector? Does your audience tend to spend time on certain social media, like Facebook or LinkedIn? When do they turn to Google for information? Are they likely to subscribe to a newsletter? – Consider these questions as they will vastly influence the kind of content which you produce.

Examining The Competition

By now you should have a good understanding of which content you will be moving forward with, the audience you will be targeting, and the goals you hope to achieve.

This section is about scoping out your competition and finding opportunities where you can out-leverage them with content. Here you want to consider the following questions: What seems to be working for them? Are there things that your competition isn’t doing which could convert your audience? Perhaps you realised that only 5% of all creation budgets are going towards podcasts at the moment – could this be an opportunity?

A Deeper Look Into Competition: Keyword Research

Conducting detailed keyword research is imperative when scoping out your competition and when forming a content marketing strategy – after all you want to use the right language which attracts your audience right?

98% of specifiers prefer to conduct research online. They do this by typing a question into Google which includes keywords or a keyword phrases.

Google’s complex algorithms sift through the immense amount of webpages indexed and analysed by their “spiders”. Spiders are a software which crawl through each page on every website on Google. Google then matches your individual pages to the keywords and keyword phrases used by the users during searches.

In other words if you understand the language your audience use when searching for construction product information, then you know what language to use when generating content to attract and help them. However, without a thorough keyword your chances of being competitive is thwarted.

Choosing An Appropriate Content Management System

A Content Management System (CMS) is the underlying piece to any content marketing strategy as it is the place where you house all of your content, and content data. A CMS allows you to track manage, and create content all while gaining deeper insights using advanced analytics.

HubSpot is a popular CMS as you can plan, publish, produce and measure your results all in one place. Another popular CMS is WordPress and although it isn't as advanced as HubSpot you can add the HubSpot WordPress plugin for free web forms, live chat, CRM access, email marketing, and analytics.

Allocation Of Resources

Now that you know what type of content you’re planning to create, who it’s for, and where you’re planning to share it, its essential to ensure you have the resources needed to deliver on your content marketing strategy.

This involves answering questions like:

• Who’s responsible for producing and maintaining content?
• What human, physical or digital tools and resources do you need to create the content?
• How will you go about repurposing content?
• How best do you produce content on a time poor schedule?

Creating Content... Finally

Evidently there’s a lot of prep work needed in your content marketing strategy before you can actually create content, but now it's time to do just that!

At this stage you will have a clear understanding of what content you will be producing and how to produce it. Whether that be video, blogs, ebooks, or infographics.

Publish

The next stage of your construction marketing strategy is to publish your content. You want to ensure as many people as possible see your content – as much of the right people.

To do this you must make sure your content is being distributed on the right channels used by your prospects. This means posting regularly to social media, making sure you have an effective email marketing strategy to distribute blogs/articles/alerts on a regular basis.

The worst thing you could do is to post your content and hope for the best – you will be very disappointed if you do that.

Measure

Finally it's time to measure - to assess the success or short comings of your content. To do this, you’ll need to return to those KPIs you set at the start of the content strategy plan, and see what’s changed and whether you’re hitting your targets and what needs to be adjusted to ensure your targets are met.

To track your KPI’s you can:

• Check HubSpots reporting services to analyse how your content is performing against your targets
• Examine through Google Analytics
• Measure sharing activity through Buzzsumo
• Use SEMrush to track Google rankings

That’s it! Now you know how to create a successful construction content marketing strategy from beginning to end.

Conclusion

With a great content marketing strategy and a dynamic CMS you can supercharge your construction content marketing strategy to drive results for your construction product brand. But take time when making one as mistakes can be costly!

About Insynth

At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.

We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.

As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.

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