While academics are currently arguing the point of whether ads even matter anymore, any small business owner will tell you they absolutely do. Your advertising campaign is sometimes the only way that people can find out about your business. For builders and contractors, construction advertising is a must.
While there are some particularities in the construction industry, some concepts are universal.
To ensure that you make all the right moves in construction advertising this year, remember these 6 concepts.
The language that you use for your construction company will determine how your audience perceives what you do and how you do it. While you may be interested in fixing broken sinks and damaged roofs, using negative language to describe them can be tricky. You should do what you can to avoid associating the work you do with things being damaged.
You should show off what you can do to renovate, renew, and refresh an old home. Talk about the kinds of renewable and green energy sources that you've used or installed. Be sure your language is always light and positive.
When you encourage people to contact you, use action language. Always sound assertive and you'll show your audience that you're confident about what you do.
That will draw them to you and trust your services.
High-quality photos are important to any construction business. Whether you're looking for before and after photos of a big project, or you need renderings of a high-rise, attractive photos will capture the attention of your target audience.
Whatever you do, stay away from stock photos or renderings of generic properties when you're talking about a specific one. The further you get away from the facts, the harder it will be for your audience to trust you.
Hire a professional photographer to take photos of your latest project. While you're at it, ask them to bundle a package together with headshots of your main team. You should have high-quality photos of you and your entire crew to show to potential clients.
Keep an eye on what's happening in home design so that your photos always look contemporary.
You might not think your name is important, but you'd be wrong. For years, companies would name themselves things like "A1 Construction" or "AAA Builders" just so they would be at the front of the phone book. Now that people aren't searching alphabetically anymore, what matters is location.
Search engines show which companies are located closest to you (to be covered in the next point). Choose a name that speaks to where you are and what you do. While something like Midtown Remodeling might seem generic to you, it'll come up at the top of the search results when someone in midtown searches "remodeling". Think about how easy you are to find when you decide on a name.
Search engines rely on tools called "web crawlers" when a search comes in from a user. On days previous to the search that's being called for, web crawlers have looked at every single page on the internet and indexed them all.
They look for keyword usage, location information, how fast a site loads, how often it's updated, and how well organized it is to make a judgment.
If you rank highly on all of these elements, search engines will rank you highly and put you in the results that users see.
Use your location, neighborhood names, and your zip code liberally throughout your site. This way, search engines will know which users to match you up with. They look at location data, recent searches, and account information from a user's search to determine roughly where they are as well.
While it might seem a little outdated, there are a lot of clever ways to make commercials now. You don't need to put together an eye-popping 30-second clip just in hopes that your local station will air it at 2 AM. You can create your own persona and define your own voice.
With video about to account for more than 80% of online traffic, you need to be creating video content.
Using social media, you can send your commercial out to your audience telling them who you are and what your construction company is all about. If you have an overall mission statement, you can make that clear in your video.
You can use Instagram or Facebook's "stories" feature to string together a series of short clips. Add subtitles to your video so that people can find out what you're about without pausing their music. They might just turn into customers if you start with a bang.
You need to do some research before you decide on your advertising campaign. Get to know who your competitors are and how they're reaching their audience. Look for glaring gaps and where people might be being left behind.
Check out which social media channels they seem to be responding the most on. If you're not on those channels, make a profile ASAP. You need to be where your customers are.
If you're more into high-end design and construction, advertise on lifestyle sites that cater to that kind of aesthetic. If you're building more rural homes, advertise on sites that seem relevant to that kind of lifestyle.
When you're engaging in construction advertising, you need to stay ahead of your competitors. Your best way to do that is to watch them and learn from them. If you see them making smart decisions, see how you could make those same decisions even better.