3 Online Marketing Tips for Construction Business Owners

ID-10098607No matter what line of work you're in, you need a strong online presence in order to get more leads and increase your customer base—phonebooks are now almost obsolete and traditional marketing techniques like TV and magazine ads are super pricey (and probably out of your small construction business owner budget). Thus online marketing is the way to go. First order of business: create an up-to-date professionally-looking website that can also be easily accessed through a smart phone. A blog can be beneficial too.

Other marketing options include using three of the nation's most popular social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. If you already know the basics of using these sites then good for you—you're on the right path. But to learn how to kick it up a notch and get more "fans" or "followers," you might want to consider using the following techniques.

Mark Your Specialization

Your team may be able to complete a number of various construction projects, but here's the thing about consumers: they don't want just a regular Average Joe building their offices or homes, they want the absolute best—an "expert" if you will. After all, when patients get sick they want the best doctor in the city to operate on them, correct?

Solidify your "expert" status by choosing a specialty such as retail construction, sustainable green building, or high-end residential projects for example. This doesn't mean that you have to limit what kind of projects you can take on, but a specialty can help you see which direction you need to take when building a campaign. For example, if you tweet #construction #greenbuilding at the end of your tweets and include a link to your business website, those looking for sustainable builders on Twitter will be able to find you with ease.

Create a Spokesperson

You may be a construction site, but that doesn’t mean you can't have a spokesperson or even a mascot to represent your company as a whole. In fact research shows that companies that have mascots generally perform better simply for the fact that consumers can identify the company and the product being sold. If you want your construction business to stand out amongst the crowds, a spokesperson could be the solution.

Not only that, a spokesperson typically has more success when trying to sell a product on social media than direct companies do. For example, Progessive Auto Insurance created a quirky spokesperson by the name of Flo a few years ago. Flo (not Progressive Auto Insurance) has managed to acquire more than 4 million Facebook fans. She still promotes Progressive products, but it seems less intrusive coming from her.

Offer Special Discounts

Last but not least you need to offer an incentive for consumers to add you/follow you on social media sites to begin with. One of the easiest ways to do this is to offer exclusive/unique coupons to consumers who add you on Facebook for example. But do make the coupon or offer differ on other social media sites that you use. No repeats. Again the key here is exclusive.

Kristie Lewis is a freelance resident blogger for constructionmanagementdegree.org, a site that helps direct students to specialized construction and building programs. She also likes writing articles that help small business owners in the same field.

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