Construction Marketing For Business Growth

Understanding Construction Industry Marketing

In the present economy, the competition in the construction market is increasing as fewer people have the means to build new homes. Construction businesses need a solid marketing strategy to get new clients and grow their revenues.

The experts of dNOVO Group Marketing Agency created this guide to construction marketing. It accumulates decades of experience in boosting lead generation for construction companies in Canada.

The guide will help your company strengthen your company’s online presence, and increase your SEO rankings, website traffic, and conversations. Learn how to build a consistent digital marketing strategy that will help you double your business’ annual revenues.

Ready for your company to change for the best? Get some warm beverage and let’s dive deep into the ins and outs of construction marketing.

Construction Industry in Canada: Brief Overview

In this section, we provide several construction industry insights we picked from different open sources.

According to the Canadian Construction Association, the construction industry contributes $151B to the Canadian economy annually accounting for 7.4% of the country’s GDP.

The main sectors of Canada’s construction market are Commercial, Industrial, Infrastructure, Energy and utilities, Institutional, and Residential Construction. The residential construction accounts for over 50% of the market’s output. That’s why any changes in this sector impact the construction industry on the whole.

According to the Canadian Government, 61.5% of construction companies are micro (less than 5 employees), 37.4% are small (less than 100), 1% are medium-sized (100-499), and 0.1% are large (500+ employees).

The market was booming in 2021 due to the historically low interest rates. However, it began declining in 2023 due to issues in the residential sector, such as high construction costs, labour shortages and low business confidence despite the stable growth of non-residential sectors.

Canada Construction Market Report by Global Data predicts a decline in the construction industry till 2025 when the market will experience an average annual growth of 2%.

The company attributes this future growth to the transportation, renewable energy and industrial sectors. Another factor that will boost the construction industry in 2025-2031 is the plans of the Canadian Government to build an additional 3.9M houses to fix the housing shortage.

So far, it’s unclear which companies will participate in this endeavour, whether the government will employ large market players or small local businesses in each province/county separately, and how the employment process will be organized.

Overall, the perspectives of the Canadian construction industry look promising for the market players. Now, you need a good marketing strategy to boost your reputation and help you stand out in the competition.

Building Construction Marketing Strategy

The most efficient way to promote construction firms is by building a strong online presence. The majority of paying clients are searching for (and finding!) contractors on the Internet. That’s why we suggest focusing on digital marketing strategies for your construction firm.

The Essential Components of a Construction Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing strategy for a construction firm must include the following tactics:

1. Website
2. SEO strategy
3. Content Strategy
4. Pay-per-click
5. Social Media Marketing
6. Email outreach

We’d like to point out that the first four marketing tactics work for all types of businesses. However, your SMM, PPC, and email outreach marketing campaigns will depend on the type of potential customers you want to win.

For example, construction firms working mostly with individual clients will benefit from SMM. However, if you have a B2B business model, you will need to look into cold email outreach.

Planning Marketing Strategies Step-by-Step

We suggest that construction companies take the following steps when building their marketing strategy:

1. Identify your goals & objectives
2. Choose marketing channels
3. Outline the timeframe & KPIs for goal attainment
4. Plan marketing campaigns across channels
5. Allocate the budget
6. Assign marketing roles
7. Choose tech stack
8. Correct budget or plan if necessary

Marketing Guides for Contracting Businesses

This guide is part of the series of marketing materials created by dNOVO experts for contracting businesses. These guides will help businesses increase website traffic, generate more leads, and gain new clients.

Check out other marketing materials in the series:

• Roofing SEO
• Roofing Marketing
• Contractor Marketing
• Contractor SEO
• Construction SEO
• Landscaping Marketing
• Home Remodeling Marketing
• HVAC Marketing
• Plumbing Marketing

Building a Construction Website that Converts

A construction company website in many cases is the first thing your prospective clients will learn about your business. You need to make sure that it leaves a good first impression and meets the expectations of your visitors.

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If your construction company is a new business, chances are you already have a website. However, it might be the case that it doesn’t meet all the requirements for a website of a construction company.

In this section, we discuss the essential elements of the construction website. Additionally, we list the technical requirements in the section dedicated to SEO.

Benefits of a website for construction marketing:

1. Attract and educate future customers
2. Help with SEO strategy
3. Convert customers
4. Build brand awareness

Header & Footer

Headers and Footers are essential parts of each and every page of your website. Usually, they contain the same information:

• company name and logo
• links to the pages
• contact data

The header’s links are arranged in a compact menu with drop-downs, while the footer links are usually demonstrated in lists. A good practice is to fix the header so that it remains available at the top of the page as website visitors scroll down the page.

In the screenshot below you can see the example of a header (white background) and footer (gradient purple background):

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Homepage

The homepage is often the first page of your website that your potential clients will see. Usually, it contains a shortened version of other pages of your website.

We suggest including the following information in it:

1. A short overview of your services
2. Your Unique Sales Proposition
3. Icons of the awards you got
4. Book an appointment form for easy contact
5. Gallery of your projects
6. Testimonials of satisfied clients

Pages for construction services

These pages will give all the necessary information about the services you provide to your potential clients. Build each page around the handpicked keyword and create supporting content. In this way, you will also support your SEO efforts and help your target audience to find your company.

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Gallery of Completed Construction Projects

The gallery is proof of your completed projects. It helps build the trust of potential clients. We suggest hiring professional photography services for the end results. In this case, you will get beautiful images that will catch the eyes of your potential clients and will push them towards the desired buying decision.

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Blog

The blog is a powerful marketing tool and we recommend creating fresh posts on a regular basis. It will help you in three main areas:

1. Educate your potential customers
2. Support your SEO strategy.
3. Give more authority to your pages by smart interlinking.

We suggest writing about construction-related topics that include some DIY suggestions such as choosing construction materials or automating the process with construction software.

In the content strategy section, we discuss in great detail how to choose topics for your blog.

Cost

Many construction companies create pricing pages. In their opinion, it’s best to be upfront about the cost of building. In this case, your sales team will not waste time on people who are interested in the lowest price on the market and are even ready to

Some marketers and sales professionals are against this practice since learning about prices early on in the sales process can “scare off” potential clients. This can be especially critical in the current economy, particularly if your target audience isn’t looking for luxury or premium construction services.

Your sales team would want to emphasize aspects of your work that justify higher costs to your potential clients.

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About

This page is often used to build rapport with potential clients and create brand loyalty. This page is essential for many prospective customers to make a decision since it can show not only the company’s story but also the people they’ll be working with, like workers, construction managers, and the owner.

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Search Engine Optimization for Construction Businesses

This page is a general overview of search engine optimization for construction marketing. We have a large construction SEO guide that will discuss all the aspects laid down in this section in detail.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the basis of any SEO strategy. Keywords are words, phrases and sentences people use to look for products and services online. You need to choose the right keywords for your website to be able to get to the top of the search engine result page.

Keywords have three main characteristics:

• Volume

The volume shows the number of searches for this keyword online per month. You will want to rank for as many high-volume keywords as possible. Check out the “builder for custom homes” keyword. It enjoys 1,300 searches monthly as shown in the screenshot below:

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• Difficulty

Difficulty shows what it will take to get to the top of the search. More often than not, this keyword characteristic makes a marketing manager reconsider choosing the word despite its high volume.

For example, check out the “Construction Company” with 5,400 searches annually. Its keyword difficulty is 70% meaning you’ll need to get 237 backlinks from high-authority domains to be able to get to the top of the SERP.

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• Intent

Intent shows what people are usually searching for when they’re looking for a certain keyword. There are three types of intent. Informational means that people want to learn about a certain topic. Here’s an example:

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Commercial means that people are considering different companies that provide a certain service (or sell a certain product). Transactional intent means that people are ready to take action (like booking an appointment or making a purchase).

These intents reflect the complex buyer journey that a person takes before solving their problem (from educating about the issue to hiring somebody or doing it on their own).

Technical SEO

Technical SEO encompasses a wide range of activities aimed at optimizing website’s technical characteristics to meet Google requirements. The majority of these technical characteristics revolve around website usability.

When Google assesses two webpages with similar content quality and domain authority, it will prefer the website which provides a better UX to the website visitors.

The technical SEO includes:

1. Improving website architecture
2. Making navigation easy
3. Increasing the website speed
4. Removing duplicate content
5. On-page SEO

Local SEO

Local SEO helps your company attract the local target audience. In a nutshell, it comprises two practices: Google Business Profile and targeting local keywords.

In the screenshot below, you can see the page optimized for local search in Burlington.

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Google Business Profile is free for any business and has a number of advantages. First, your business is shown on Google Maps. Second, your business has a special section in Google Search when people are looking for your company’s name.

Third, you rank better in local searches. Fourth, you can provide all the necessary business information right in Google (like contact data, opening hours, and links to the website). Finally, Google Business Profile enable your customers to rate your company and leave their reviews.

Check out an example of a Google Business Profile on Google Maps:

Link Building

Link building will help Google crawlers understand the authority of your website in the construction industry and the authority of some of your web pages on your website.

You’ll be working with three types of links:

• External

These are links on your website that lead to other websites. They help your website visitors to learn more about the topic you discuss on your website. They also serve to back up your claims.

For example, if you discuss the legislation governing construction sites, you need to point to a specific page on the website of your province’s government.

• Internal

Internal links show Google crawlers which pages on your website have the biggest authority. The more links point to a certain page, the more authority this page gets. That’s why the general recommendation is to place the links to your service pages on your blog posts.

• Backlinks

Backlinks are the links to your website placed on other websites. There are two types of backlinks: good ones and malicious ones. The former are the backlinks from reputable websites with high authority. The latter are the backlinks from websites of shady businesses, for example, gambling websites.

As part of your SEO efforts, you will have to disavow the malicious backlinks in Google Search Console.

Content Strategy for Construction Marketing

Content strategy is one of the pillars of construction marketing. In this section, we’ll discuss its benefits for your business and how to form a good content plan.

Benefits of Content Marketing for a Construction Business

1. Help SEO

One of the main goals of content is to make your website rank high for certain keywords. To achieve this goal, you’ll need to create a content piece fully dedicated to this keyword. A good content strategy is based on the keywords you choose for your website.

Additionally, you can “support” critical pages by creating additional content pieces. Place links referring to the critical page on these supporting content pieces, e.g., blog posts. This practice will signal to Google crawlers that you consider this page as the most important.

2. Establish Yourself as an Expert

Demonstrating expertise to your potential customers is important. Building a house is a major life investment and people want it to be sturdy, last long and be safe for their health.

Use content to show your expertise in construction to ensure your prospective clients that you know what you’re doing.

Check out this piece of content discussing the common mistakes people make when building custom houses:

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3. Earn the Trust of a Prospective Customer

The demonstrated expertise along with customer reviews, earned awards, and photos of your work can help you earn the trust of the website visitors. Trust is pivotal if you want people to become your customers.

4. Shape buyer Journey

The buyer journey starts long before a prospective customer gets to your website. However, it can end here if you go smart about your content, links, and CTA (call-to-action).

Think about your potential customer’s buyer journey from researching a certain topic, to reviewing companies to making a decision.

Create content that will help them at each stage of their journey. Check out the example below:

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The company starts with content talking about the issues a person can have while making house additions. It has a link to the pricing page for the second-floor additions. This page contains a CTA with a pop-up widget where the website visitor can book a consultation.

5. Convert

Last but not least, your content must convert. What does it mean? A potential customer should be gently persuaded to make a certain action:

• a phone call
• an email
• an appointment booking.

To achieve this goal, you need to leave as much contact data as possible.

Check out this example here:

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In the website menu, you can see a link to the contact page next to a call CTA button with the telephone number of the company. Below, there’s a consultation request widget that will enable a website visitor to book an appointment right there.

How to Form a Content Plan for a Construction Company

Content Plan is a document listing the content pieces of a certain website. It contains both historical data (the past written and published content pieces) and the planned content.

Usually, it contains:

• the stages of content production
• the deadlines
• the names of people responsible for a certain stage
• the links to content: back-end (e.g., Google Doc) and frontend (e.g., the website page)
• the completion check boxes

…and basically anything that fits your content creation process.

1. Choose topics & the type of the content

One of the hardest parts of content plan creation is deciding on the topics and types of content.

How to pick content topics for construction marketing:

• Start with SEO keywords
• Check out your competition
• Visit forums
• Collect FAQs from your customers

Once you’ve formed a number of topics to write about, you can then assign them to different content types for the construction business:

• Blog posts
• Service area pages
• Construction services pages
• FAQs
• Supplementary pages

Check out this example of content that discusses the project documents necessary for the construction process:

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2. Outline the steps for creating a content piece

Keep in mind that the content creation process goes beyond a mere writing task. You’ll have to start with researching LSI keywords, creating visuals, planning interlinking and backlinks, staging your content on your website, and reposting it on social media.

You should also make plans for the team for the vacation period. Let’s say, the SEO manager goes on vacation for a couple of weeks in July, you can ask them to pick the keywords for July and August in advance and set up automated reports sent directly to a marketing manager.

3. Identify the roles

The tasks we mentioned in the previous items require different sets of knowledge and skills. You’ll need an SEO specialist, a content writer, a webmaster, a link builder, and a designer. If you want to showcase your successful projects, you will also have to hire a professional photographer or even videographer.

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In the example above, you can see the results of the work of all the aforementioned professionals:

• designer – photo and placement of elements
• content writer – texts
• SEO specialist – keywords & on-page SEO
• webmaster – webpage layout + widget.

4. Plan the timeframe

Each of the tasks will require some time to accomplish. Additionally, some unforeseen circumstances can delay each step of the process. You need to plan for it in advance, setting the deadlines slightly past the time a certain task will require.

5. Summarize the plan

Summarize your content plan in one file. Some marketing teams often use Google Sheets or online Excel for this task. Others prefer the calendar or special content calendar tools.

Check out an example of the Content calendar below featuring different stages of the content publishing process:

Whichever you choose make sure that your whole content marketing team is on board, has access to it, and understands the process.

6. Be ready to revisit the plan in a couple of months

Remember, that any activity seems straightforward and simple at the planning stage. After getting into numerous bumps on the road you will understand that the initial content strategy for your construction company was unrealistic. That’s when you need to make changes.

Social Media Marketing Campaigns for Construction Companies

Social media marketing (SMM) works best for a medium or a small construction company that wants to attract the attention of individual homeowners and people looking to build their homes.

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The advantages of SMM

Social media has a number of advantages for your construction marketing:

1. Build communication with your past, current and potential customers.
2. Share one piece of content across multiple platforms.
3. Your followers can share your content on their social media pages.
4. Create posts tagging your clients and harnessing their networks.
5. Your posts can go viral reaching a large number of people.
6. Backlinks to your website.
7. Traffic to your website.

Choosing Social Media Platforms

Managing multiple social media accounts across several platforms might be hard. It’s especially hard when your marketing budget doesn’t allow you to hire an SMM manager. In many cases with SMB construction companies, it’s the owner who ends up doing SMM for their own firm.

That’s why we suggest first focus on one platform and see how it goes. Then slowly add one more.

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Firms choose social media platforms depending on the type of content they are going to post. For example, if you have a lot of videos, we suggest TikTok.

The platform choice also depends on the type of construction you provide. Beautiful pictures of luxury homes will be most popular on Instagram.

Topics for Construction Social Media Accounts

The topic choice for social media will also depend on your target audience. In general, we suggest the following topics:

1. Special offers
2. Videos and photos of your completed projects
3. Videos and photos of your working process
4. Reposts of your blog posts.
5. Employee Spotlight page or post.

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Email Marketing Campaigns

This section of our guide is divided into two subsections for B2C and B2B construction companies respectively.

Email Outreach for B2C Construction Companies

As mentioned, an email marketing campaign works best for B2B construction companies. As a B2C business, you can still put marketing efforts into it. Use automated email campaigns for two major purposes:

Warm up your potential customers.

To attain this goal, you will need to create a landing with valuable gated content or a widget that collects the contact data of your website visitors. The widget can be a simple “book an appointment” form or a more complex calculator for the cost of construction projects.

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Send special offers to former clients

Some experts think that there’s no point in sending emails to past clients. It’s because email outreach is mostly used by B2C companies for client retention or upsell. Individual clients would rarely order more construction projects after you’ve built their house.

The exception is the people who invest in real estate. Another possibility is the clients who expressed interest in house additions They might be interested in making more additions in the future.

Email as a B2B Lead Generation Tool

B2B construction companies can leverage email marketing campaigns for lead generation. In some organizations, this type of outreach is conducted by marketers since you need a good email writer to compose personalized emails.

In other organizations, it’s part of the sales process, since such campaigns are often augmented by LinkedIn outreach and phone calls. Thus, you need a good SDR to get through the objections of decision-makers.

To succeed, you’ll also need a contact list of potential customers that you can generate within your company or buy from a business that specializes in this type of service.

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Construction Marketing Ideas

In this section, we discuss construction marketing ideas that will help you boost your marketing efforts and achieve desired results faster.

PPC

The first on our list of construction marketing ideas is Pay-Per-Click advertising. This is the most popular type of online ads when you pay per each click on your ad.

The benefits of PPC for your construction marketing are plenty:

1. Get website traffic
2. Reach the necessary segment of your company
3. Get temporary backlinks

You can place your PPC campaign in Google search, YouTube, social media, and various websites. You can choose the landing page for each campaign individually.

Client testimonials

Customer testimonials are one of the most efficient marketing ideas in terms of price-effect ratio. It will help you persuade your potential clients that your company is trustworthy. In other words, it’s great for conversions.

Ask your existing customers for their testimonials. It can be a simple review on your Google Business Profile (as shown in the screenshot above) or a video recording of them sharing their experience with your construction business.

Don’t forget to show customer testimonials on your website:

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Engaging video content

Video content can help you increase brand visibility and build the trust of your clients. In the past, construction company owners thought that they should only post videos containing the results of their work. We disagree with this approach to video content.

Search for “watch people working” and “beautiful houses” on YouTube. You would be surprised to find out that the first three videos in the first category have accumulated 46.3M views, while the first three videos in the second category have earned only 3.5M views.

Humans love watching others work. Don’t hesitate to use this peculiarity of ours to your own advantage. Film your construction professionals at work and share on your social media platforms.

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The benefits of video content are:

1. It catches and holds attention.
2. It increases the on-page sessions.
3. It can be used in multichannel marketing across different platforms.

Co-marketing campaigns

In a nutshell, co-marketing campaigns are campaigns that your company plans and implements with another business. Good examples of such businesses would be building material companies, furniture manufacturers or retailers, designers, etc.

Apart from joint marketing efforts, you can also agree to recommend your existing customers the services your partner provides.

Such recommendations can assist your construction business in generating leads and converting them more easily since there’s already trust in your firm.

Hiring a Construction Marketing Agency

Outsourcing marketing efforts is always good for small and medium businesses. Construction firms are no exception.

Managed services have several benefits over in-house teams, such as the cost-efficiency ratio, the timeframe, and the results. That’s why we suggest hiring a construction marketing agency.

dNOVO Group has a decade of experience in managing construction marketing for our clients. We provide the following services:

1. Building and supporting a website.
2. Construction SEO strategy.
3. PPC.
4. Email marketing.

Over the years, we’ve helped multiple clients reach the top of search results, increase their website traffic and conversion rates, and grow the number of clients and annual revenues.

Are you ready to boost your lead generation?

Book a free one-hour consultation with us.