Content for Online Construction Marketing
In Construction, Content is King.
Do You Have What It Takes to Build Your Business?
If you’ve been following the changes taking place in B2B (business-to-business) marketing, then you know online content is king. Since construction marketing IS B2B marketing, all this hub-bub should have you very concerned about who’s handling your online efforts such as writing content for your website (which now needs constant refreshing to maintain its popularity with the search engines). Worse still, who’s writing your social media content? After all, it’s the stuff that represents your company across all the popular engagement platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube. As a construction company, you can’t have just any-old stay-at-home blogger posting your material. What do they know about your kind of construction? What do they know about your real audience or how your company voice sounds to your long-time customers? Asking why is this even important? I’ll tell you why.
I’m sure you’ve heard things like “the phone book is dead,” and that the “younger generations who are taking the reins of long-standing businesses don’t prefer to network face-to-face anymore.” Or “Jobs are being won across state lines by johnny-come-lately’s who’s online marketing is beating up on the rest.” While some of this is true, more and more customers and prospects are finding their resources online by searching Google, Bing, YouTube, etc. They are evaluating your expertise and capabilities based upon what they learn about you online. The content that represents your company online is important to these search engines who determine who you are, what you do, and how your company should be categorized in their systems. Give the responsibility of generating your digital content to someone who doesn’t know you or your industry, and you’re asking for trouble in the form of lost visibility, lost opportunities and flagrant brand misrepresentation.
So, who should you rely on to handle this new and all-important marketing chore? You could let your staff do it. But, before you do, make sure they like to write content, post blogs, update website material, and manage online conversations. If they are averse to these tasks, then they’re probably not a good choice for this work even though they are employed by your company full-time. Not everyone likes to write, and very few like to write a lot. Think back to when you were last in school. Did you get super excited when the teacher assigned a 50-page report on some random topic? How about having 5-page reports due in every class at the same time while still having to study for tests and completing regular assignments? This is kind of what it’s like to manage online content for companies. Unless you love to write and generate topics to write about, this can get old really quickly.
What about the designer you hired to throw together your website? How knowledgeable are they about construction topics and issues? I know many graphic designers, and very few are good writers (actually I don’t know any who are… no offense to my creative friends who are really great at other things). You may not know it, but “missing content” is the #1 reason websites fail to launch, and “bad content” is the #2 reason sites fail to convert visitors to prospects and clients. Now, I do know a lot of marketers who are good writers, and many of them even enjoy the content development process, but not many of them know construction or the issues facing the industry. They know how to market a variety of companies, but don’t really understand the relationship-driven business development process the industry prefers or how construction marketing should integrate and support that process.
Bottom line, it’s become very important to choose your online content developer/writer/publisher very carefully. Your digital content now determines how successful your online marketing efforts are, and now that the reign of digital media has changed the world of B2B marketing forever, it’s more important than ever to find experienced construction marketers to manage your company’s online presence. The Brand Constructors can help.