Ready for the New Year?

The past couple of weeks, I’ve asked you what are you doing differently in the new year and discussed having a plan in place. Now ask yourself, “Do I have the tools I need to carry out my plan and to achieve my goals?”

The changing of the years is only important if things actually change. We all know many New Year’s resolutions fall be the wayside usually around mid-January, but your marketing & business plan needs to carry on over the next 11 months. You don’t want to get to July or worse, October, and realize the year is nearly gone and you don’t have the tools you need to achieve your goals for the year.

Last year we built out our CRM database and refreshed our own website design. I’ve started reaching out to many construction marketers and business developers via LinkedIn to introduce myself and The Brand Constructors because many marketers didn’t know we existed. We also transitioned to a new project management software that gives our teams more robust reporting and we can schedule our team’s work on projects to ensure we’re meeting long-term deadlines.

For 2014, we’re repositioning our website further with additional content and working on other “under the hood” improvements to create a better experience for our clients and prospective clients.

The tools we often create for construction marketers and business developers are:

• Website that you can update. We overhaul the design, reposition the brand, and build the website on a CMS (Content Management System) that gives you the keys to drive.
• RFP/SOQ/Proposal template where we craft the boilerplate text & position the company as well as design pages for most bids. Then we transition the InDesign file to the marketing team to use on individual proposals.
• Award submissions are sometimes similar to the proposal templates where we get the base or first submission done and then transition the files to the marketing team. Other times we do the awards year-to-year because the in-house team does not have the capacity to execute the awards with their current workload.
• Newsletters are great for internal communications and building a brand community with clients, subcontractors, vendors and suppliers. We generally redesign the newsletter and create some modular elements like sidebars and pull quotes to fit small articles in the future.
• Interactive Brochure is a modern take on the classic brochure. We still do brochures, but lately we’ve created iPad friendly interactive pdf files that allow the business development team to showcase the company’s relevant experience in a fun way. Because these are not printed, the marketing team can update them as frequently as needed via DropBox.
• Brand Unification is something we’ve been asked to do more lately where we review the current brand elements and work to tie them back together. This happens often with companies that had a fluctuation in brand management over the years or have grown without a strategic plan. Usually we are engaged after a company hits a wall like struggling to enter a new market sector or geographic market.
• Tradeshow Displays are important because they can be a high impact touchpoint with current and prospective customers and they usually cost a fair amount. Also, most in-house marketing teams do not have much experience creating tradeshow displays, but luckily we do. We create a plan to utilize the display for multiple uses as well as pre conference and post-conference marketing plans that are often overlooked.

Some times the need for these tools are painfully obvious and other times you do not know what you do not have and need so we do a Brand Audit. During a brand audit we review your company, brand, position in the market, goals and the tools you have on hand. From there, we give recommendations on the tools needed and then start crafting them (once approved of course).

So, do you have the marketing tools you need to make 2014 successful?