The Nuts and Bolts of Brand Marketing

Have you been exposed to marketing jargon like this, lately?: “Unlike more traditional and widely used forms of marketing, such as mass-media advertising used to generate short-lived bursts of new business from previously un-branded prospects, brand marketing facilitates exposure to your brand experience while reinforcing the brand’s value proposition.” Right… So… What does this even mean, and how the heck do we make it happen? Construction marketing is B-2-B marketing, and it’s important to engage in efforts that focus on building relationships rather than just converting prospects into customers. To get started right, it’s best for a company that is interested in brand marketing to invest in developing their branding.

A good place to start is with a Branding Statement and Brand Promise, and then making sure you have a unique value proposition in place to guide the rest of your brand marketing efforts. Having these in place will help determine what aspects of doing business with your company differentiates you from competitors (if there are any). It will also help establish the tone and mood for your communication tools and assist with positioning your company in the market so that you attract the RIGHT customers in the first place. Essentially, your brand promise and value proposition should identify and determine why customers choose your business rather than your competitors’. Developing these “guides” can be more difficult than you think, and using a development process is vital to getting something that is real and works out of the effort. Screw this up, and you’ll look back on the time and money wasted, and think: “all this brand marketing stuff is just B.S.!” However… get it right and you’re on your way to winning better projects, increased profitability, and aligning your company with the right customers!

Once you have your branding statements finalized, then it’s time to put brand marketing to work. You’ll need to assemble a comprehensive marketing toolkit that can be used across your entire brand community to create brand awareness and facilitate brand immersion. By the way… Your brand community is everyone involved with your business (employees, suppliers, subs, customers, bankers, etc.), so put some thought into the best methods and tools for communicating with a variety of audiences. None of this will be effective, of course, if your value proposition and brand-experience delivery isn’t appropriate and consistent. Unlike advertising, brand marketing effectiveness takes time and effort. It helps your business developers build faster, stronger relationships, and it gets you short-listed on the projects best suited to your company’s abilities and characteristics. Once your brand marketing is built and running on all cylinders, it will generate consistent and significant long-term results versus the short-term bursts garnered from typical ad campaigns.