What do you do to set your construction company apart from your competitors when viewed from a marketing perspective? How do your clients perceive your firm vs. how you and your employees perceive your firm? What is your competitive advantage and how do you exploit it? Better yet, how do you go about simply getting people to put your firm’s magnet on their refrigerator and call you first?
Developing a marketing plan for your company does not have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be overly high tech or include a “wow” factor. It doesn’t have to have a stamp from an MBA or include tens of thousands of dollars in the budget to be successful. At the end of the day a marketing plan doesn’t mean just advertising, it means conveying the “sum of the experience” that your firm offers. We can all place an ad in the paper. But can you pen articles for a local newsletter, or handwrite thank you notes to past clients and clients that you have met with? Where are you when it comes to thought leadership? Are you seen as an expert businessperson or an expert craftsman – or both? It isn’t just about placing an ad, it is about the venerable 4 – P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Notice that advertising (promotion) is only one aspect of the program.
Product:
What is it that you are selling? We sell a service that is dependent upon numerous products. Become as expert in your products as possible, but tout service if you are a high service provider. Service is the difference in most cases. It is important to actually back up your service claims with actual action or this will backfire in short order
Price:
Are you selling on price? Service? Believe it or not I believe that there is a market for firms in each category. But you must understand your target market and build your strategy accordingly. Very seldom will the markets mesh – you can’t be a low price volume firm marketing to demanding service oriented customers. No one will win in that arrangement.
Place:
Define your region that you have the most clear cut advantage in and exploit it for all it is worth. If you narrow your focus to those areas that have provided you with work in the past, your marketing dollars will go further and your success rate will climb. Blind marketing may yield results, but the yield will be much less efficient than defining the geographic areas where you have an advantage. Expand your regions of focus slowly and with thought, not just haphazardly.
Promotion:
Advertise; provide thought leadership (articles, lunch and learns) develop how to videos, tighten up your website; get interviewed on the radio, etc. Pick a firm color and roll with it. Pass out shirts with your logo on them. Sponsor a lunch for past clients, maybe an annual “Friends and Family” type of event. Bring in your subs. Bring on a forum of experts to discuss issues of the day. “Green” topics work well (at least until the tax credits run out at the end of the year!) Sponsor a good deed – it is amazing what a team building exercise this can be.

I’ve seen so many great ideas. One firm I know hands out excellent quality brooms with their logo emblazoned on them to homes near where they are working, extolling the level of “Care” that they provide to their clients. Another pays an artist to draw a pencil rendering of their home or office, frames it and presents it to the client after the final punchlist. We have used a “Good Neighbor letter” for years with great effect. We’ve also been diligent in handwriting thank you notes to people that have honored us by working with us or allowing us the opportunity to legitimately compete for their work, even if we were unsuccessful. We ask when we don’t get the job what we could have done better and learn from the responses, unless the client was driven only by cost. If that is the case, we learn that we didn’t screen them well enough and learn from it.
Developing a marketing package need not be an expensive proposition. In fact, many times marketing can cost a postage stamp. The key point that I am trying to make is that it is critically important to develop your own marketing plan and stick with it. Develop your own “stamp” to imprint on clients. I would love to be the company that “Dropped that darn broom on my porch” the other day when that client is thinking about building an addition. I would love to be the company that brought thinking capital into the workplace and discussed aging in place to a group of baby boomers or green technology to young families. We have the knowledge to market effectively, yet many (if not most) of us don’t do it and depend solely on word of mouth. Word of mouth is great – but that is only one P of the 4 P’s – don’t neglect the other three. And have some fun while you are doing it.
I would love to hear some low cost methods of marketing you have used successfully in the past.

I’ve always been somewhat of a Green builder.  Growing up and coming of age in a cold climate, I learned to  prefer 2 x 6 exterior walls for additional insulation.  We use to catch rainwater in an old cistern and pumped it out to water the garden.  We were squarely in the working class, so we re-used nearly everything and built for function way more than form.

Green idealism has been around for years.  But it wasn’t until recently with the surge in energy prices and the discussion about global warming that becoming Green is a necessary business strategy.  Customers look for some kind of tangible “green” symbol on anything and everything.  They now care about where the product was sourced, where it was built, the sustainability of the materials involved, etc.

I have always felt much of the recent green trend is just that – a trend with a defined shelf life.  With that sentiment, I do think a realistic greening of our industry is upon us.  This is an important shift in public perception.  I recently joined the U.S. Green Building Council and am diligently working towards the LEED AP certification.  Sustainability is upon us, and fighting the tide is a losing battle.  Although I could tell clients that Building Science has been a passion of mine since I was a teenager, there is nothing like the proverbial letters after one’s name to verify and qualify that statement.  I am beginning to feel like a credential collector, which is something I never thought I needed in this industry – but I believe that sentiment is no longer correct.

Our clients don’t just want a contractor – they want an expert partner that can guide them through the maze of questions and regulations.  They want someone who understands tax credits enough to point them in the right direction.  They want a contractor that cares about where the product was sourced, how sustainable the process was in both harvesting and building the end result.

As contractors, we can never be educated enough.  Building scientist (BS), renewable energy guru (REG), tax credit understander (TCU), sustainable product sourcer (SPS) - and, oh yeah – be able to build a facility on time and within budget with no punchlist.  Sheesh!  These are all letters that we now must, in some way, put after our name.

It is unfortunate in some aspects, but true and incredibly exciting in others - our industry has grown up and continues to do so, and we are quickly being considered more of a professional service than anything else.  We always use to wear multiple hats in our companies, now we may need multiple heads to wear all of them that people expect of us.  Let’s not fear these new expectations put upon us, but rather embrace them as a sign that we are succeeding at our goal, and are looked to for expert guidance and advice.  That alone is a powerful change in perception.  Trust me, it will take some time to get used to.

One sidebar to the recent presidential election that I believe is monumental in importance yet hasn’t garnered much press is the incredibly successful use of the internet in a major national campaign.

President-elect Obama’s online machine was staggering in its size and scope, and clearly demonstrative of the pervasive capabilities that the internet has to offer.  Rather than being told – in one-way fashion – what interests one should have from conventional print, television and radio sources, the internet allows the customer to drive the focus of the campaign.  Now we may not be running for national or local office, but those of us in the construction business have a lot to learn about fully utilizing this vast and economical resource.

If we were told by a marketing expert that for relatively little cost we could understand our clients’ desires better; grasp what is key in their decision making process; pre-filter potential clients and ultimately appear more substantial as an organization, we would ask to whom we write the check.  The funny thing is the web offers these capabilities to us as we speak.  I believe it is time to wholeheartedly embrace the next generation of the web and make your site an interactive business development and management tool.

While having some web presence, it could be argued, is better than none at all, I tend to disagree with this sentiment.  Many of us simply place our hard copy brochures electronically on our site and call it a marketing expense.  Something is better than nothing is about all of the thought that goes into it.  But there is vast potential for learning about your clients without much effort.  Industry specific newsletters (some offered by professional marketing firms or done by yourself with considerable effort) can be sent to those who choose to receive them from your site.  While to the recipient the newsletter is free, to the business owner the information provided is priceless.  Every article that your client navigates to; every supplier site they are sent to; every extra click that a particular link receives is logged and presented to you as useful data.  Which past projects are the most popular and should be used more extensively in your print marketing campaigns?  What “green” or bathroom products receive the most hits?  What demographic actually comprises your online market (or your potential customer market) that you may not even notice from the corner office?  Which services receive the most hits? 

The data from an interactive website can be used to help focus a marketing campaign and to more clearly define where the nuts and bolts of building are intersecting with the customers’ desires.  No information is perfect, and many of the “clients” poking around on your site may be tradesmen, dreamers or competitors simply e-surfing.  In some cases, the data may even be skewed somewhat.  But there is nothing like getting quality information and feedback from potential, current and past clients that are not answering a ho-hum survey, but actually choosing to spend time the way they wish to in the comfort of their own homes or offices.  The strength of this possibility cannot be understated. 

Let’s move our websites from the “old internet” to version 2.0.  You may be surprised at what you will find.  In the case of a campaign, there may be some 40 million or people willing to donate $5 to your cause.  In the case of our businesses, we aren’t asking for donations, we are asking for something even better – real data from real clients about what is important to them.