Some of the biggest costs that face construction marketers today—advertising, print literature, reliance on a sales team—can be easily reduced.
As you look to develop a budget for the 2015 year, we want to help you make the most out of your marketing efforts while reducing your costs.
Our friends at Modern Marketing Partners have been helping businesses make the most of their marketing, advertising, and trade show budgets; and we share this great advice to help you lower your marketing budget while maximizing marketing results.
1) Know Thy Customer
Marketing is expensive and mistakes can devastate a marketing budget. Avoid mistakes by getting to know your customer. Know the segments, needs, decision makers, and more by gathering and using data. House all your customer data in a database or by using marketing automation software that can be updated with ease and used for marketing.
Conduct research. One of the easiest ways to do this is by regularly surveying your customers. Surveys are incredibly inexpensive and they will give you valuable information that can be used as a foundation for guiding marketing decisions. If you have trouble getting your customers to take your surveys, provide incentives such as discounts or special offers to customers who take them.
2) Banner Ads vs. Billboards
Advertising is often the most costly part of a marketing budget. Adjust your budget to invest more into search engine optimization (SEO), and content marketing through blogging and social media.
Your website ranking can make or break your marketing efforts. Chikita, an ad network, has continuously monitored search results to find that the top result on Google sees a 32.5% click-through rate, with continuous drop-offs from there (91.5% of clicks occur on the first page).
What does this mean? Unless your website is ranked in the top few search result positions, all the advertising in the world won’t help. Having a mobile-friendly website is also critical.
3) Print Brochures are so 2003
Print may not be dead, but it could use a lifeline. Whether seeing decreasing success in direct mail or increasing costs in brochure printing, it may be time to make the move to digitize.
Actively provide PDF versions of your advertising and reduce print runs. You can always keep brochures ready to be printed single-run, as opposed to wasting the space to store thousands of brochures.
Further, you can upload all of your PDFs to SlideShare, allowing customers to find your material more easily!
4) Build Your Brand with Publicity
A saying that you need to take to heart: Advertising and Marketing is about saying how great you are. PR is getting others to do it for you.
PR or publicity placements are free by definition, with awareness building that rivals advertising!
A few examples of how you can use PR to your advantage:
- Release Products using Free or Paid PR Wire Services
- Free: Check out this list of Free PR Submission Sites
- Paid: Great sites include PRWeb, BusinessWire, and PRNewswire
- Build Relationships with Reporters and Journalists
- Find Public Speaking Opportunities
- Go Guerrilla
A few good ideas for what to share:
- New Product
- New Website
- New, Significant Customer
- Whitepaper
- Partnership
- Changing a Name
- Any of these 30 Newsworthy Press Release Ideas
Make PR integral to your complete and integrated marketing communications strategy.
5) Repurpose your content
Content is king, but it doesn’t have to take up a large portion of a marketing budget. Create content that relates to and will interest your current/potential customers. Use the same content in different formats.
Blog about your projects, post about the projects on social media, create a corresponding video (time lapse videos of projects are simple and effective!), introduce to customers and prospects via email, develop surveys, host a webcast or podcast and much more.
In addition to this, creating ‘evergreen’ content will give you more mileage to your money. What is evergreen content?
“Evergreen content is quality, useful content that is relevant to readers for a long period of time.”
The key with evergreen then is that this quality content means something to a visitor who found the post the day it was published and one who happened upon it six months later. This means that, for the time it takes you to write one piece of content, you can reach more users.
Reducing marketing expenses for your construction firm can be simple. Just be sure you have a plan. This is why we welcome you to join thousands of members in one of our LinkedIn Groups: