Why You Should Use Content Marketing to Promote your Building Business

If you’re looking to promote your home building brand to your local market it can be difficult to be heard over a raft of competitors. Attracting customers with valuable content that provides exactly what they’re looking for could be a way to set yourself apart from the competition.

When you create content, you’re providing free and useful information to your audience, attracting potential customers to your website, and retaining existing customers through quality engagement.

Plus, you’re also generating some major ROI for your company, as these content marketing stats demonstrate:

• Content marketing brings in 3X as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.
• SMEs that use content marketing get 126% more leads than those that don’t.
• 61% of online purchases are the direct result of a customer reading a blog.
• Companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get 3.5X more traffic than those that post four or fewer posts per month. 

Clearly, content equals business growth.

The overarching goal of content marketing is to create and share relevant content so your audience can learn about what you offer. You can use it to talk about your brand, your products or services and showcase your expertise.

Here are 5 steps for implementing a content strategy for your building company: 

1. Set your sights on your target audience:

Know the primary target audience for your product. Are you a B2C company targeting consumers as the end-customer? What type of consumers are you after? New homeowners? Renovators? Contractors? 

Do you sell services to other companies or professions? Are you after architects and designers? Builders and construction companies? Civil and structural engineers? Real estate developers?

Once you have identified your audience, determine what problems they are currently facing. Creating a buyer persona can help you better understand who your audience is.  Your content should address this. Customise your tone and the readability of your text to the type of audience you are trying to reach. 

For example, a potential homeowner will want to be inspired by what you can create for them and will want to be reassured about budgets and timings. They will not care for industry jargon. While builders or construction companies might appreciate your insight into the latest industry development and your grasp of building and resource consents. 

Developing a buyer persona can also help you come up with content that is focused on the different buying phases. Are they currently researching your product? Are they comparing between different options? Are they ready to buy? The pain points in each journey may be different, giving you more material to work with, the more you understand what your audience is going through at certain phases. 

It is also helpful to remember that purchase decisions are essentially emotional. Unlike ads, content can help you address the pain points of your customer and help you build a relationship with them. 

2. Find a format that works for you

Do you have resources to put together a case study or a guide? Have you tried doing how-to videos? Have blogs worked for you in the past? Is this something you can do regularly? Format is another decision point for today’s content marketers. Today’s audiences consume content in a variety of ways. 

It is important to know your capabilities and capacity for producing content. Will you be doing it yourself? Do you have dedicated and knowledgeable people in your company that can do it for you?

Next, you also need to know what works for your audience. Video is currently the #1 form of media used in content strategy overtaking blogs and infographics (Hubspot, 2020). However, take this with a grain of salt, different types of content work for different audiences, the best way to know is to test it. 

3. Create your content

When it comes to creating content, you should plan it out so you can have consistency in the publishing schedule. Plus you can align it to current events so that it makes sense to the reader. Here are some topic starters that can help fire up that content creation process:

• Inspiration - What new and inspiring builds have you just completed. What new building trends can you share? Are there new building materials that focus on sustainability? Is there a more energy efficient building process that you’ve started using?
  
  
• Positioning yourself in your industry - Establish your niche and work your way towards being a thought leader. It isn’t just consumers that are interested in how the building work is done. Writing in-depth about a construction process also benefits aspiring builders and other professionals in your field. 
  
  
• Product reviews & co-branding - Are there specific products or brands that you love to use on-site? Talk about them extensively. Tell people why you trust these brands. Use beautiful shots. It doesn’t just show your knowledge of the subject matter and your ability to stay on top of your game. It also builds goodwill. If you talk about popular brands, they might want to feature your piece in their popular site or give you a shout out in their social media platforms. 
  
  
• Client stories- Have you received any good feedback from a client? Get your client to tell their building story. Have them talk about their experiences with your company. Studies show that testimonials can improve conversion rate by as much as 80%. 
  
  
• Company announcements - Is there anything new and notable happening in your company? Recently completed projects, exciting developments, updates on the latest projects -- these are just some of the things that your target audience might find worthy of a read. 
  
  

4. Choose your channel

There are many channels available for you to disseminate the content you currently have. You can publish your content as a blog post and drive traffic to your blog pages using Google Ads. If you have video format content, don’t just host it on YouTube. You can drive more traffic to it with paid advertising. 

B2C companies find that social media paid advertising can be quite effective for content marketing. According to Hubspot’s 2020 State of Marketing Report, Facebook is the #1 social channel used by marketers with the highest ROI. 

B2B businesses, on the other hand, can look to professional networks such as LinkedIn to find profession-based target audiences. 

Instagram is ideal for high quality images such as inspiring shots of new builds posted with a short description. Video also performs well on Instagram.

5. Engage and convert your audience

At this point, it is important to actually measure which of your content your audience is consuming. Are they reading what’s on your website or your blog posts? Are they sharing it with others? Is your downloadable content being downloaded? Work with that and do more of what your audience loves. Set conversion metrics that are aligned with your company’s goals.

Next, look into engagement tactics you can use to convert a captive audience into clients. Email automation is one of the things you can start exploring. Having a CRM tool can help you nurture your leads better. Chatbots are also an up and coming tool you can use to have more touch points with your audience while they are exploring your content. 

Analytics and engagement tools are essential for creating sustainable strategies with repeatable successful outcomes.