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Construction Marketing:

How to Use Content to Grow Your Business

A guide to using content marketing for companies of all sizes in the construction industry

(Plus examples of excellent construction marketing)

This is a comprehensive beginners’ guide to content marketing for businesses in the construction industry. It’s intended for businesses that are new to the idea of content marketing — from solo entrepreneurs to large companies. 

Table of Contents:

1. Different types of construction marketing

2. What is content marketing?

3. Content marketing for the construction industry

4. The benefits of content marketing for construction companies

5. Different types of content for construction marketing

6. How to create good content for construction marketing

7. How can people find your content?

8. Examples of great construction content marketing

• This article focuses on one broad type of marketing: content marketing.

Of course, there are many ways to market a business in the construction industry. For example, it’s often said that construction businesses depend on relationships — so work typically comes from repeat clients, and from referrals. And the success of bids and proposals is influenced by relationships too. New clients emerge from Chamber of Commerce breakfasts, golf tournaments, and awards galas.

Content marketing complements the marketing you’re already doing. In particular, content actually helps with relationship marketing and social media marketing. It can kick off a relationship by introducing someone to your company, or to your product (or to applications of it they didn’t know about or fully understand). It can build trust and deepen relationships with customers by showing your expertise and experience. It also gives you material to share on social media, building relationships with followers and connections. Although it’s rarely emphasized, content marketing is really about relationships.

• Content marketing is using information for marketing purposes.

I’ll be very brief because the article I wrote here gives a more detailed explanation of content marketing: What is content marketing?

Content is material that conveys information in any medium — writing (in print or on a screen), video (live or recorded), audio (live or recorded), graphics, photos, and so on. When the ultimate purpose of creating and sharing that information is to market a business, then you have content marketing.

Crucially, though, content marketing is not self-promotional or salesy. (So ads and brochures are not content marketing.) It’s focused on being helpful to clients and customers (potential, current, and past), with the ultimate goal of growing your business over time.

• Content marketing nurtures business relationships, like networking does.

You don’t go to a networking breakfast and try to sell your product or service to the people at the table next to you. You don’t play in a charity golf tournament and give a sales pitch to the others in your foursome. You don’t go to a national conference and peddle your wares at the hotel bar.

Instead, you meet people, get to know them, find out about their challenges, and if they have questions you answer them. You stay in touch, maybe meet up for a coffee occasionally, or chat on the phone from time to time. You gradually grow the ‘know, like, trust’ factor. Networking is not about making a quick sale. It’s about nurturing relationships and — ultimately — benefitting your business in the long run. Content marketing is another way to nurture relationships — but without you having to be involved all the time. It’s like networking in your sleep.

• Content marketing has many benefits throughout the marketing funnel.

The majority of companies in the construction industry do not make the most of their websites. Often, construction industry websites are not much more than fancy (or not so fancy) digital business cards — somewhere to list a phone number, staff bios, and office address. This is wasted potential. And, unlike many other industries, construction is not yet saturated with content. There is still plenty of room for your content!

But how, more specifically, can creating helpful content benefit your business? It’s nice to be helpful, but there must be a business benefit to be worth spending much time and money on. Note how this is like a question about networking: It’s nice to be friendly and helpful, but how does attending the Chamber of Commerce breakfasts every week benefit our business? Remember, just as networking is about creating and nurturing relationships over time, so is content marketing. In this section, we’ll look at some of the specific ways in which content helps with this.

Build trust through helpfulness

First, content builds trust when it honestly and helpfully answers people’s questions. And if your content is online, you can reach people 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including holidays, with no geographical limits. Much more than you can manage at a once a week networking breakfast or an annual conference! It still takes time to build trust, though. You don’t expect to attend one breakfast and then have sales pour in. It takes time and multiple interactions to build trust — that’s why you show up to networking events again and again.

Similarly, prospects will likely interact many times with your content before they’ll express any interest in working with you or buying from you. (Quite how many times will of course vary. Just as real life business relationships to vary in how quickly they develop. As well as the prospect’s personality, budget, and the urgency of their need, it also makes a difference how costly, complex, or unusual your offering is.)

Increase brand authority

Related to trust is authority. In your content, not only can you answer basic questions, you can also show your specific, advanced expertise. You can show how your company is innovative or how your process is different from other companies’. Or how your product is different from the product that’s typically used for the same application. You can show your experience across different markets. Content gives you the opportunity to strut your stuff without coming across as salesy or pushy.

Boost web traffic (create a greater pool of potential leads)

If you have one of the ‘business card’ type websites, you may have noticed you get very little traffic. One of the benefits of content marketing is that, over time, it can attract more traffic to your website. If you get it right, a percentage of that traffic will become leads. Your content builds trust with those leads until one day, they contact you — rather than a competitor who hasn’t gone to the effort of building trust.

Generate leads

It’s all very well to have anonymous visitors to your website, but what about a repeated visitor who isn’t quite ready to call you? What happens when they’re ready to take the relationship with you a step further? If you have their contact details, you could follow up with them. How do you get their email address or phone number? One way is to gate especially valuable content that is unlocked only once someone gives you their contact info in exchange. But you have to make sure that the content is the kind of thing that this ‘let’s take it to the next level’ prospect would want.

Content is also helpful for your in-person networking. Suppose a contractor talks with you over lunch about a problem they have that your product can solve. As well as answering questions in person, you can also ask them if you may email them some information later. Content gives you an opening to deepen the relationship in a helpful, non-pushy way.

Differentiate your company from competitors

If you have helpful content on your website, and your competitors don’t, then you’ve already differentiated yourself. But you can differentiate yourself by talking about how your process or product is different than others. Do you self-perform various construction tasks, rather than sub-contracting them? Explain the benefit of that to your clients. Are your projects typically design-build? Explain why that should matter to your clients. Do you sell a building product that’s new and unfamiliar? Explain the benefits of making the switch. But remember to do all this in the spirit of sharing helpful information — not pushing your product or service.

Weed out time-wasters

There are certain types of project that your company or your product is not a good fit for. It would be a waste of time for you to talk with someone who is looking for that. Content gives you the opportunity to say so up front. Not only does this prevent wasting time with people who aren’t a good fit, it also helps build trust with people who are potential clients.

Content is useful at all stages of the marketing funnel

Of course, the image of a marketing funnel is simplistic. People don’t just pour in the top and move straight down; they percolate around in there. But it’s a helpful simplification. We always want the overall trajectory to be through the funnel for a good number of them. And you need content that helps them progress through each stage. First, they have to find you. They have to come to know, like, and trust you. They want to see your expertise and what makes you or your product different. They want you to address their objections and concerns. They want to know that others just like them have worked with you and been delighted with the experience and the resulting product. So you need to create content that fits at the different stages of the funnel.

Remember, it’s not just about turning strangers into clients though. It’s also about turning customers into repeat customers and also about turning customers into fans. That is, into people who will refer you to others and who will sing your praises — often by sharing your helpful content. Help them help others by making content that’s share-worthy.

Turn customers into fans

Your content can help customers troubleshoot or get more out of your product. (This is especially relevant for construction software.) You know it’s important to have good customer service available to help customers with their problems. Content is a natural extension of this.

People rarely share advertisements with their business associates. But if you have some genuinely useful informational content they can share, that helps them introduce new people to your company.

Attract talent to your company

I hadn’t thought of this benefit before writing this article, because it’s not something I typically think of as marketing. But of course in a sense it is! It’s not marketing a product or service to a customer; it’s marketing the entire company to an employee. Everyone knows your CEO is going to talk about how fantastic it is to work at your company. But what about the employees across your whole organization? What do they think? Video testimonials are very powerful. They can bring your mission statement and written values to life and make them more believable to potential hires. See the section at the end of this article for an example of a construction company making great employee videos for this purpose.

• Here’s a list of different types of content marketing that construction companies could create and use. (There may be even more that I haven’t thought of!)

  • Blogs

  • Videos (including drone footage)

  • White papers

  • Case studies

  • Podcasts

  • Brand magazines

  • Photos

  • Infographics

  • Short form writing (e.g. FAQ, checklists, quick guides, comparison tables, quizzes)

  • Webinars

  • E-books

  • Guest posts on industry blogs

  • Articles published in trade magazines

What type of content should you create?

If you’re starting out with content creation, pick only one or two types to get started with. Which ones you choose will depend on:

• Your company’s priorities

• Your audience’s needs and preferences

• What you or your team likes to create

• Your (team’s) skills

• The time and budget you have available

Ask yourself these questions to help you decide what format(s) to try for your content marketing:

1. What’s your highest priority marketing and sales goal right now? (E.g. attracting more web traffic, generating leads, nurturing relationships, overcoming objections, explaining a product or process, boosting marketplace authority…?)

2. What content format(s) can you offer customers that would contribute to that goal? (E.g. Gated content to gather leads’ email addresses? A webinar to explain a complex new product? Case studies to overcome prospects’ last minute objections…?)

3. Which content format(s) do you or your team feel enthusiastic about creating?

4. What skills do you already have or judge you or your team can relatively quickly gain?

5. How much time do you have to create content?

6. What’s your content creation budget? (Outsourcing some content creation is of course a possibility, if you have the budget to do so.)

I can’t help you with questions 3 to 6. But here are some thoughts to help you move from 1 to 2.

Increase web traffic

Let’s suppose you decide your main priority right now is to get a bigger pool of potential leads. So you might decide to try attracting more traffic to your website. If your team can come up with engaging topics, do background research (including keyword research), write and edit posts, promote each post, and keep on top of any comments, a blog might be a good option for you.

Overcome objections and demonstrate experience

Alternatively, your priority might be to demonstrate your experience and overcome prospects’ last minute objections. Perhaps you hear the same worries over and over in sales meetings, and clients get cold feet before buying. So your top priority may be to address their worries by creating case studies. You can print them on paper to provide in client meetings.

Case studies are stories — extended customer testimonials in a style similar to magazine articles. They show how other clients had the exact same concerns and how those concerns were addressed or turned out to be unfounded. Or, if printing out case studies isn’t important to you, you could create video case studies — or, at a minimum, video customer testimonials.

Educate

Do you have a process that’s difficult to explain in words, but easy to show graphically? Consider creating infographics. (Canva is fantastic for this kind of thing.) Or perhaps video will best show the information you want to share with prospects. Don’t forget the possibility of drone footage.

Suppose you do something unusual, like 3D printing building façades. That’s unfamiliar to your potential customers and they don’t understand the benefits of your technology. You could create an in-depth white paper that explains your technology and its benefits. An explainer video could do the same thing.

Experiment with your content

Those are just a few examples of the potential for different types of content. But, really, you can’t know what’s going to be effective until you try it. Read around and take your best guess at what might be a good fit for your needs. Then approach content creation in a spirit of experimentation and exploration. You might need to try a few things for a while and see how it goes. Even with all the evidence supporting the benefits of content marketing, you can’t know what will resonate with your specific audience until you try it. For a reasonable period of time (6 months?), try creating some content, promoting it, recording the results, and adjusting as you learn.

• This section is a quick overview of how to create good content. For more detail, I recommend the book Content Rules by Ann Handley and C. C. Chapman. And, if you’ll be creating written content, Writing Without Bullshit by Josh Bernoff.

Know your audience

The single most important thing you need to know (or at least make your best guess about) is who your audience is. Are you a builder communicating with hotel developers? Or with couples who want to build their dream single family home? Are you a concrete supplier talking with general contractors in your region? Do you manufacture robots and need to communicate with specialist subcontractors? You can see that the content that will appeal to those audiences will be quite different.

Develop a persona (or a small number of them if you’re talking to more than one audience). For example, for this article, I’m talking with general contracting companies of various sizes and also with specialist suppliers of building materials, equipment, and services. Although other audiences may find this content useful, they’re not my focus.

To create personas, the best source of information are real customers! In her book Buyer Personas, Adele Revella explains how to conduct interviews to gather information for creating useful buyer personas. I highly recommend it. If you can’t do customer interviews, at least talk to your sales team and whoever answers the phones. They interact with customers every day. They’ll have input on characteristics of your audience.

What questions do your customers ask?

Your sales team might hear the same customer questions over and over. Pay attention to questions posted on your website or on your social media profiles. If you don’t yet have a large number of customers and you don’t have much of an online presence, try searching on Quora and Reddit for questions people are asking related to your corner of the construction industry.

If your product is new and different, look up what questions people are asking about the standard that you’re an alternative to. You can provide answers to those questions in your content, and introduce people to your alternative.

Type into Google a question related to your niche and scroll down to the “People also ask” section for more inspiration. Here’s an example:

KEYWORD RESEARCH

Keyword research is a big topic. You’re unlikely to master it before you get started, so learn the basics, get started, and keep learning, adjusting, and improving as you go along.

By doing keyword research you can discover surprising things. For example, I found out that way more people search for construction marketing than they do for marketing for construction.

If you sell prefabricated modular homes direct to homeowners, you might wonder whether you should refer to modular homes or prefab homes. It turns out that more people are searching for modular homes than prefab homes and they have been for some time.

You want to speak your customers’ language for two reasons: First, it resonates with people. In person, you’d adjust naturally and use the terminology they use. Second, if people are searching for ‘y’ but your content talks about ‘x’, Google may not show them your content and they won’t find it.

For another kind of example, let’s suppose your product is so new people aren’t yet searching for the name of your product (either the generic name or the brand name). Let’s suppose it’s a new alternative to concrete and people are searching for information about concrete. Then you can provide information about concrete that honestly explains its pros and cons compared to your alternative product.

For more information on some keyword research tools, read this article: 4 Free & Cheap Keyword Tools & How I Use Them (I use these too, among others.)

PLAN/OUTLINE

Jot down the points you want to include and then arrange them into an order and heirarchy that makes sense. For example, you might have three main points and a couple of sub-points under each main point. (At this point, you may discover you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, and you have material for two or three blog posts or videos. It’s much better to discover this at the beginning of the writing process!)

Your outline will help you break your content into manageable segments. If your content is written, that means different sections with headings and subheadings.

YOUR OWN SPIN OR FOCUS

There’s a LOT of content out there and more is created every day. According to WordPress, their platform users post 70 million new blog posts per month. That’s over 1600 blog posts per minute. And this doesn’t include blog posts on other platforms.

So it takes work to get attention! You don’t have to be 100% original; even Picasso wasn’t that. But you do need to put your own spin on things, talk in your own voice, to your own niche audience. Or you can aim to create something better or more comprehensive than what’s already out there.

For example, there are a lot of content marketing articles out there that are not aimed at any particular industry. There are also many marketing articles for the construction industry that don’t focus on content marketing. But there’s only a handful that are specifically about content marketing for the construction industry, which is what I want to target. I judged I could write something more helpful and more comprehensive than what was already out there. You’re reading my attempt to do so.

CREATE CONTENT IN-HOUSE OR HIRE FREELANCERS?

Unsurprisingly, there are pros and cons of each. Creating content in-house has the advantage that you already have the staff. You don’t have to pay extra — so long as they have the time to get it done. Depending on what you create content about, they may have the necessary industry knowledge, which can speed things up.

A freelancer may not have the industry knowledge, so they may need to spend time interviewing you or other employees to gather it. The cost is highly variable. You can find freelance writers (graphic designers and so on) on places like UpWork and Fiverr. But there’s a mix of quality, so you’ll have to spend time sifting through.

I won’t go into more detail here, because I wrote about how to hire a freelancer here: How to hire a freelance content writer without getting burned.

• As well as creating content, you need to promote it. This section talks about ways to do that.

Basic SEO (search engine optimization)

The keyword research you did helps people find you when they search online. Focus on a small number of related keywords and be clear about what you’re not talking about. So for this article, I’m talking about content marketing. I’m not talking about other types of marketing, such as networking at trade shows or giving speeches at conferences. And this article is focused on the construction industry — not the fashion industry.

As you learn about SEO, remember that Google wants the same as you: Quality content that answers people’s queries and gives them the information they’re looking for. So the first priority is always to provide helpful information. You want people to find your content and you want them to find it interesting and useful. If you don’t provide that, no amount of SEO wizardry will make up for it.

As well as keywords, you should pay attention to the title, headings (formatting them as H1 or H2 and so on), and the url you use. These not only help readers mentally organize your content, but they help Google too. (Although, they might make as much difference as they used to: Are H1 tags necessary for ranking?) You should also include links to reliable sources, and internal links to other content you’ve created on your site.

Links back to your site from high quality websites are a sign to Google that your content is valuable, which is great. But it’s hard to get them until you’ve already established yourself. Google is smart and doesn’t like it if people try to cheat or game the system — such as sites giving each other links for the sake of it. (Or even worse, buying links back to their site.) However, if your content is good and it’s relevant to an industry influencer’s audience, then by all means let them know about it.

I don’t know much about SEO for non-written content, such as videos. But Neil Patel provides reliably useful content: The Secret Guide to VSEO: Video SEO

Of course, getting close to the top of the first page of google is great. But it’s hard to do off the bat. In the mean time, there are other ways people can find your content.

Social media

Tell your social media followers and connections about your content. Encourage employees to share too. Remember not to be salesy; but don’t be shy either. You’ve got information that’s helpful. Think of it as your duty to share it with others! If a follower shares it with their followers, that’s a relationship you want to nurture. Even though it’s online, it’s still polite to thank them.

Other than social media, where do your prospects hang out online? Are they homeowners? Check out Houzz. LinkedIn groups are mostly dead in my experience. But if you’re sharing content that’s helpful to group members instead of trying to sell, you already stand out. (Don’t share only your own content though. Share helpful content that others have created too.)

Guest posts

Is there a popular blog in your sub-niche of construction? If so, they might be willing to have you write a guest post for their blog. (The ‘guest’ in ‘guest post’ means you don’t get paid for it.) They won’t want any salesy material, but if you write a post that their audience will be interested in, it can help drive traffic to your own website and the content you have there.

Real life

You can hand out printed material at trade shows and in meetings with prospects. Direct mail is also an option — but of course it’s expensive. You could reserve using mail for your highest priority leads and clients.

Finally, repurpose your content if you can

I’m not good at this. I’ve occasionally written something I’ve then turned into an infographic, but generally I tend to write content and then move on. But it’s much better to squeeze as much as you can out of every piece of content you create.

If you record a video, for example, it’s easy to create a written transcript from it. (I’ve used both Temi and Otter for creating transcripts. They both use AI to create the transcripts, and they’re less accurate than a human transcriptionist would be. But they’re cheap and easy to use.)

Gary Vaynerchuk is the master of repurposing, but of course he has a team to help him. If you have a team who can dedicate some time to this, it certainly makes sense to get the most bang for your buck — and helps you reach a bigger audience. (For example, I rarely listen to podcasts, but I’m happy to skim-read a transcript. Everyone has their preferences.)

Here are some examples of repurposing content, but there are certainly many more!:

white paper —> break up into blog posts

blog posts —> break up into social media posts

blog posts —> take key points and create an infographic

blog posts —> bundle a few into an e-book

video/audio —> create written transcripts

written transcripts —> turn into a blog post

drone/video footage —> extract still photos

photos —> create slideshow

case studies —> extract customer testimonials

CarbonCure is absolutely rocking its content marketing. Its technology mixes waste carbon dioxide into concrete, where it is sequestered as solid limestone. The resulting concrete has a smaller environmental footprint than regular concrete, and is also stronger than regular concrete. The company uses content to demonstrate the value to potential customers. (Not only being greener and stronger, but also the dollar value.)

CarbonCure has different audiences: Ready mix producers, architects, engineers, and contractors. And they produce content in different formats: Webinars, e-books, blog posts, graphics, videos, training materials for customers to use and materials that help them market their concrete to their customers.

“Content marketing has been a key driver for the success of CarbonCure's marketing department. Having a steady stream of valuable content has helped with lead generation efforts and served to expand our brand awareness,” says Rebecca Hussman, Communications Manager at CarbonCure. “A key tactic that has worked well for us is to repurpose one piece of content into multiple mediums so as to maximize the content's potential reach; so for example, a webinar can be repurposed into ebooks, blog posts and even editorial articles.”

This blog post — How Sustainable Concrete Helped imi Win New Business — is based on a webinar CarbonCure did with their client, imi. It’s a case study about how using CarbonCure helped imi get new work because of the demand for concrete with a smaller environmental footprint.

They also create a nice little graphic that sums up the environmental benefits in a way that’s easier for us to grasp. They re-use this graphic with new numbers plugged in with other customers.

They also create videos, such as this 34 second one (shared on LinkedIn) that gives a quick explanation of how carbon is sequestered in concrete:

CarbonCure is doing a great job of producing a lot of high quality content in many different formats. If you’re just starting out with content marketing, it’s better to do one type of content really well than to do none (like many construction companies, unfortunately) or to do a bunch poorly.

Canadian company, EllisDon, describes itself as “an employee-owned, $5 billion-a-year construction services company”. The company creates videos of employees to help attract new talent to the company: EllisDon Careers. Videos are fantastic for helping your audience trust you. We’re much more inclined to believe that EllisDon is a great place to work when we see and hear it from employees’ own mouths.

You probably know Procore. It’s a company that provides cloud-based project management software for construction companies. And they know how to create good case studies that tell a story! Here’s an example:

Digital drawings and cross-project transparency grow Bird Construction’s wingspan

The company’s blog, Jobsite, drives plenty of traffic to their site. For example, this single post, published in May 2019 — 23 Best Modular Homes — is the second most visitor-attracting page on the site. It draws an average of over 1000 visitors per month, according to Ubersuggest. It’s second after the homepage.

This is the fifth most attractive page: What is CAD and why is it important? Note how it’s educational without being salesy at all. It talks about construction software (so it’s related to the company’s product and likely draws an overlapping audience). But it’s not about project management software and doesn’t mention Procore at all.

Because content marketing is marketing, it’s important that every blog post is relevant to (at least a good-sized segment of) Procore’s potential customers. So there would be no point in Procore writing blog posts about modern dance, say. It’s not necessary for every blog post to be about project management — so long as each post can do its job of attracting traffic that’s relevant to Procore’s business.

In case you think it’s only big companies that can do a good job with content, look at Impresa Modular’s website. Impresa Modular has only 10 employees, plus 7 commissioned sales people (everyone else is a subcontractor). The owner, Ken Semler, writes the blog himself.

A recent blog post explained the construction home loan process for homeowners building their dream home: Clearing the Haze that Surrounds the Construction Loan Process. That’s a question Impresa Modular’s potential customers — people thinking about building a new home — will have. Semler’s not selling his product in the post, but that post may well be the first time someone’s even heard of modular construction, let alone Impresa Modular. But what a great first introduction! The company has demonstrated its helpfulness. And they’re seeing the rewards in terms of traffic. This screenshot is from Ubersuggest:

Semler says, "The hardest thing for anyone blogging for their own small company is to do it consistently. But it takes consistency, combined with authentic voice, to make blogging powerful. Those two items combined will get you viewers and Google's attention!"

Content marketing — just like developing business relationships through networking — is a long game. Success doesn’t come overnight. If you’re willing to be patient, using content for construction marketing can be valuable to your business in many ways. I hope this article has helped you get started.

If you think others would find this information about construction marketing useful, please share it!

If you have questions about how to use content marketing for your construction-related business, feel free to send me an email or send me a message on LinkedIn.