This post is specifically about content marketing for modular construction companies — but the same points apply to any business.

Like any company, your modular construction company needs to be marketed. Alongside paid advertising and word-of-mouth, content marketing is a valuable way to promote your company.

But what exactly is content marketing? Content is material in different media, such as blog posts, white papers, articles, case studies, before-and-after photos, videos, podcasts, and so on. When a company produces content with the ultimate goal of marketing itself, that’s content marketing.

Crucially, though, the content is supposed to be useful — not overtly promotional.

Content marketing answers your potential (and actual) customers’ questions when they’re doing research before (and after) buying from you.

Applying this idea to the modular construction industry, a potential customer might type the following question into Google: “What are the benefits of modular construction?” Let’s suppose you answer that question in a blog post on your website. If that post comes up in the potential customer’s search results, and your post is high quality information (not a sales pitch for your company!), then you’ve demonstrated your knowledge to that customer and you’ve been helpful.

Your blog post may be the first time that customer has heard of your company and now you’re on their radar when you weren’t before. And you’ve taken a step towards building that crucial ‘know, like, trust’ factor with them.

If you’d like to try content marketing for your modular construction company, these are the questions you need to answer before getting started.

1. Who is your content for?

Let’s suppose your modular construction company serves two distinct markets. You sell modular buildings to institutions such as universities, and also to individual homeowners.

If your target markets are very different like this, you’ll likely need different content for each audience. This is because their needs and pain points are very different, and where they go for information relevant to your business is very different. A homeowner may discover modular construction while browsing Houzz. But that’s an unlikely place to find the local university’s Executive Director of Facilities Development.

Ideally, you should construct fully articulated personas that represent your target markets. In addition to basic demographics, having some psychographic details can help your content appeal to your target market and help you imagine a real person when you create and distribute your content. It’s always easier to create content that hits home when you can imagine a real person you’re ‘talking’ to.

But don’t get carried away. This doesn’t mean you should use guesswork or your imagination to come up with a whole bunch of irrelevant details about your persona — like whether or not they prefer sushi or burgers.

What you really need is an understanding of their decision-making process when it comes to choosing a modular construction company to work on their project. The way to uncover these useful details is through customer interviews, conducted in a specific way. For this purpose, I highly recommend Adele Revella’s book, Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight Into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, And Win More Business.

Let’s imagine that one of your personas is Abigail, who is the Executive Director of Facilities Development at a higher education institution. She knows her university will need to build student apartments in the next few years to accommodate growth in student numbers.

But Abigail is a busy professional and she doesn’t have time to dedicate to researching the options for construction when the need isn’t yet pressing.

When the time comes to build the new housing, unless some new information disrupts her preferences and assumptions, she’ll likely work with a traditional contractor the university has worked with before. She knows there are always problems with traditional construction — but least they’re problems she’s familiar with.

Once you know Abigail in some detail, you’ll be able to create content that she’s interested in and try to find ways to get it in front of her eyeballs. Let’s suppose her considerations and pain points include: Cost uncertainty, time to occupancy, disruption at the site (safety, noise, heavy equipment), skilled labour shortages, and environmental/sustainability issues.

Your content will be valuable to Abigail if it addresses what she cares about. If your content is helpful to Abigail, it makes engagement with your brand valuable to her. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it will be hard to create content that will resonate. So that’s your first task: Figure out — in some detail — who your content is for.

2. Why should your modular construction company use content marketing?

Not only is Abigail busy, but like all of us, she also sees lots of ads every day and is used to tuning out most of them, even though some are for products or services that would help her.

Abigail hasn’t heard of your company, doesn’t care about your company, and isn’t interested in what you have to say about yourself. (Harsh, I know.) If your ad says your product is great, that doesn’t carry any weight with her. Even if she notices your ads, she’s skeptical of their claims. We’re all skeptical of ads.

Content is different. The point of content isn’t to sell… at least not right off the bat. The point is to provide something of value: helpful information.

Abigail cares a great deal about her own problems and the issues she has to deal with at work. If your content promises to help her solve a problem or make a decision, then she’s more likely to pay attention to it than to an ad.

Imagine Abigail was browsing online and saw a link to one of these downloadable guides. There’s a good chance she’d be interested in them.

The Top 5 Sources of Cost Uncertainty on a Construction Project — And How to Manage Them
Guide to Green Building Certifications and Rating Systems
How BIM Can Serve Building Owners During the Construction Process

Promising Abigail something she’ll find valuable is a way to cut through the noise of advertising. As we talked about above, note that this content mustn’t push your product. Abigail needs to see that you’re a trustworthy resource, a reliable source of expert insight. Remember, you’re building the ‘know, like, trust’ factor way before trying to make a sale.

Construction is a competitive market and you need to stand out. You know you need to reach out to customers; you can’t expect them to always come to you. Furthermore, Abigail isn’t very familiar with modular construction. She associates it with low quality mobile homes and temporary worksite accommodation.

(According to the “Modular Industry Characteristics and Barrier to its Increased Market Share” report, 62.5% of modular construction professionals agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “There is a negative stigma associated with modular and offsite construction.”)

So she’s unlikely to come looking for you — especially in the early stages when she’s not yet even considering alternatives. You need to put yourself on her screen — without trying to push ads on her.

You might be tempted to think that making an emotional connection with Abigail is unnecessary; that all you need to do is persuade her with facts that she can rationally evaluate. You’d be wrong. While those facts are necessary, they’re not sufficient by themselves. Emotional connection is essential too.

A survey of over 2,000 business decision-makers found that:

“56% of [a] final purchase decision is driven by emotion – with feelings like trust, confidence, optimism and pride emerging as the most influential.”

(The B2B path to purchase: An emotional roadmap by Conor Wilcock, director B2B International)

So: purchase decisions are at least partly emotional — even in the B2B world. When you think about it, this makes sense. Many B2B purchases tend to be expensive and to have a big impact on a business — and thus on the reputation of the decision-makers. Of course there are emotions involved. Abigail needs to feel far more confidence and trust when she buys a modular building from your company than she does when she buys a novel on Amazon!

Facts and stats about your company help to build trust too, of course — she’ll want to know how many and which types of buildings you’ve worked on, what ROI she can expect, how long you’ve been business, etc. But that’s later in her buying process.

Content marketing gives you an opportunity to gradually create that emotional connection with Abigail — to build her trust and confidence in your brand over time. At the beginning, she’s not ready to be sold to, so don’t even try! It’s just going to put her off.

Of course there’s a role to be played by facts and data. Your content marketing should include facts and data because Abigail will need to rationally justify (to herself and to others) why she chooses to do business with you rather than a competitor, when the time comes. But it’s a mistake to ignore the emotional factors.

3. How can your potential customer find your content?

You might create the most brilliant content, but it can’t do its job if Abigail doesn’t see it (or hear it). So you have to know where to find Abigail, so she can find your content.

For blog posts, you can play the SEO game and try to make sure your content comes up on the first page of Google for relevant search terms. (Given that the construction industry isn’t as blog-saturated as some other industries, this isn’t too unlikely so long as you produce great, helpful posts that answer Abigail’s questions.)

But you can also attract Abigail’s attention when she’s online rather than waiting for her to search for your content.

Where does Abigail ‘hang out’ when she’s in work mode? Perhaps she reads articles on websites for facilities development professionals. She browses LinkedIn. She belongs to various professional organizations and reads relevant trade magazines. These are the kinds of location where she might come across your offer for a free handbook or white paper that clearly addresses one of her pain points and promises to help her solve it.

She clicks the link, comes to your landing page, reads the intriguing summary of your white paper, puts in her name and email address — and gets your download in exchange. Let’s suppose you offered one of the content suggestions mentioned earlier:

The Top 5 Sources of Cost Uncertainty on a Construction Project — And How to Manage Them

Because you’ve gone to the effort of producing excellent content, Abigail reads it and finds it useful. She’s reminded of some ways to manage cost uncertainty and learns a couple of new ones — including modular construction.

Your content puts your company name and the idea of modular construction in Abigail’s brain. It occurs to her as a serious possibility for the student housing, which it hadn’t before.

But she’s not ready to buy yet. Remember, the student housing project is a few years in the future. Most prospects won’t be ready to buy right at the time you happen to contact them. They need to be nurtured. They need to get to know you first. Trying to sell too soon will likely blow your chances altogether.

Although this is a content marketing cliché, it’s an analogy that makes the point clear: Your first interaction with a prospect is like a first date; they’re just starting to be interested in you. Your prospect is not yet ready to marry you and you only put them off by asking.

4. What content do you need at different stages of the buyer’s journey?

Abigail isn’t ready to buy, but because you offered her a helpful white paper, you now have her name and email address. You can invite her to join your email list, telling her what other useful content you’ll be offering. If she was happy with your previous content, there’s a good chance she’ll want to read more. You might have more guides, white papers, blog posts, videos, etc.

Use your content to nurture your leads and help them move further along in your sales funnel.

Generally speaking, many touchpoints are necessary before a decision is made to buy an expensive B2B product or service. That’s why you need to have content available through different channels (e.g. your website, email list, and social media accounts) and, preferably, in different formats (e.g. short form text such as blog posts and case studies, long form text such as white papers and e-books, photos, videos, and so on).

What kinds of content are useful at different stages of the buying journey?

Here’s a graphic made by Powered by Search that shows some of the possible types of content that caters to buyers at different stages of their buying journey. Of course, not all of them will be relevant to your company, and you may not have the capacity to create all of them even if they were. But you should create at least some content that caters to each of the three broad stages.

5. What are the features of successful content?

Any content needs to satisfy at least four conditions if it is to be successful in helping prospects move forward through the funnel.

It needs to provide value. For example, your blog posts help make your customer’s job easier or they provide useful information. They are not all about your company, e.g. awards, new hires etc. Nobody cares about that stuff as much as you do.
The content must be relevant. That is, it must be targeted to the right audience. There’s no point telling Abigail about the finishing options you offer homeowners.
It must be up-to-date. For example, if there are major shifts in the modular construction industry, your content needs to reflect that.
This one should be obvious, but it’s worth emphasizing: Your content has to be well-written and well-researched. If your writing is long-winded and boring, your prospects won’t read it. And if it’s not well-researched, your prospects won’t respect it.

If your content is outstanding, Abigail may even share your content with her facilities development colleagues at other institutions, giving you even more return on your investment.

Abigail wasn’t ready to buy when she first downloaded your content, but you want her to turn to you when she is ready. So you need to keep providing value, and keep your business top of her mind.

Once Abigail is ready to select a construction company for the university’s new student accommodation, she’ll remember that modular construction is a live possibility and that your company has the expertise to deliver.

Through content marketing, Abigail’s come to know, like, and trust you. You've nurtured the relationship so that when she's ready to make a decision, it's your sales team at your modular construction company she wants to talk with.

If you’d like to market your modular construction company with content like white papers and case studies, I can write those for you. Let’s talk: zena@boudicawriting.com

Content Marketing for Modular Construction Companies