In today’s digital age, content marketing is a powerful tool all businesses should leverage. Trade and construction businesses are no exception.
Due to the market’s competitiveness, construction and trade businesses need to establish a solid online presence that will help them stand out, attract customers, survive, and (more importantly) thrive. This is where content marketing comes into play!
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Content marketing provides more than traditional advertising methods since it allows businesses to provide valuable, informative, and engaging content to their customers. Content marketing allows businesses to educate their customers and build relationships with them before anything else.
We provide ten content marketing strategies for construction and trade businesses that drive success.
Benefits of implementing an effective content marketing strategy
Let’s see the benefits of implementing a content marketing strategy for businesses:
Improved brand awareness
By implementing a content marketing strategy, construction and trade businesses can increase brand awareness and educate customers about their services and expertise. By producing high-value content, they can place themselves as an authority in the field, gain visibility among their audience, and increase their customer base.
Increased customer base
If done correctly, content marketing can increase the client base for businesses. Providing valuable content shows customers that companies care about them first and that they don’t want to sell them their services at all costs. Consequently, high-value content captures the customer’s attention, builds trust and confidence in the business’s capabilities, and allows businesses to grow exponentially.
Improving and building relationships with customers
Content marketing allows construction and trade businesses to engage with their audience on a deeper level. Companies can build strong relationships with their customers by consistently delivering valuable content, responding to comments and inquiries, and fostering meaningful conversations. This enhances customer loyalty and generates positive word-of-mouth recommendations, leading to potential referrals and repeat business.
Improved online visibility
We cannot stress enough the importance of online visibility for businesses. Construction and trade businesses can improve their visibility in search engines by developing and conducting a good content marketing strategy and using the best SEO principles. This will help them drive organic traffic to their website and increase the chances of being discovered by potential customers seeking construction and trade services.
It gives a competitive advantage
In a competitive industry like construction and trade, standing out from the competition is crucial. Content marketing enables businesses to stand out by showcasing their unique expertise, successful projects, and innovative approaches. By consistently delivering valuable content, companies can position themselves as industry leaders and gain a competitive edge.
Things to know before developing a content marketing strategy
There are some things businesses should determine before creating their content marketing strategy.
Understand their target audience
Before working on their marketing, businesses should determine their target audience, as it will allow them to optimize their marketing efforts and save time and money.
Before crafting your content marketing strategy, determine your customers’ demographics, interests, and behaviors. For instance, businesses focusing on B2B should promote their content on LinkedIn, as their clients will likely spend a lot of time on it.
Define their goals
Once you’ve determined who your target audience is, you need to define the goals of your content marketing campaign. Think about whether you want to raise awareness about your brand, make yourself an authority in the field, or attract new customers and adjust your content to each goal.
Conduct content research
Content research is a vital step in creating a successful content marketing campaign. Knowing what your customers want to see and read about will help you attract them, spread awareness about your brand, and become an authority in the field.
Research your niche’s most popular topics and keywords and base your content around them. You can also identify gaps and find something your competitors aren’t talking about (or they do it poorly) and use this opportunity to stand out from the crowd.
Create and plan a content calendar
Consistency is the key to success. Make a content calendar once you determine what type of content your customers consume the most and what opportunities your competitors are missing. It will make you post regularly, prevent repetition, and give a better overview of your efforts you can use to analyze performance and plan the next steps.
Monitor and Analyze Performance
Once you’ve created a content marketing strategy, and started creating your content, make sure to track its progress. This way, you’ll know if you’re on a good path and where you should improve.
10 Content strategies for construction and trade businesses
Here are ten content strategies construction and trade businesses can use to reach their marketing goals and improve their business.
Write blog posts
Writing blog posts on their website, as a content marketing strategy, can help trade and construction businesses in several ways. First, writing blog posts can help them establish their expertise and reputation. Creating educational content helps businesses build credibility and trust among their customers and shows them they don’t care only about selling their services.
Furthermore, suppose they focus on addressing customer pain points in their blog posts. In that case, these businesses will position themselves as problem solvers and market their services as the solution to customer needs.
Secondly, blog posts can help these businesses attract more website visitors and increase their customer base. If they optimize their blog posts for relevant keywords, they’ll improve their rankings on search engines and consequently improve their lead generation efforts. Moreover, they must optimize their website for mobile use or invest in mobile app development to provide an even more immersive and interactive user experience.
Lastly, blog posts can be a great way to showcase a portfolio and previous projects that highlight the quality of work and expertise of the business. This can help customers build confidence in their business and make them more likely to contact them.
Bonus tip: If you don’t have a blog section on your website, you can add it effortlessly in seconds! BlogHandy allows you to add a blog section to an existing website using just two lines of code. What’s best: even non-coders can do it! This will allow you to create your content and attract new customers without endangering the structure of your website. Visit BlogHandy’s website to find out more!
How-to Guides and Tutorials
Creating how-to guides and tutorials is another excellent content marketing strategy construction and trade businesses should follow. Following this strategy can help them attract relevant leads, as they usually target specific keywords or topics potential customers search online, allowing them to increase their client base faster.
Tutorials and guides also allow construction and trade businesses to showcase their capabilities and skills by including visuals, before-and-after comparisons, or case studies within the guides to illustrate the expertise and the quality of their work.
Furthermore, how-to guides and tutorials can serve as great lead magnets that capture contact information from interested readers.
Lastly, following this content strategy can help construction and trade businesses increase visibility and social sharing and enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction. Readers often share and recommend valuable how-to content, leading to increased brand visibility as the content gets shared on social media platforms, industry forums, or other relevant online communities.
Case Studies and Success Stories
Construction and trade businesses can benefit from implementing case studies and success stories in their content marketing strategy. First, this type of content allows them to show their expertise, problem-solving abilities, and successful outcomes they achieved for their customers.
By describing problems they faced along the way and how they solved them, construction and trade businesses can show what value they bring to their customers through their case studies and success stories.
In fact, this type of content provides customers with concrete evidence of the business’s track record and ability to deliver quality work, which increases the customers’ trust and overall brand awareness.
Sharing success stories and case studies through various channels, such as social media, email campaigns, websites, and so on, allows construction and trade businesses to attract and engage target audiences, stand out from competitors, and generate leads and conversions.
Visual Content
Creating visual content is another excellent content marketing strategy construction and trade businesses can employ to improve their business. The nature of the industry itself proves to be a fruitful ground for a visual representation of projects, craftsmanship, the transformation of spaces, etc.
Companies can share such content to capture customers’ attention and increase engagement. By showing their expertise, they’ll increase brand awareness and customers’ trust.
Furthermore, since visual content is highly shareable, it can be distributed across various platforms such as websites, social media, online leaflets, and so on.
Lastly, by employing visual content as part of their content strategy, construction and trade businesses have the chance to simplify complex concepts, increase the retention of information, and improve understanding and effectively communicate their value, capabilities, and craftsmanship which leads to increased brand visibility, engagement, and ultimately, new business opportunities.
Social media content
Social media content can help construction and trade businesses reach a broader audience and engage with potential customers more interactively and immediately. Trade and construction businesses can effortlessly build brand awareness and establish expertise by sharing project updates, industry insights, and behind-the-scenes glimpses.
By showing what they can do on social media, these businesses can open a dialogue with their customers, support them, and address problems much faster than in other, more traditional ways of communication.
Live streaming and video content
Video content is one of the best ways companies can capture customers’ attention. Creating and posting bite-sized videos attracts a much broader audience and allows businesses to increase their customer pool effortlessly.
Live streaming is a popular method companies can use to engage with customers in real-time. It can also be a valuable asset for construction and trade businesses since they can respond to customers’ inquiries and share tips in real-time, increasing engagement and brand awareness and making them an authority in the field. In case you decide to use live streaming in your communication strategy, make sure to incorporate the RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) protocol for seamless and reliable video transmission.
Email marketing
Email marketing proves to be an effective content strategy construction and trade businesses can employ to increase their brands’ visibility, attract new customers, and retain existing ones. Email marketing allows them to build and nurture relationships with their customers by sharing relevant content such as project updates, industry insights, special offers, etc.
Email marketing can also be an excellent way for construction and trade businesses to showcase their expertise and services since sharing informative content, case studies, success stories, and project spotlights allows them to demonstrate their capabilities and unique selling propositions.
Furthermore, email marketing as a content marketing strategy allows businesses to promote new products and services directly to customers and send personalized offers increasing the chance of a conversion.
Lastly, an email marketing strategy allows them to track and analyze customers’ behavior enabling businesses to make informed decisions, optimize campaigns, and achieve better results over time.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing can be a good content marketing strategy for construction and trade businesses. Collaboration with relevant influencers can help these businesses effectively reach their target audience since influencers already have an army of people who trust them and are ready to accept their recommendations.
Furthermore, influencers can show brands’ products in a relatable and engaging way and expand brand awareness in a natural, non-sales way that’s appealing to customers.
Lastly, influencers’ endorsements can serve as social proof that influences their followers’ purchasing decisions, consequently increasing the brands’ sales.
User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) can be a successful marketing strategy for construction and trade businesses. Encouraging customers to share their experiences (project photos, testimonials, reviews) provides a trustworthy example for other potential customers and increases brand awareness at the same time.
Furthermore, user-generated content fosters a sense of community and engagement around the business, encourages customers to become brand advocates, and helps build long-term relationships with them.
Conduct a PR campaign
You can share news about your recent projects, milestone celebrations, CSR activities, and so on other websites, broaden your audience and increase brand awareness. All you need to do is reach out to reporters and media with a clear pitch on why your news is relevant to their audience and stress how you’re offering them exclusive and first-hand information. You can even offer to become an expert they can call in case they’re writing a story.
How to choose the right content marketing strategy for your business?
If you’re wondering which content marketing strategy to use for your construction or trade business, we have to disappoint you by saying there’s no universal solution. You’ll probably have to combine several content marketing strategies for maximum results.
If you’re starting with content marketing, we’d recommend looking at how you can repurpose and reuse content you make and combine it into several content marketing strategies at once. For instance, you can shorten blog posts and post them on social media, share the articles in your newsletter, and use it in link building.
That said, the most important is to assess how much content you can produce at the moment to satisfy your quality standards and how you can use it in various content marketing strategies for the best results.
How to promote your content?
There are various methods to promote and make the most of your content. You can:
Write guest posts
You can find relevant websites in your niche and ask to write a free article for them. Besides helping your SEO efforts, guest posts can help you attract new readers who wouldn’t have the opportunity to find out about your business otherwise.
Share it on social media
You can repurpose blog posts into shorter articles for social media and share the link that drives the readers to your website.
Use social bookmarking and content aggregation sites
You can submit your content to popular platforms such as Reddit, StumbleUpon, or Mix, which expose your content to a larger audience and drive traffic to your website.