The US construction industry remains a highly competitive market, creating challenges for competing firms to differentiate themselves. Meanwhile, many of these companies don’t have the internal capacity to learn modern marketing well because of understaffing, lack of knowledge, and complex marketing jargon. On the bright side, over the past year, &Marketing has been able to support the acceleration of a rapidly growing construction firm through a combination of marketing strategy & execution by overcoming these challenges.
Challenge
&Marketing’s client partner is a manufacturer that supplies capital equipment to the US construction industry. The client had seen swift growth in the past two years based on the internal team’s industry experience and network, but was concerned about plateauing. The organization wanted to ensure they were standing out in a sea of competitors to continue this growth at a steady pace, so they turned to &Marketing for help with an outsourced solution.
Solution
&Marketing started work by developing a fundamental understanding of the complexities during the purchasing process in the construction industry. The & team interviewed client team members to gather a greater understanding of ins and outs of the construction business and followed it with a structured market study of current and potential decision-makers (procurement, construction managers, company leadership). &Marketing mapped each decision maker, their selection and purchase criteria (beyond competitive price), and where each gathered information about new products, services, and vendors. Based on this, &Marketing developed a playbook which linked their strategy to a set of execution tactics and aligned the internal leadership team to it.
The &Marketing team focused initial activation efforts on the firm’s website by updating the company’s basic information, adding a dedicated section to display completed projects, recent company events, and employee profiles. This information provided the foundation for a content strategy (including a cohesive executional calendar) to keep the website content fresh. A social media plan (including scheduling software and a campaign to improve internal LinkedIn profiles) distributed this content to reach these key B2B decision makers. Concurrently, &Marketing analyzed data on each post to determine the most effective content pieces.
Finally, &Marketing implemented a Google PPC (pay-per-click) campaign centered around the client’s core services. The campaign focused on generating website leads from individuals searching the web to find similar services.
Outcome
The client partner’s outsourced digital marketing execution team was able to quickly and affordably complete these marketing tasks, which generated an average of 5+ leads per month, all trackable through website activity. As a result, the client’s website traffic more than tripled, the website bounce rate was less than half, and search volume increased on all major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. For a firm that didn’t have an existing marketing department, &Marketing’s outsourced solution helped them build a solid case for continued effort and future investment.
