On average, there are more than 15 billion searches done online in a given month.  Whether you know it or not, your customers are searching online for your services.  If your business has not yet made the leap to online marketing, you risk losing the opportunity to connect with these customers while your competition reaps the rewards.

So how do you get started marketing your construction business online?

In today’s technology driven world, your company website is more powerful at communicating your value and services than ever before.  Three key opportunities to focus your efforts and start marketing your business online include: building a professional website, targeting the right audience and developing great content.

1.  Build a Professional Website: The Trust Factor

Trust plays a big role throughout the life cycle of your customers. They must trust you will complete the work estimated, within the agreed upon budget, at the agreed upon time. Building trust is no small task. This trust is earned through on-going discussions about their needs and how you are the best fit for their project.

On the web, you don’t have the advantage of a face-to-face interaction with your customers. This adds a different layer of complexity to building that relationship and gaining their trust.  In lue of that face-to-face interaction, your customers look for other ‘trust symbols’ when they first visit your website.

These Trust Symbols include:

A good first impression is just as important on the web as it is face-to-face.  Utilize your website to clearly communicate the value of your construction company. Your culture, people, customers, projects, awards and recognition all play a role in gaining trust online.

2.   Target The Right Audience: Know Your Customers and Their Needs

This is generally a good rule of thumb in any business practices, but it’s especially important when marketing your business online. Clearly defining who your customers are and what they need is the catalyst for your online marketing plan and can help save you time and money. Targeting the wrong customer can eat your budget very quickly and produce no results.

Look to your sales and customer service teams to help gain a better understanding of who your current customers really are.

From this research, start to define your unique customer segments. From ‘new design/build’ to ‘remodel’ or even ‘just looking’, each customer segment is searching for a different answer or solution based on their current needs. You have a unique opportunity to provide each customer segment the answer they are searching for – at the exact moment they are searching for it – on your website.

A large part of marketing your construction business online is understanding what keywords your customers are searching for and showing up in the search engine results when they search. When someone types a keyword into the search engine, they are essentially asking a question and searching for the answer online. Through the process of understanding your customer segments and the questions they are asking, start to develop a list of keywords that are relevant to each customer segment. Optimizing your website to include these keywords can help bring new – qualified – visitors to your site and fill your business development or sales pipeline.

3.    Develop GREAT Content: Help Your Visitors Accomplish Their Goals

What do I mean by create GREAT content? You already have a services and about page, what more do you need? Well, your services and about us page talk about YOU – but don’t necessarily help answer the customer’s questions or provide the information they are searching for.

While clearly communicating the value of your company is key to building trust and setting you apart from your competition, each visitor to your site has a clear goal they are trying to accomplish. Whether they are just researching the type of home they want to build or are ready to talk to a contractor about building that dream home, they have needs that must be met in order to take the next step in the ‘buying cycle’.

Leverage the research you have done to define your customer segments and their unique needs and develop a content marketing plan. What type of content or information can you provide each customer segment to help answer their questions and move them through the buying cycle?  Articles or blog posts about the different styles of homes, imagery of completed residential or commercial projects, information on how to budget for a project, questions to ask their account manager they might not have thought about. The answer will depend on the research you’ve done, and how your company can provide added value to help your customers reach their goals.

Creating GREAT content is not only important for making a connection with your customers through each stage of the buying cycle, but is GREAT for the search engines as well! The search engines see sites that continuously add new content as ‘fresh’, and prefer to show ‘fresh’ and ‘relevant’ content over websites that haven’t been updated in years. Optimizing this content to include your priority keywords can help pull new visitors to your site via search. By producing great content on an ongoing basis, we create many doors to brining customers to our website rather than solely relying on our homepage.

The web is an ever evolving and changing entity and keeping up with those changes can be challenging. Those construction services companies that learn to embrace the web, understand their customer segments and provide the type of content that helps customers reach their goals, will reap the benefits.

Take a look at your current website, what type of first impression are you making with your customers and website visitors? Is your site trustworthy? Are you speaking to the right customers? Are you providing added value with great content? In online marketing – there is always room for innovation and improvement – you just need to take the first step.