Which is the right course?

The Construction Marketing Ideas blog moves to a new Wordpress site/format in the Christmas/New Years week. In the meantime, you'll see many unique postings on both blog sites. This blog will be updated daily until the holiday period.

If you head over to the Wordpress version of the Construction Marketing Ideas blog (as we prepare for the primary switchover during the Christmas Holiday period) , you'll see poll with a a set of four questions.

All the answers are correct, but please select the one that is most relevant to you.

Read More

Three rules for construction marketing success

Here are three rules which will virtually ensure you have a sustainable and successful, construction marketing strategy.

1. Create incredible (free) experiences for current and potential clients, delivering value far beyond their expectations.
2. Get your suppliers -- the organizations to which you give money -- to pay for your marketing.
3. Consider creative "inversions" of the above two rules to surprise the market and achieve marketing star status.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that when you put the first two elements together, you can generate extremely effective marketing at truly low cost. You reach the level of brilliance when you figure a way to change the rules and modify the process, however.

Our original business model, developed in the early 1990s, has worked wonderfully to connect the first two rules into truly powerful marketing packages. We discovered that we could write positive editorial profiles for businesses and organizations, and then work with them to obtain advertising support from their suppliers.

This concept is effective and has been sustainable for almost two decades. The challenge is defining who "our clients" are. Are they the businesses which receive the editorial profiles, and don't need to pay much, if anything, for the publicity, or their suppliers, who write us cheques for the advertising?

The search for answers to the latter question, to find ways to provide real value and "wow" for our true advertising clients, led me to study marketing with intensity with the objective of providing truly valuable (and free) marketing consulting services. This blog and the Construction Marketing Ideas newsletter are the result.

You might notice a virtuous evolution here. The blog and newsletter -- originally (and still) intended to provide after-sales service to existing clients -- allow us to meet a new group of potential clients and cost little in cash to achieve true impact and results.

How do you apply these principals in practice? The answers, depend in part, on your scale of business.

Very small and start-up level

Here, you have several challenges, simultaneously. You need to bring in enough money to keep going, lack support resources and staff, and the marketplace is likely to be skeptical of you.

Your first, and obvious, answer, is to call in some favours from friends, family, and former clients.

Then, you need to do something different. But how do you figure out what that "different" should be? I wish I had a simple answer to this type of question: In fact, it is one of the most frequent inquiries I receive in the "free advice" invitation on the sidebar and it is my hardest question to answer: I can't delve into the micro-environment of your business and you are unlikely to have the resources to pay me a per diem to investigate potential ideas in great depth.

Generally, I think you should aim to be the big fish in a small pond, and look to your suppliers for some supporting resources to make you seem even bigger.

Small to medium ($250,000 to $2 million annual sales)

Here, you have a client base but not a whole lot of money to squander. Look into client appreciation events and even better, client appreciation events that support your marketing.

(The idea of providing a free inspection or service call in exchange for the right to put up signage, or a "thank you" dinner at a great restaurant -- maybe one of your previous clients -- has real merit.)

Medium to substantial ($2 to $10 million)

Now you have some power in the marketplace. Consider organizing supplier-focused trade shows, using our services for editorial features, and organizing a formal marketing department where you can apply all the best practices disciplines of the industry in your business.

Large (more than $10 million)

By now, you will have a marketing department, public relations and communications strategies and the like, and you will likely have systems and a budget in place for community service and co-op and client support initiatives.

Regardless of the size of your business, however, the three rules above will provide powerful clues about your marketing strategies. Before you jump into spending money on your marketing, consider their implications and whether you can apply them. You may magnify your results, while reducing your costs. In fact, you might even turn your marketing initiatives into a profit centre.

Read More

Business and proposal development: Quantity, quality or both

One of the surest signs you are heading down the path of failure in construction industry marketing is when you are chasing and pursuing leads and project ideas you have a faint chance of winning.

This often happens when you start getting desperate: You can see your order and project backlog is drying up and you want to get work started, fast, to prevent the crunch of idle workers, expensive capital equipment and (if you are the marketing manager, rather than the boss), the threat of losing your job when you know few other employers will rush to hire you.

Trouble is, of course, you run into the all-to-common situation where the harder you try and "work", the poorer results you achieve. Hours spent on public bid proposals will do your company little good if the competition has already been wired in favor of an incumbent, or at least a much smaller short-list group; worse, is if you make the short list as an outsider through sheer effort, then pour your heart and soul into the final presentation, again, only to discover that the incumbent or special friend of the bidding authority has already really made its decision.

On another level, what good do you gain by attracting a group of 500 "first degree contacts" or 1,000 "followers" on Twitter, when you know nothing about the people in your contact list, and your followers are just following you because you've induced them to sign on, somehow.

So what should you do?

Here, you run into another irony. If you've been "relying" on referrals or repeat business, or (even worse) if you have put all your eggs into a very small number of client relationships, and these businesses either have failed, or your individual relationships no longer are influential or control the picture, what do you do? You are in deep and serous trouble.

The answer to these challenges of course is effective marketing, and systems for lead and relationship qualification and development. Setting numeric goals is important, and following guidelines and rules for relationship and business development can be helpful. Sometimes it is wise to work with large numbers.

For example, I cited the example that it is folly to blindly seek connections within the new electronic or social media groups. But since individual connections require little effort, and could in some way help your business, it isn't necessarily a bad sign to have a large online network. Your challenge is to communicate and give enough value to your group so that you can earn some "reciprocation" points -- at the right time, members will, knowing your business and its priorities, share valuable insights, leads or projects with you. (This is why you are best posting useful information rather than self-promotional notes when participating in online discussions and forums.)

When it comes to public RFPs and competitions, once again, you need to be pragmatic and selective. Rarely is it wise to go all the way in a public presentation exercise with the hope that you can perhaps win a future job; you need to find some way to find and develop your relationships away from the "stand em up and shoot them down" approach to business development.

But information about public proposals and projects may provide you with key insights into what is planned for the future, who the key players are, and where their network exists. You can decide if you want to invest time and energy in developing these relationships perhaps through selective association involvement, seeking relationships through your existing network, or the like.

If you need a short-term fix, your answer is either to connect with your existing clients and look for ways you can enhance or add on to their business (or simply in some cases, ask for a little work), or to figure out innovative adaptations to solve problems and present/communicate directly with your prospective clients, perhaps after building a knowledge base of referrals and connections.

In other words, if you know you can save money or provide value before the prospective client even is thinking of putting it out to public bid, you can develop your relationships and often gain an audience for an unsolicited proposal. This can be a lot of work, and you risk your efforts being "stolen" by someone already on the inside, but your chances are much better in succeeding than when you heed the cattle call and rush, like a lemming, to follow the crowd into preparing a submission to an open RFP where dozens have already applied.

Read More

Your three most important construction marketing priorities

You have limited time and resources. Where should you focus your marketing attention, and how?

Here are three fundamentals which, I believe, should reflect about 80 per cent of your marketing energies.

Know and understand your current and recent clients (and the ones that left for the competition).

The ongoing Construction Marketing Ideas poll, How do you attract most of your business?, shows that 34 per cent of this blog's readers obtain most of their business from repeat clients -- and 39 per cent from referrals. So you really need to know your clients, on two levels: How they relate and feel about your service, and who they are: Their likes, interests, socio-economic status, values, and more. And of course, you especially need to know this information about the clients you have lost to your competition.

With this information, you can build closer bonds, draw out referrals and repeat business, and correct mistakes. And, significantly, the information will provide you valuable clues about where to spend our resources for other marketing initiatives; which media to use, where to advertise, and so on.

Know your employees, what they think, their values, and how they relate to you, each other, and your clients.

Your employees are at the front line of client service and marketing; and if you have problems here, you will have problems everywhere. You need to be in touch with everyone in your organization -- remember, the front-line installers or service reps are the people your clients will spend most time with; and even if you are on the non-residential side of the business, you want to be sure to put the right tradespeople and specialists in place where there may be client contact.

One of the most effective ways to connect with your employees is to have regular meetings and huddles -- and periodically, if your business is larger, go out and work with your front-line staff at their jobs; you may pick up eye-opening insights.

Know your numbers.

You are running a business, after all. You had better have reliable financial and cash flow reporting information. How are your receivables, are sales matching projections, and are you collecting your accounts on a reliable schedule? You need to know your business as a business.

Read More

Completing the picture

Marketing is a puzzle of paradoxes.

If you achieve perfection, you don't have to look for clients; in fact, you turn away people you don't want to work with. High volume and margin sales are "converted" with a few emails, a phone call, perhaps, and maybe a handshake. You smile all the way to the bank on the repeat and referral business, or you hit a publicity jackpot, where a major publication or website writes wonderful things about your business, and people simply want to do business with you.

Much of the time, however, we feel trapped at the other end of the picture: Making cold calls to people who want nothing to do with us, spending thousands of dollars on advertising or leads services, for no results, and fighting like dogs for clients who simply push harder and harder for a "better deal".

When you are at this, frustrating, place in the marketing curve, you may be tempted to grasp at straws, and scammers (including some less-than-ethical lead generations services are among this group) play their game and hit you when you are down.

The question is, how can you get from the less-perfect-place you maybe at now, to where you want to go, reasonably quickly?

I could share my standard advice here, but realistically, your best results will come with the simplest effort; reconnect with your current and former clients, and think about how you can connect and communicate with their friends and colleagues. Think multi-media and creatively about how you can give, share and support the group, and you'll be much closer to success.

Read More