The Misconceptions of Digital Marketing in the Construction Industry
For whatever reason, there always has been a giant brick wall between digital marketing and the construction industry.
It is as if, the construction industry perceives the term ‘digital marketing’ by associating with basic advertising instruments, such as issuing email marketing, promotional content, and online posts, without a proper marketing plan to enact without the organization’s intentions or objectives. A common misconception with digital marketing, especially social media marketing.
The importance of social media is already relevant to our contemporary lifestyle. However, misconceptions still exist surrounding social media marketing.
As a result, confusion arises. Because social media marketing consists of a myriad of latent media sites.
To uncover the confusion, some questions could be answered from a marketer to a client’s perspective.
- Should I be on every social media platform?
Our response: No.
Why: There is a belief by joining every single social network your prominence and distinguishability is strengthened, it is usually a bother to create and maintain that many profiles. Instead, it is better to be tactical with the channels you possess and enquiring yourself as a brand or marketer what value is portrayable to the network. In an infographic from Search Engine Journal, reveals the disparity of overall users of different social media platforms.
- What kind of content should be exhibited?
Our response: The audience wants to see the sort of content that is understandable, helpful, and alluring to them as consumers.
Why: It all resorts to understanding your ideal consumer. By knowing your audience’s requests, and requirements it becomes valuable to generate and discover relatable content to appreciate. This is reinforced by the Sensis report’s conclusions that 52% in 2016 and 63% in 2017 of the public are more likely to trust a brand that possesses engaging content. (Sensis Social Media Report for 2017 ).
The Problem
A common fallacy about the digital marketing landscape within the construction industry is the belief that referrals and word-of-mouth (WoM) are the traditional and only essential forms of creating awareness and brand building.
Although recommendations and word-of-mouth usually focused on family, friends and employees are longstanding and impactful marketing instruments, they are not the only forms of communication for stakeholders to exhibit.
Furthermore, they can have harmful influences on construction businesses.
For instance, the rate of your advertising is generally slow to circulate. It takes a long period of time for the information regarding your construction business to be passed around and it takes even longer for you to develop relationships with new clients.
The Way Forward
To surmount to these issues, it advantageous to employ digital marketing approaches such as email marketing, to better help distribute your services online at an impersonal pace also publishing information on blogs and online platforms through social media, which allows you to reach to your audience more rapidly.
Also, employing recommendations can be restrictive due to reaching a limited audience.
The limiting factor comes down to, prospective clients that could be marketed by an individual, generally in a one-to-one meeting.
The likely prospective clients you reach out to across employees and current clients, would only be those that you are comfortable with and see on a consistent basis.
Negative referrals and feedback can have strong withdraws on a construction business without even knowing the true extent of the impact. Firstly, you would not know if the client had a bad experience with the construction company unless they told you.
Consequently, you are unable to remedy and appease the client. As a result, the unsatisfied client would be expressing their opinion and experience to other potential customers, thus creating an enduring impression on your business.
A needed and necessary reflection on the misunderstandings of digital marketing through selective networks and interactive content is the advocated strategy, for the construction industry.
This benefits enterprises to acclimatize in their marketing approaches and helps them understand the value of core strategies within digital marketing.
