CONSTRUCTION MARKETING BAGGAGE

Last week, I was offered the opportunity to speak about promotion to a group of construction professionals in Hayward, Wisconsin.  Because of a schedule conflict, I was forced to decline their gracious invitation.

This is what I would have shared with construction professionals in Hayward …

Have you unpacked yet?

If you are like most people – and in spite of industry stereotypes, construction professionals are people – you carried a lot of baggage into 2008.  Included in this baggage were solid plans and good ideas, some tired traditions and outdated philosophies of business, and an ingrained culture of “the way we’ve always done things around here.”

Prepared or otherwise, we all carried baggage into the new year.  Here are some marketing ideas you should unpack … and others you should toss away.

Quality

One of the things you are going to want to toss away is the notion quality will attract customers to your business … like a magnet.

This is not to suggest quality is not important in 2008.  Even the best marketing won’t motivate a customer to purchase a poor product or service a second time.  A lack of quality will quickly repel customers and destroy your company’s reputation and referral pipeline.

But in 2008, quality alone won’t win the day.  As Tom Peters has preached since the early 1990s, at best, quality is your “foot in the door,” your “ticket to the dance.”  Quality in 2008 is an expectation … a requirement for everyone in the construction industry … necessary for your success.  But don’t waste your entire marketing resources on promoting your quality.  ISO 9000 certification notwithstanding, quality in 2008 – even world-class quality – is no guarantee you will survive, much less thrive and prosper.

I shared in my September 3, 2007 posting on Adding Value Through Quality that for the construction industry, quality may be the hardest value-added marketing strategy to implement. 

The difficulty is not because quality is lacking – the ready mix industry, for example, excels at providing a quality product in conformance to project specifications.  Instead, industry-wide excellence makes it difficult for individual ready-mix producers to claim the high ground for quality in a given marketplace, as quantifying quality can be difficult to do.

For quality to attract customers to you like a magnet, you must be able to demonstrate how your quality is outstanding compared to your competition’s quality … in terms meaningful and important to your customers.  This can be difficult to do when all 15 ready-mix companies serving the 53172 delivery area emphasize quality concrete in their ads and business communication.  With every company claiming the quality top spot, quality concrete becomes an expectation, not a customer benefit … empty rhetoric, not a value-added strategy … a common, meaningless claim customers can ignore.

Public Relations

Regardless of the size of your company, a marketing tool you are going to want to unpack for 2008 will be your public relations skills. 

The media (both tradition and social) have 24/7/365 needs for news and information. This provides outstanding opportunities for savvy construction professionals to provide newsworthy information about their companies and the products and services they sell.

As the Father of Guerrilla Marketing, Jay Conrad Levinson, sermonizes, any marketing program that does not incorporate public relations is not going all out.  Some of the benefits of public relations, according to Levinson, include:

• public relations is free (if you discount the sweat equity of your time, energy, and imagination)
• public relations is believable
• public relations is seen, read, or heard by large numbers of people
• public relations is remembered
• public relations has decades of staying power as reprints, audio, or digital video
• public relations generates positive word-of-mouth promotion
• public relations promotes company expertise, credibility, and stature.

News about construction is especially interesting to media gatekeepers, because – based in part on the success of This Old House, Hometime, and HGTV – gatekeepers believe every media consumer is a “sidewalk superintendent.”

To support its membership’s promotion efforts, in 2006, the Wisconsin Ready Mixed Concrete Association (WRMCA) created a digital PR Toolkit.  Contact WRMCA Promotion Director Cherish Schwenn for a free copy. 

[For a free PDF version (1.4MB) of the WRMCA PR Toolkit, click HERE.]

World-Wide Web

If, in the mid-to-late 1990s, you thought the World-Wide Web was just a passing fad, it is time to think again.

While effective use of traditional marketing and business communication tools remains a vital element for success in business and organizational management strategies, the Internet has emerged as a key enabling tool for profitably conversing with prospects, customers, employees, media, and other constituents and stakeholders.

So throw away any notions you might have regarding your ability to thrive and prosper without an online presence, and unpack management strategies for managing your company’s identity, building relationships, establishing credibility, creating communities, demonstrating your expertise, powering customer or stakeholder conversations, supporting company initiatives, raising capital, and influencing and directing decision makers.  

Then look for ways to implement these strategies online.

A mature technology, the Internet allows prospects, customers, and constituents to get what they want: Relevant information, on demand.  Creating opportunities for online conversations allows site guests to be in control, finding the information they need, when they need it or it is most convenient for them (24/7/365), in a non-threatening manner.

Giving control to prospects, customers, and constituents is counterintuitive to ‘traditional’ marketing goals, but provides exceptional payback for companies with strategic online presences.  Putting them in control lowers information distribution costs and shortens buying/decision-making cycles.

By providing multiple online touch-points and interactions, businesses multiply the number and quality of opportunities for site guests to engage in conversations – reducing the face-to-face time it takes to escort guests through buying (awareness, interest, desire, purchase) or idea/technology diffusion (awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, adoption) cycles.

Web strategies are diverse, based on the goals and objectives of the company, individual, or organization publishing the site.  But in almost all cases, the key to creating effective online conversations is content.

The payback most site guests seek is GRI: Gobs of Relevant Information. Providing this information creates the footing and foundation for establishing credibility and confidence, which are vital for building strong, profitable, long-lasting relationships.

Every organization or business has an online presence – either through its own web site or blog, or through favorable (or other) references on other sites and blogs, in podcasts, or within the social media environment (Facebook, MySpace, or other online technologies and practices people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives).

Publishing a website for your company or organization allows you to manage your online presence and counter unfavorable references in other parts of cyber-space.  Other reasons for having a web site can be found by clicking HERE. 

To test the current online presence of your company or organization (or yourself) go to google.com and type the name of your company or organization, bracketed by quote symbols, in the search word bar (for example, type in: “Cellular Concrete LLC”).

Word of Mouth Advertising

The last piece of baggage to handle today – and it is another bag to toss – is the myth your company doesn’t need to do marketing, that word-of-mouth (WOM) advertising is all you need to thrive and prosper in 2008.

WOM is great … and the tools discussed today can help you to generate even more positive WOM advertising.  But WOM has two inherent challenges:

• You can’t control the message being delivered
• You can’t control the timing of the message.

The myth of WOM as the only promotion you need may be the toughest bag to throw away.  But when the economy slows, a passive strategy of hoping your solid reputation in the marketplace will generate phone calls and emails is a death wish.

Marketing and sales guru John R. Graham, president of Graham Communications and author of Magnet Marketing and The New Magnet Marketing suggests the best attitude for any company is to “assume that in business, the road is always uphill.” 

In slow times, Graham recommends companies go on the offensive, employing “Survival Marketing” techniques, business-basic strategies for creating and keeping customers.  Those strategies include:

• Focus your energy and attention on your customers
• Work especially hard at retaining current customers
• Build your prospect list
• Don’t waste time on deadbeats
• Increase your presence in the marketplace
• Maintain a strong financial position
• Employ niche marketing
• Firm up your company identity
• Make employees and suppliers your company ambassadors
• Dramatize your business
• Drag to management out into the field
• Be daring
• Stand firm
• Assume no one – not even long-time customers and friends – knows what you sell
• Stick to your knitting
• Radiate confidence.

(Strategy implementation details are found in John’s book.  Click HERE to purchase from amazon.com.)

Prepared or otherwise, we each carried significant baggage with us into 2008.  What will you keep?  What will you throw away?

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