Creating a marketing plan for a construction business

Relaunching your business in a new market

A year ago, Sharp Thinking was given the task of creating a new marketing strategy for a construction business based in Kent to move from the commercial to residential market requiring a very different approach to marketing and business development.

Sharp Thinking, a Tunbridge Wells based business, set about researching and building a plan to focus on increasing brand awareness, raising their profile and running lead generation campaigns.

The Approach: Building from the foundations up

We began by working with the managing director to fully understand their business and absorbed reviews and business tenders to get a better understanding of their core areas of expertise.

A SWOT analysis was used to highlight the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats surrounding the company, along with an audit of their competitors. We needed to find a way to repackage their impressive commercial credentials to the residential market.

Much emphasis was placed on what would be their ‘ideal customer’ to define their target audience and construct a robust targeting strategy. We started out quite broad which is often the case and eventually were able to define specific segments we wanted to focus on. This is one of the most important and difficult parts of marketing planning. Clients are typically worried about excluding some parts of the market, but it is so important to do this. The more defined you can be, the better. This is done by creating customer personas and putting us in the mindset of the target audience to understand what makes them tick and crucially what is important to them.

This provides us with valuable market and customer insights which should always form the basis of creating a strategy. A brand positioning was then developed to resonate with the consumer market and provide a means to differentiate from other local players who tended to use the same messages and had no real point of difference.

With further strategic elements of the plan completed, including documenting the customer journey, developing a new charter to put the customer first, the construction business were all set to execute the plan and achieve their goals.

The Result:

With a defined plan, the construction business were able to know who they were targeting, what assets they needed to create and when and where to communicate to build their new business.

A plan built with knowledge and a new sense of direction

With their plan fully structured and a marketing budget to show how much they should spend and where to invest, they were safe in the knowledge their marketing would be targeting the market correctly and in the right order.

Talking to the market with emotion

Most decisions, especially when investing a lot of time and money in your own home, are made with high amounts of emotion. By creating their new positioning and strapline of helping make your dreams a reality, the construction business were focusing on the potential customers vision and goal.

Building their brand reputation

PR was used to build the profile of the owner of the business with opinion and commentary on construction trends and new legislation which achieved good traction on TV and online media using a PR agency.

Maximising their web presence to drive search ranking and online enquiries

A new optimised website was recommended taking advantage of how Google and potential customers searched for construction support. Search engine optimisation (SEO) friendly copy and new blog content would allow the business to be more relevant to appear quicker to potential customers.

Building a social media presence with the customer front and centre

With a detailed content plan, the company were able to focus and engage the market with free opinion and advice blogs to help anyone embarking on a construction journey themselves.

"Nat has done a fantastic job with our marketing, and is continuing to work with us. We have seen great response to the methods that have been designed and she has consistently supported our businesses across all platforms going above and beyond what we expected from her. Could not be happier, many thanks. "

Tobias Barfoot, Inno Construction

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