How to Brand Your Construction Company

The point of business is often to solve the problems of others—to deliver a need. Construction companies are no different. Like any other business, they need to involve themselves in advertising and branding. Business strategies have evolved over the years to incorporate more and more effective tactics that benefit both companies and their customers. Those who need a little help with their construction marketing have come to the right place. Below are some suggestions on how you can brand your construction company, along with brief details of how to execute them.

How to Brand Your Construction Company

Set a Budget

First things first, if you want your endeavors to reach the full potential of their success, a budget needs to be set in place. The type of budget that you need to consider will vary significantly in nature. You may work on coming up with an annual budget for your business overall, or it may be more specific, like a project budget. With proper budget planning at the root of any successful branding, here are some tips that you will find useful:

• Do not do it alone. It may be your company, but the pressure should not fall solely on your shoulders. Involve your employees and delegate the budgeting as you see fit. For example, you may assign a team to help you scrutinize and plan out the necessary expenses over a specific period. It also helps to keep your employees updated on any change in policy, as well as changes in your company’s financial goals.

• Accurately define the risks that you face. In acknowledging both short-term and long-term issues, you can better prepare yourself for trouble when it arises. An example of this is listing down all your guaranteed expenses every month. By doing so, your budgeting becomes easier to do.

• Be sure to review any budget you’ve come up with regularly. Things change all the time in business. When some unexpected thing happens, do not be afraid to make adjustments to your budgets in response to it. Consequently, you remain in firm control of your financial decisions. It is also worth studying past trends in the construction industry to give you an idea of what you can expect in the future.

Understand Your Target Audience

To make any branding efforts worthwhile, it is essential to cultivate an understanding of those you seek to revolve your construction company’s services around. This is true not just for branding, but also for marketing. No marketing plan would work without taking into account who your target audience is, what they are like, what they want, and so much more. As you burn through your marketing checklist in your effort to further your company’s goals, here are three tips to help you better understand your target audience:

• The use of historical data is an excellent way to study what works and what doesn’t when it comes to your target audience. Take a look at the data you’ve gathered before and look for trends. Just because it’s in the past, doesn’t mean that it has no bearing on your future branding efforts. Be sure to ask yourself important questions along the way. Have you done something in particular that appeased several notable clients? Is there something that they did not enjoy and should be avoided? Which service has proven to be the most popular in the past? Consider all of this and more.
• Acquiring feedback is one of the most direct ways to better understand your target audience. Better yet, consider the fact that it can be done in multiple methods. Clients can be spoken to in person and asked on the spot. If that isn’t something you want, then maybe a survey—either on paper or digital—can be sent so that you can gather the feedback of many at once. Once you’ve received enough, you can analyze what’s been said to educate yourself better.

• Take advantage of social media platforms. By now, everybody knows they’re free and are freely used by all kinds of people to express themselves. Even if it means not gathering direct data about your company, social media can present you with information about the industry and its customers as a whole. Not only will you be able to find and identify trends in the present, but you’ll be able to study past ones as well, similar to the use of historical data. Through this, you can predict future ones and better cater to your target audience.

Choose the Right Logo to Represent You

Here we arrive at one of the most prominent aspects of branding. A business without a logo is one whose brand is incomplete in representation. To solidify your corporate identity, it is necessary to develop the right company logo so your customers and clients will have something visual to associate with you. You’ll be pleased to know that fancy equipment is not needed to develop one. Instead of focusing too much on the technical parts of its creation, the following are the areas that your attention will be needed the most:

• The level of complexity: It is your choice as to whether or not your logo turns out intricate or straightforward. Designers often prefer the former because it allows a level of clarity that isn’t possible with intricate designs. Think about how your customers will appreciate your brand’s message before designing something too complicated.
• The colors: Any logo designer knows the role that color plays. Nothing is ever chosen at random or by accident. By taking a look at all the prominent brands, you’ll see carefully selected color schemes that speak reflect much of their values. Red, for example, is known to inspire feelings of power and high energy among those who see it. By comparison, blue inspires both tranquility and compassion. Decide on your logo’s color scheme wisely to better communicate your message to your target audience.
• The relevance: If your construction company’s specialty is on residential buildings, for example, then it would confuse customers if your logo includes an image of tall, commercial skyscrapers. Anything you add in the logo should have relevance to what your brand is all about. There is no room for mixed messages in branding, so you should identify your niche and be as specific as possible.
• The adaptability: If you take a look at prominent brands, you may notice that their logo doesn’t always look the same over the years. Just like business as a whole, it is versatile that is consistent in achieving the success they want. A logo will have its lifecycle, and how you design it at the beginning will determine its potential for adaptability. Think about all the mediums that it will be featured in, along with how future customers are going to react to it.

Build Your Site

As important as a logo may be, another branding method that businesses can’t afford to neglect would be the use of a company website. It is a necessity to have an online presence in the present climate of the industry, and a construction website can legitimize you more than any single social media platform. Whether you run a multiple-page or a simple one-page website, what’s important is that the site’s contents are reliable. Everything included must be informative, easy-to-access, and enticing enough to turn visitors into clients.

Get More Visibility Through Social Media

Social media is now an integral part of branding, whether we like it or not. No modern marketing strategy is complete without including specifics like a social media marketing plan or an email marketing plan within its contents. Besides being an extra avenue for business advertising, social media platforms also serve as easier and more convenient ways for you to post updates and content that will further cement your image in the minds of your customers.

Establish a Brand Mission Statement

Even if your services are clear enough for anyone to understand, it helps to have a mission statement. What this is—for those who aren’t familiar—is a concise declaration regarding what your company is all about. Not only regarding your services, but also what you aim to do, your values, and the benefits you want to provide your clients with. Simple as that sounds, creating a statement of work will require asking yourself a few crucial questions:

• Who am I serving?
• Why do I really care?
• What am I providing?
• What prime benefits will my clients receive?
• What makes my company different?

Those will serve as internal guides so that you can come up with a mission statement more easily. Writing a project scope statement will also involve the same questions, although it will focus more on project deliverables as well as what the primary project objectives are.

Outline the Key Qualities and Benefits Your Brand Offers

The key to branding falls to mutual understanding between the business and its customers. You can have all the platforms available to you, but without the proper use of it, you won’t be able to call yourself successful. Take the creation of your website, for example. That particular platform is brimming with opportunities that you can take advantage of. You can utilize it to outline all of your brand’s key qualities and benefits.

Being direct to the point will benefit you because 1) it removes any difficulties on the part of your customer. All they have to do is read. 2) it eliminates any possibility of misinterpretation. Transparency is always an excellent trait for business to have. To be open about things like your contractor budget or the details of your most recent cost analysis, it shows that you have enough trust and respect for your customers. What better way for you to brand your business than that?

Put Your Brand on Display

These strategies speak more to the traditionalists who want to try their hand at creating construction brochures, a poster, a flyer, a leaflet, and other similar items. Many businesses, despite the ease and convenience of more digital means, still turn to brochures for a myriad of reasons. One, the fierce competition created by digital marketing makes it easy for customers to go from one brand to another at the drop of a hat. Traditional displays, on the other hand, can’t be turned away as easily as browser pages. Once a client has seen a poster or skimmed through a leaflet, their attention is more likely to be kept. If you aren’t convinced about this, here are further reasons why you ought to put your brand on display away from computer or phone screens:

• These tactics are budget-friendly. It won’t cost you much to design and print out brochures and construction flyers. Even the mass production of those materials can be quite affordable. Although the effort can indeed be time-consuming, it is guaranteed to be time well spent since these tactics have a history of notable success.
• These tactics can be more focused. With digital marketing, it doesn’t come as a surprise that sometimes the content can be a bit all over the place. Customers may have a difficult time deciding where to focus their attention. With brochures, flyers, and construction posters, the contents are more singular in nature, allowing customers to better focus on one topic at a time.
• These tactics tend to rely on multiple distribution channels. Because of that, you can expect more diversified results. From there, you can analyze the said results and decide to focus on just one or two.

Stand Out from Your Competitors

The last entry in this article is going to be more long-term and comprehensive compared to others. One word that should be synonymous with branding is perception, and it is the perception of uniqueness that will allow customers to flock to you over the competition. The question now lies in how this is achieved. Creative marketing is undoubtedly going to come in handy, and the development of a construction firm marketing plan will prove to be a necessary endeavor. Within that plan, it is recommended that you include several construction promotional tactics, such as any of the ways listed in this article so far.

The reality of branding is just as dynamic as the nature of the business itself. As you can see, there are multiple tactics and strategies for you to employ. If you aren’t entirely sure yet of what will work for you, then it won’t hurt to give everything a try at least once. From there, you will find yourself in a much better position to make informed decisions regarding how to brand your construction company.

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