Unfortunately, many digital marketing myths have been repeated so often that some people assume they are facts. These myths originate from a variety of sources, but the end result is the same: They lead contractors to make marketing choices that hurt their business.
Below are three of the most common digital marketing myths in the commercial construction industry.
Myth 1: A Company’s Website Doesn’t Matter
It’s true that the commercial construction industry is heavily relationship-based, which has led some people to mistakenly believe that websites don’t matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
A prospective customer is generally not going to say, “Oh, these guys have a terrible website, so I’m not going to hire them.” It is much more subtle than that.
A poorly designed website won’t necessarily trigger a conscious reaction in prospective customers. Instead, it most often will trigger a subconscious reaction, which causes them to start evaluating a company more critically, looking for reasons not to hire them. It’s similar to how a potential employee interviewing for a job has a much harder time competing with other job candidates when he makes a bad first impression by showing up poorly dressed and unprepared.
An effective website helps to create a powerful and trustworthy first impression.
But the importance of a well-designed website goes far beyond the impression it makes on prospective customers. It also impacts what visitors do and how long they stay while on the website, which tells Google whether they have a positive user experience while there—and that determines how well that website performs in organic search.
Failing to have a professional and up-to-date website creates a poor first impression that is difficult to overcome and causes lost business opportunities while harming organic search performance.
An effective website must have a professional appearance, load quickly and be mobile-friendly.
Myth 2: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a One-Time Task
Most people think of technical SEO (also known as on-page SEO) when discussing search engine optimization, but few realize that it is only one factor and, in many cases, the smallest factor in how a particular website ranks for relevant keywords and topics. The other two factors, which play a much larger role, are:
- Original text content that’s accessible to the public on pages and blog posts; and
- Relevant, authoritative links from other websites pointing to a company’s website.
Both of these factors have a tremendous impact on how highly the pages in a particular website rank for relevant keyword topics and both require consistent, ongoing effort. SEO is not a one-time task because search engines are constantly evaluating websites and ranking them with their complex algorithm to deliver the most relevant results to their users. What may be the perfect answer today could become an outdated or incomplete answer tomorrow.
To further complicate matters, every website is also in a constant state of competition with every other website, so when a company stops putting effort into their SEO campaign, it gives their existing competitors a lead while enabling new competitors to catch up.
Search engine optimization, like any other aspect of a successful business, requires consistent, ongoing work. This means publishing new, high-quality content that solves the audience’s needs, and earning high-quality links that meet Google’s guidelines from other relevant, authoritative websites.
This is discussed in more detail in a previous article on search engine optimization.
Myth 3: Social Media Doesn’t Work in This Industry
Commercial construction falls far behind many other industries when it comes to using social media, but it can still be an incredibly powerful channel for the industry. The key is understanding how the audience in this industry behaves and how to appropriately target them.
Unlike some other industries like media, marketing or technology, the typical employees and business owners in the construction industry don’t usually spend much time during the day on social media. This obviously makes it more difficult to get in front of them because they are on websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for a shorter window of time compared to other users.
This makes it critical to focus on a highly defined target audience and to deliver a message tailored specifically to convey a company’s expertise, authority and trust to that audience.
Accomplishing this requires a company to figure out exactly who their ideal customer is and what they are interested in. From there, it’s a relatively simple process of testing a combination of various targeting options, along with ad copy and images, on advertising platforms such as Facebook until positive results are obtained.
It’s important to understand that results won’t be achieved overnight. In fact, achieving results on social media for the commercial construction industry will typically take longer compared to other industries because of their reduced use as discussed earlier.
It’s also important to note that social media isn’t just used for generating new business—it can also play a valuable role in finding new employees.
