Ten top tips for integrating on- and offline construction marketing strategies

Some construction industry companies still keep their on- and offline marketing activities separate, leading to confused messages, inconsistency and wasted budgets. Ayaan Mohamud of Pauley Creative outlines the alternative.

Integrating digital and non-digital marketing activities combines the best of both worlds. The quality and feel of a glossy brochure, for example, will subconsciously convey its own brand message. Including within it the address of a website page, however, allows its effectiveness to be more accurately tracked and measured.

The basic requirement for establishing an online presence is of course a professionally designed, user-friendly, search engine optimised website featuring content that’s of value to your target audiences. The basic requirements for effective integration can be summarized as follows:

1. One image, one voice: ensure that logos, corporate colours, imagery, font sets and key messages promoted offline match those presented online. Failure to do so risks confusing prospects and softening the impact of your campaign or messages. The main purpose of branding is to make your company uniquely recognizable.
2. Plan the ‘journey’: as your prospects’ information gathering efforts move from ‘research’ to ‘shortlist’ to ‘buy’, is their journey supported by campaigns or content on your part? Separately, offline and online are effective at bringing clients to your business, but a combination of the two working in synergy will keep your company fresh in people’s minds and make them want to come back for more.
3. Be consistent: make sure that your strategies work together and complement each other. If you are conducting a sales promotion offline, ensure that your website is up to date and is promoting the same deal.
4. Include it, or URL regret it: publish your website address on all marketing material to increase visibility.
5. Re-use material: popular industry websites such as ribaproductselector.com and theNBS.com allow you to re-use material in a variety of formats, while still exploiting the advantages of online. Your ribaproductselector.com technical pages can feature downloadable data sheets and include product specification clauses.
6. Teasers: use print-based teaser campaigns to drive traffic to web-based promotions or landing pages where they can find out more about your products.
7. Optimise: ...website landing pages for searches based on your company name, product names, catchphrases or slogans used in offline marketing material.
8. Brand reinforcement: reinforce campaign messages by re-using the creative featured in offline campaigns in online banner ads, on ribaproductselector.com for example.
9. Interact: with customers via social networking sites and discover what your target audience is talking about. Find bloggers and influencers who write or Tweet about similar products, as they can help raise awareness about your business.
10. Common goals: sharing the same goals for both your on- and offline marketing makes it easier to track and measure campaign performance. For example, if you are a roof tile manufacturer you could set up specific landing pages for certain types of tile and publish the URLs in your print adverts. You would then be able to track and measure the leads generated through that campaign, and analyse any gains.

 

Pauley Creative is a digital marketing agency for the construction industry, working with product manufacturers to develop marketing strategies to increase brand awareness and lead generation. Their strength is based on developing measurable campaigns and strategies by integrating SEO friendly websites with online applications, email marketing, social media, mobile and paid advertising.

 

 

 

 

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