Content is still king and one of the most important aspects of your marketing. All businesses today actively invest in content promotion, and this shows that your competitors are on the grind. Whether you are doing it all by yourself or you are in the position to hire a full-time content writer, then you will need a content plan for your construction business.
So, what exactly is content strategy? And what are the most important components you must incorporate with your strategy? Find out in this blog.
What is Content Marketing, and Why Is It Important?
At its core, a content marketing plan is your “Who, Why, and How” – Whom are you helping? Why are you creating? And how will you be able to help your target audience when no one else can? Businesses generally use content plans to establish an audience and accomplish at least one of the profitable results – faster conversions, higher lead quality, and increased revenue.
Your content plan is an integral tool that helps you get the full attention of your target audience. In the next section, we have identified the ten core building blocks that can help you successfully develop your company’s content marketing strategy and take it to the next level!
What Must the Elements Include in Your Content Strategy?
1. Brand Guidelines
The main foundation of your strategy comes from your construction brand identity, which must include clear guidance on voice, personality, and tone. Successfully detailing and communicating your brand identity through your content is crucial if you want your content strategy to work. Creating and using your brand identity helps create a consistent voice and tone across different channels and assets your company uses.
2. Marketing objectives
Your company’s marketing plan helps ground your team on its objectives and big-picture goals. So, to reach your content marketing goals, it is a must to align them with your target audience’s needs as well as streamline them to your content creation process. This makes it easier to reach your target goals and to be successful as they should be:
- Specific: Be particular with what you exactly want to accomplish.
- Measurable: Make sure to determine the metrics for success.
- Achievable: Always go for challenging yet attainable results
- Relevant: Ensure the goals can support your marketing strategy
- Time-bound: Breakdown the period in which you will work on achieving your target goals
3. Your Customer’s Persona (s)
Having a deeper understanding of your target audience can help you align your content strategy to the underlying needs of your market. Have you already heard the term customer persona? A customer persona is a made-up or fictional character created based on various attributes for a particular segment or role. This includes demographics such as:
- Roles and responsibilities
- Challenges and pain points
- Goals and objectives
- Influence on the purchase decision
- Solution requirements
And most importantly, you have to work to discover unique insights regarding your target prospects that the rest of your competitors tend to overlook or under-appreciate. You need to learn that it serves as your creative catalyst for a more successful content strategy and marketing campaign direction.
4. Data and market research
Data and research help your construction company better understand your market’s present conditions and where it is going. The content that your company shares with its target audience can generate helpful insights and data that significantly help in fine-tuning your content strategy.
Moreover, market research provides critical insights into what other brands have already done to improve their tactics further. So, learning about your market includes learning about all your competitors. So, if you know what type of content your competitors share with their prospects and customers, you can use that to your advantage.
As a matter of fact, tools such as social listening helps you and your team understand how prospects discuss your construction services, products, and industry online. Such valuable insights help your company improve its content and gain a competitive edge.
5. Customer Journey Map
Once you define your customer, a journey map is next on the list. This outlines your personal’s unique needs and how you can meet them at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Know that an effective journey map is a visual representation or portrayal of the customer journey based on what the buyers are thinking and expecting at every phase of the decision-making process.
So, by understanding what your buyer is thinking, you can craft content that best supports them as they start to consider your service or product. Here are the important points that must be included in the customer journey map:
- User actions
- Buying process
- Emotions
- Pain points
- Solutions
6. Content market fit
Many times, the content you are trying to create only sometimes satisfies the audience you are trying to attract, either because your content does not reach them, does not answer their questions, or both. As necessary as it is to understand your customer, it is equally important to understand the present state of content within your construction sector to look for more opportunities.
Ensure also to pay attention to the state of social media behavior and content consumption formats, including visual trends and device usage. The key here is to find your unique spit to stand out and add more value to the conversation. To put it simply, the goal of the content-market fit approach is to distribute more content to attract and retain your target customers.
7. Process
Every content marketing strategy requires an iterative process that can help your team focus on what is important – transforming creativity into more effective content. To establish an effective content plan, make sure to consider the following points:
- Group content in a couple of core buckets (blogs, videos, ebooks, etc.)
- · Design the best practices workflow for every core content type.
- Meet with your team members to see whether the best-case process is possible and okay for them.
- Test the entire process. Determine if it works. Where are the breaking points? And what are the gaps?
- Scale up your content strategy and make new workflows or process a habit.
8. Internal communication plans
An internal communication tactic is a recipe for success. However, without a detailed and comprehensive plan to execute the strategy, there can be a breakdown in your process.
This is the perfect time to bring in different voices – your customer marketing, head of communications, product marketing, and other teams you have in your business. This is to make sure you are aligned with your tactics. This is very helpful if all your teams operate as a “service function” for other parts of your construction business.
9. Content Calendar
Consistency is important when establishing an online presence. And the best way to have everybody in the loop is to manage a shared content calendar. This particular tool helps you plan and stick to a regular schedule for publishing content. The content calendar includes detailed information about the content format, channels, posting time, etc.
By scheduling content on a joint calendar, you can enable proper coordination and visibility across different initiatives, regions, and teams.
10. Ongoing analysis
It is frequently stated, “A writer’s work is never done.” The same is true when you are accountable for defining your brand’s ongoing story. Generally, test and learn is a great method you should try, and it is proven to be very effective with any form of content.
Gather data, iterate, listen for feedback, and assess your successes in your marketing efforts. Know that building content effectiveness requires perseverance and patience. Therefore, it is important to progress continuously, milestone by milestone.
Start Creating Great Content with ConstructionMarketing.io
Does your construction business need a better content plan, one that is driven to deliver great results? If yes, then partner with us.
Here at ConstructionMarketing.io, we are a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in content marketing services. We are fully committed to helping construction professionals strategize their content plans and organize workflows that accelerate the delivery of their high-impact marketing campaigns. And with our personalized marketing strategies, we are ever-ready to help your construction company earn more revenue and achieve its digital marketing goals.
Our content tactics include the following assets:
· Blog posts and articles: We believe a blog is the centerpiece of an excellent content plan. Our agency sets up your blog section on your website. Our team of content marketers ensures the creation of an interesting and relevant content design that matches your goals.
· Social media monitoring: Social media is how your content marketing efforts will spread. And our team has the knowledge and tools necessary to track your social media channels for new mentions and shares of your blog posts. Your social media presence is also one of our main focuses.
· Infographics: Through detailed research of your construction brand, key topics, and industry, our content marketers can gain valuable insights to provide exclusive and accurate data to our design team.
Contact us today and let’s start creating the best content for your business.