Anyone involved in any business has a role to play in marketing. And in today’s intensely competitive world, marketing sits across every single function of the business. Whether a contractor, a construction business owner, or both, you should develop some core skills.
You may feel that marketing is best left to the experts. However, critical marketing skills can make a big difference to your success in the business, especially if you have firsthand knowledge about these things.
This blog post guides you through the different marketing skills you need to possess to be equipped and succeed in your marketing efforts.
Marketing Hard Skills You Need to Learn
The following marketing hard skills will come in handy in your role, especially if you are forming your own in-house marketing team. Allow us to discuss each skill:
1. Market research basics
Market research is one of the most important marketing skills everyone should have, and you should better understand your buyer’s pain points and needs. Moreover, you must be able to determine your service or product’s target market among many other potential clients.
2. User experience design basics
Your construction website is the customer touchpoint that you should maximize first and foremost. Therefore, learning the basics of user experience (UX) design makes sense. A positive experience on your construction website can engage more users, letting them navigate through your pages to learn more and more about your construction brand and convincing them to purchase.
As a contractor, you should know what makes a compelling and great UX design. This is to make web visitors stay on your website instead of bouncing off your competitor’s website.
3. Content marketing
Content is king, and it remains the fact that content marketing skills are one of the things that can help you turn on your target prospects. High-quality and useful content enables you to build trust with your target audience, nurture and maintain relationships, generate leads, and win new and loyal customers.
4. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is another way to engage with your target prospects and existing customers, making it one of the best technical skills necessary for construction business marketing. Moreover, social media marketing goes above and beyond creating posts, going viral, and running ads. So, learning these new skills involves a basic understanding of the various social media platforms, growing your brand’s reputation, social listening, lead generation, and more.
5. Analytics and Data Interpretation
Businesses today are awash in data. So, if you are equipped with the right skills, you know how to separate vanity metrics from meaningful ones and use data to make well-informed decisions. Analytics is one of the most valuable marketing skills that one should possess. Analytics allows you to measure the effects of all the changes you have made to your construction marketing strategies.
You may try to master this particular skill if you want to level up and be like other marketers. You should know how to put context to the numbers and determine why certain marketing-related things are trending up and down.
The ability to understand the performance of your marketing campaigns with hard data is, again, a valuable hard skill that you must learn.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a process where you should be improving all of the content of your construction website, intending to generate more organic traffic. By consistently optimizing your content, your online business visibility will boost, and you can always be at the top of search engines like Google.
This hard, technical skill is very important to learn. We urge you to always start with the basics, and you must start creating helpful content that delivers practical value to make reasonable SEO efforts. And most importantly, determine keywords related to your service offerings and construction business.
Marketing Soft Skills You Need to Have
As we have done discussing the most common technical skills necessary for marketing, let’s move forward to some common soft skills you should learn as well if you want to advance your marketing skills:
7. Communication skills
Marketing involves primarily communicating with many people. Therefore, communication skills are important skill to have. This skill is, in fact, one of the most crucial soft skills that anyone should possess. When you are hands-on with your marketing campaigns, communication should be a skill you should hone. Being able to communicate clearly with your people and your target prospects, customers, etc., is vital to your business’s success.
Remember, you are communicating with every single one involved in the campaign. Effective communication skill helps you develop a rapport with your clients and listen to their criticisms and feedback.
8. Collaborative thinking
One of the biggest causes of failure in business is ineffective collaboration and cooperation. Your marketing team has multiple campaigns pending and in progress, with numerous marketing tools at their disposal while competing priorities they need to consider. It is critical that you collaborate effectively with your team members, stakeholders, and clients to create an atmosphere where your marketing efforts can thrive.
A collaborative thinking mindset can help you integrate input and feedback from others and balance their expertise accordingly.
9. Experience with contemporary digital tools
The best marketers today have access to more platforms and channels to reach their target audience than ever. As someone who wants to learn about marketing, there are a lot of tools you can pick from at this point. We recommend you be, first and foremost, comfortable using CRM software (Customer Relationship Management) and its reporting tools to prove investment return on your efforts.
Tracking qualified leads, and conversion points using your CRM software can ultimately create success for your campaigns. Google and HubSpot offer different courses, not to mention the many resources available on Coursera. If you feel weaker in technical areas, you should continuously work on improving your skills in this part.
10. Leadership skills
These skills are very helpful for working with a small or big team. As one of the leaders, you should be able to lead your team toward success by mentoring and motivating each team member. A leader in marketing requires a leader that exhibits phenomenal leadership skills like delegating tasks more effectively and setting goals for agencies and freelancers.
11. Continuous learning, horizontally and vertically
Construction marketing is an ever-evolving practice, and even today’s best marketers cannot possibly know everything there is to know. If you want to possess the skills, you should continuously engage in and showcase continuous exploring and learning in the marketer’s specialty and marketing as a whole.
Your learning style must dive deep across different digital marketing approaches and skills (e.g., lead generation, inbound marketing, SEO, analytics, etc.)
12. Creativity
If marketing efforts become more and more data-driven and analytical, creativity still has its place in the marketing landscape. Regarding marketing, creativity and science should work hand in hand since creativity is now more necessary than ever. It is crucial to be unique and different to compete with other rising and established brands and position yourself in the market.
Creativity skills should be something you need to acquire to brainstorm a lot of exciting ideas, making your target audience more engaged. Creativity is required for your visual effect and to develop creative content, status updates, and ads.
13. Goal-oriented
A useful and effective marketing strategy uses different metrics to track and monitor the progress of the business toward pre-determined goals. There is significant importance in being goal-oriented, and possessing the skill allows you to know your goals. Here is the SMART approach you can use to identify your marketing goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timed
When you know exactly what goals you want to achieve, you likely focus your efforts on reaching these specific goals. Know that being goal-oriented means setting specific goals and crafting a solid strategy and plan to accomplish these goals.
Grow Your Construction Business with ConstructionMarketing.io
We hope everything we detailed above will help you better understand what marketing skills you need to possess, especially now that being multi-skilled is advantageous. You may also notice that there are a lot of different avenues you can always take, depending on your goals and interests, when it comes to learning about digital marketing in general or any specific aspect of the field.
While it is great that you are interested in learning some useful marketing skills, hiring an agency allows you to start your marketing campaigns almost instantly. You do not need to explore the learning curve or form an in-house marketing team. It is possible to see your marketing campaigns live within weeks, right after crafting a strategy.
Begin by first understanding your needs and sharing them with us. Here at ConstructionMarketing.io, we prioritize your needs and help you assess your marketing goals. We want you to enjoy the freedom of creating decisions that best suit your marketing budget plan and, of course, your interests!
Suppose you have more questions about our services. Feel free to reach out to us.