If you are a construction business owner, you are probably looking for ways to expand your marketing efforts. Two of your focuses are continually improving how you attract and nurture new leads and grow your existing business accounts. The automation of such decisions and tasks that is central to the growth of your construction firm is alluring for sure. So you go to the latest digital marketing trends that are making a name.
For sure, you have heard of Marketing Automation and all its amazing benefits. Simply put this way, this is a way that can save you time by automating your marketing processes. With that being said, in this blog, we will address some of the top benefits of this automation. Starting first with the definition of it.
Marketing Automation Defined
As the name suggests, it refers to platforms that take the intensive labor of several marketing workflows and tasks. This makes it easier to engage and convert primary buyers of your construction services. They can also be used to measure the effectiveness of many tasks to give you a much better sense of what works, what does not, and why.
This type of automation is the use of high-end software platforms to automate complex and routine marketing processes, reducing costs and enhancing effectiveness. It allows your construction firm to personalize and instantly scale your marketing efforts.
The feature sets when it comes to these platforms vary broadly. Some of the most common features include:
- Forms, landing page, and microsite creation
- Email marketing
- Lead generation scoring and management
- Search Engine Optimization Support
- Social Media Marketing
- Content marketing
- Analytics
These platforms, designed for automation, are built to deliver, boost, and scale marketing programs – making every marketing touch more focused and personalized.
Eight Marketing Automation Benefits
Marketing automation can help you accomplish a lot of your strategic marketing goals. The trick here is to understand which strategies make sense for your construction firm fully. Deeply understanding your goals helps you determine which metrics to track and optimize.
Here are some of the best benefits of automated marketing solutions:
1. Attracting more new leads
A common goal of many contractors is to develop a flow of new leads. It is something that most marketing automation platforms are well suited for. In many cases, this often involves some combination of social media, SEO-optimized content, and guest posting to increasingly drive visibility. With the capacity to automate the implementation and track any sourcing across different platforms, you can effectively measure success and optimize your programs accordingly.
2. Better qualifying new leads
As you attract more and more prospects, some are already qualified and ready to engage, and others are far from it. How can you tell the major difference? One part of the answer is the content you are sharing. If it’s well-targeted, you can find that your better prospects will be naturally attracted to it only because it communicates directly to their needs.
You may also try lead scoring. Today, most systems are equipped with CRM capabilities that automatically assign leads based on predetermined behavioral criteria. These two mechanisms work together to achieve your strategic objectives of cultivating better-qualified leads.
3. Segmenting your database for more personalization and better targeting
All your target prospects have unique needs, and to treat them the same does not make sense. However, when you have a single massive list, it can be hard not to. That is why these marketing automation systems provide you with tools to automatically segment or categorize your list by behavioral or demographic criteria. When you outline your criteria like these, your marketing strategy becomes “personalized”.
· Depending on your platform, segmentation can be highly dynamic, adjusting (adding or deducing people) for a list of data or conditions. Below are some benefits of dynamic segmentation:
- Send offers based on different characteristics (revenue, location, industry, etc.)
- Keep messages relevant to a specific lead based upon their place within the sales funnel.
- Remove a person from the business development list once they have become clients.
- If dynamic segmentation is done manually, it would be time-consuming and prone to many errors. Only a well-designed marketing automation system lets you set it and forget it.
4. Nurturing your leads to develop more opportunities
Some professional services industries like construction are usually dealing with long closing cycles. You might spend months waiting for a potential customer to need your services. With your professional services, impulse purchases are impossible. Apparently, managing a nurtured or drip campaign is something the systems do well. In fact, your middle-funnel nurturing can be automated.
The timing and content of these initiatives can be programmed in advance so that there’s only a little attention required.
5. Determining sales–ready opportunities
Many of your leads have been nurturing and will need the construction services you provide. If these people are well-nurtured, they will be guaranteed that you can help them. Your construction firm will be on top of their mind and choice, and they will prefer you over other firms. And when the time is right, they can reach out to you.
For instance, you can configure the automation system to send out a free consultation offer from time to time. You can always look for opportunities while minimizing your time investment.
6. Improving client retention
You can agree that your professional services, like any other else, are episodic. Your clients need a construction firm from time to time, but not continuously. From a firm’s perspective, maintaining an on and off-client relationship when you are busy working with your other clients can be difficult. Many of your clients might not also realize the full range of your company’s expertise, leading them to seek out other firms instead.
However, marketing automation provides some relief by automating many of these ongoing interactions.
7. Tracking and Optimizing Marketing Investments
One of the greatest challenges in the marketing landscape is figuring out what works in a marketing context. The tracking capabilities of the latest modern marketing automation systems help answer this recurring question. Cross-channel integration allows you to track and optimize your strategies, providing the insights you always need to improve your Return on Investment.
8. Increasing the productivity of your marketing team
This is perhaps an easy one to score a win. With the designs and functionality, automation systems almost always dramatically impact the marketing team’s productivity. That is what they are designed to be – to take the repeating labor out of your marketing campaigns.
These systems, when set-up, can be a laborious process. However, after that, the time savings accumulate every single day.
Four Marketing Automation Trends
We think it will be helpful for you to know the latest automated marketing solution trends. Check out below:
1. The sophistication of the underlying technologies is increasing rapidly
As advanced technologies like predictive analytics, speech recognition, sophisticated testing, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) becomes more incorporated into marketing systems, these platforms will become beyond capable. Even nowadays, such advanced systems offer more functionalities than most firms know how to apply. This trend is only likely to get more advanced as more features are to be added in the upcoming years, so behold on that.
2. Industry-focused marketing automation systems are more likely to increase
As new automation vendors enter the market and the competition continues to intensify, everyone expects to see the introduction of more platforms targeted at a specific industry or niche as a strategy. This movement towards specialization makes sense for the platform developers, who always want to differentiate their services or products from the wave of competition.
3. Construction firms that do not deploy digital marketing are falling behind
Automation in marketing has grown out of the digital transformation of communications and revolving buyer expectations. As you may expect, construction firms that embrace the latest digital techniques tend to surpass and outperform those that do not.
The fastest-growing firms are more likely to embrace digital marketing tactics. And those that do not embrace it are at a competitive disadvantage. This marketing activity is most likely less effective, costlier, and reaches a much smaller audience. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, being in less is not a desirable position.
4. Hyper-personalization is the new normal
When many people hear the word automation, they often think of rote, impersonal, or canned. As a matter of fact, automated marketing solutions are guaranteed to be effective at hyper-personalization. Nowadays, automation platforms can create multiple customer touchpoints, strengthening the relationship over time. Automation gives your construction business many opportunities to stay transparent to your target audience and significantly improves the odds of sending the right messages to the target person at the right time.
ConstructionMarketing.io is Ready to Action!
Marketing automation is always here to stay; before long, it will be a standard part of all professional service marketing programs. And when properly implemented, it is a way to scale and personalize your marketing strategy. It is also well-suited to establishing awareness of your construction firm and building trust over time, which makes it a greater match for your business.
Of course, there can be pitfalls and challenges along the way. In fact, no marketing automation will turn bad messaging into converted leads. Therefore, you must ensure your strategies are built on a solid understanding of your target audience and your company’s strengths and weaknesses.
If you don’t like to do the work, we can help you with that! Here at ConstructionMarketing.io, we can help you to understand your target audience better and align your vision to your goals.
Before jumping to using marketing automation tools, you must pay attention first to have a good marketing campaign.
Contact us today to learn more about our digital marketing services.