As a construction company or a contractor, time is quite limited. Between lining up your next projects, juggling different subcontractors, and putting up circumstances that come up unexpectedly, it’s obvious you got a lot on your plate.
Your schedule does not leave a lot of time for marketing, which means you are often forced to take on tasks that are not what you are looking to do to keep your schedule occupied. However, you are looking for a way to begin breaking into another market, whether that’s a higher class of contracting or commercial residences.
It is the right time to sit down and determine your target market, so you can finally work smarter and not harder. Get those higher-paying jobs you absolutely would like to work on.
The Importance of Knowing Your Target Market
The first step in marketing your construction business is knowing your target market in a cost-effective, smart way that provides enormous ROI in the long run. As a contractor, you do not want to stick with the same jobs. Instead, you wanted that power to pick the best jobs for you and your company rather than just the best fit on your schedule.
So who are you marketing to? Remember that everyone is not your target market. Determining and understanding your target market is critical. Here are some common benefits of knowing your target market:
- Determining who and where your clients are
- Knowing how you can effectively communicate with your clients.
- Helping you to choose effective marketing channels.
You have always wanted to spend your marketing budget wisely. And by simply knowing and understanding your target market, you can now focus your spending on your clients, who will eventually become repeat customers.
Ways to Determine Your Target Market
It takes a bit of research on your part, and it is a pretty easy thing to do. Doing so sets you apart from your competitors and other fellow contractors. Here are some effective tips that can help you determine your target market.
1. Understand your Niche Market
Whatever you are offering, it is most valuable to a very particular set of people. This is what you call the niche market. To better understand your niche, look at what you are offering and why you are marketing it. This will help you understand what you have to offer and why the prospects want to avail of it.
Whenever you are bogged down in the many details of your target market analysis, try to acquire additional information about this matter. Ask questions, too and remember your answers to these questions. Let this be your guiding path to your ongoing research.
2. Look at your current client base
If you are already turning some profit in your business, then it means that you already have direct access to your target audience. Your present clients have already made a negotiation with you, so you know firsthand that these are real-time conversions.
Once you finally understand your existing client base, you can target more and more people like them using your marketing plan. Take a closer look at your client base and identify any patterns in their main characteristics.
- Age – What is the age range of your current clients? Identifying this data helps you when picking your target segment, especially in social media ads.
- Gender – Are your present clients mostly male and female? It helps you better understand their particular needs and wants that are probably unique.
- Income – How much money should your clients spend on your services? Are there any financial barriers you need to address? Are your clients able to make repeat negotiations? Do they need to save up first for the services you offer?
- Location – Where do your clients currently live?
- Behavior – How do your clients socialize online? Which brands and pages do they follow? What are their preferred social media platforms? What type of blog content do they consume, and can you integrate that into your marketing strategy?
- Values – What are their general values and beliefs? Does this influence their brand loyalty?
3. Look at Your Analytics
When creating a digital marketing strategy, knowing what type of content to share and where to share it is essential. You can eventually know this by simply looking at what kind of content currently brings clients to your construction website. Determine also what content converts to a lead.
A lot of information you wanted to know is available in the analytics dashboard. Doing Analytics Audit helps you gain insights too. And when you dig deeper into this data, you can understand more of your market and your audience based on the following four segmentation types:
- Geographic segmentation – This data informs you when you can send email marketing campaigns, informs you when choosing social media posting schedule, or talking on regionally specific topics.
- Demographic segmentation – This market segment includes aspects like gender, age, ethnicity, income, location, education, etc. It might seem like dry information, but it can help you tremendously when are creating your ads.
- Behavioral Segmentation – This segmentation typically looks at purchasing behavior, the usage rate of your services, occasion-based behavior, and how they interact with your brand. Understanding these data points help you to understand what motivates people to avail of your construction services.
- Psychographic Segmentation – This data reveals what values, beliefs, interests, attitudes, and lifestyle factors may influence the audience’s behavior when availing of your services.
Market segmentation sounds like more technical details, but it is just a way to place efficient ads. Through this way, your marketing effort is not wasted on any market or anyone who is not likely to avail of your services or products.
4. The company expertise you offer
One way to decide the right markets to pursue is to figure out your construction business and employees.
- Do you have any unique knowledge of a particular geographical area?
- Do you have specific areas of expertise? For instance, do you have experience in particular markets, like working with people in real estate?
- Are you good at getting on with many types of people?
All these factors can help you establish an attractive offer to your target market. Meanwhile, while concentrating on your target market, you can slowly manage other important things like social media, website, web design, link building, and blogging. You can best hit your target market with these digital marketing strategies, making you well-known in the market. Without this targeting and marketing, it will be almost impossible to determine what to pursue and where to go next.
5. Analyze your service/product
Write out a list of your construction services and their advantages. Once you have these advantages listed, create a list of people who have particular needs that your services or products can only fulfill.
This is how you can effectively determine how your services and products fit into your target’s style. When and how will your target audience benefit from the services they avail? What services or products are specifically appealing to your target audience? What social media channels does your target audience turn into to get information?
6. Evaluate your decision
Once you have decided on the target market, make sure to ponder the following questions:
- Will my target market benefit from the services/products I offer?
- Are there enough people who can fit my criteria?
- Do I fully understand what drives my specific target to make decisions?
- Can they afford my construction services/products?
- Can I easily reach them with my message? Are they accessible?
Do not break down your main target too far. Always remember, you can have more than one niche market. Simply consider if your marketing channel is different for every niche. Reevaluate your target if necessary. The trick here is to find that perfect balance.
7. Use Social Media Listening to Discover conversations referring to your brand
Social media listening is a crucial strategy to uncover conversations about your company, your services, and the industry you belong. Despite not being tagged, monitoring relevant hashtags and keywords reveals what people say about your business and competitors online.
Also, reaching out in response to social media posts is an excellent way to find your target market on different online platforms. Use social listening for a much deeper social media market research. As you do social media management, monitoring hashtags and keywords, you can uncover other relevant hashtags your audience currently uses.
What is Your Next Step in Reaching Your Target Market?
How was your process in reaching out to your target market? Have you pursued the right group of people or the wrong one? Either way, you must end up with a clear idea of who to reach out with your digital marketing campaigns. In many ways, you can now start to build buyer personas as well as targeted marketing campaigns. But it’s a well-known fact that no one can do it all alone unless they have the time, digital marketing tools, and skills!
Here in ConstructionMarketing.io, we can help you find the right market and audience to target for each of your digital marketing campaigns. With our assistance and a strong background in construction, we can help you deliver a compelling and outstanding message to each of your target markets.
Talk to us today. We can help determine your target market, address the pain points, and win their loyalty and businesses for a powerful reputation in the industry.