Content Marketing for Builders & Remodelers in 2023
Valuable And Relevant Content Your Small Business's Target Audience Is Looking ForA Foundational Key To Content Marketing
for Builders, Remodelers, & Contractors
If “90% of all new home sales and remodeling projects start online.” and “Women initiate 80% of all home-improvement purchase decisions, especially when it comes to big-ticket orders like kitchen cabinets, flooring and bathrooms.” (Forbes, 2003) we can then say women are the primary influencers in the decision to remodel or purchase a new home. Therefore your online content marketing has to be designed to address thinking and buying habits of women.
What Is Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a marketing discipline in which you focus on developing and publishing content that focuses specifically on the wants and information needs of a targeted audience online.
The Goals of Content Marketing are:
- To Establish Authority for your company, your Brand as an expert in your defined field.
- To expand a company’s potential customer base by developing Brand Awareness.
- To develop Brand Loyalty with content that brings those potential customer back over and over again looking for answers.
- To provide Customer Education about how your industry and your business in particular operate and work. An educated client makes for a happy client.
- To inspire conversation and facilitate Customer Engagement.
- To create Customer Evangelists that so appreciate the value of your content they actively promote it by sharing it.
Unlike other methods and techniques in online marketing Content Marketing is about developing valuable information. “The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.” (link)
Once upon a time marketing consisted of broadcasting your marketing message via familiar Outbound Marketing methods such as advertising via the yellow page, direct mail, television and/or radio ads, val-pac, classifieds, local “Pennysaver” publications and you just hoped someone who needed your particualar product or service would stumble across your ad. In the words of Marketing Guru Seth Godin “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.”
Being remarkable today consists of making content available to a market searching for answers that demonstrates your expertise and understanding of your product or service to potential clients at the different stages of the buying process that they are in.
What Are The Element of Content Marketing
- Defining Your Target Audience — Before you write any content, craft an offer or even think about your marketing funnel, you first need to decide exactly who you’re marketing to.
- Developing the Content — The content can be Experiential Stories, Product Reviews, Product and/or Service Information, Work Photos, Finished Project Photos, Who’s Who profiles,and Step-By-Step Tutorials. And can be delivered as web page content, blog articles, social media posts, or in the form of downloadable PDFs and eBooks too.Keep in mind that your content should avoid being promotional and should instead address what is the problem your service or product is trying to solve and exactly how you service or product addresses that issue.
- The Offer — While your content may not promote your business, your offer will. Keep in mind your offer often isn’t a hard sale; in fact, it’s often completely free, and meant to capture emails, not to make immediate sales.First and foremost, your offer should be something that’s very valuable to your target audience, and that they can’t get anywhere else. This could be an e-book, white paper, report, case study, free consultation, etc. Again, the offer won’t usually be a direct selling tool, but a way to showcase your expertise and help your customers get to know you.
- The Promotion and Distribution of the Content — While well written content is one of the primary foundations Search Engine Optimization it is not the only tool in the SEO Toolbox and we’ll work with you to develop a plan to make sure your content is there for those people who want it and are searching for it.
- The Follow-up —
My Content Development Philosophy
My philosophy regarding Content Developement has roots in two excellent books:
- They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan
-
—They Ask You Answer
At the core of They Ask, You Answer is a simple idea: educated prospects become happier, better customers.
If your prospects are asking questions, you must answer them — openly and honestly — on your website.
The book/audiobook teaches the reader:
- How to build trust with buyers through content and video.
- How to turn your web presence into a magnet for qualified buyers.
- What works and what doesn’t through new case studies, featuring real-world results from companies that have embraced these principles.
- Why you need to think of your business as a media company, instead of relying on more traditional (and ineffective) ways of advertising and marketing.
- How to achieve buy-in at your company and truly embrace a culture of content and video.
- How to transform your current customer base into loyal brand advocates for your company.
—Building a StoryBrand
Building a StoryBrand advocates for a storytelling framework in business messaging. It encourages businesses to position themselves as the guide, customers as the heroes, and provides a seven-step process to clarify their messaging for better engagement and success.
Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework is a storytelling and marketing strategy that helps businesses clarify their messaging and engage with their customers effectively. The framework consists of seven key points that guide businesses in creating a clear and compelling brand narrative. Your story has seven points and they are:
- A Character (your customer)
- Has a Problem (they need to solve)
- And Meets a Guide (your business)
- Who Gives Them a Plan (your solutions)
- And Calls Them to Action (to start the buying process)
- That Ends in Success
- And Helps Them Avoid Failure (what would happen if they don’t buy)
Your Content Matters!
Your content is still the most important vital element. There is a lot of talk and scuttlebut about how important social media like Facebook and Instagram is but it is not as important as we are lead to believe.
Spencer Powell of Builder Funnel recently said in a video: “Social Media is overhyped.” and he was basing what he was saying on statistics his company has compiled from his client’s reports.
This is also the talk that’s going on in the SEO trade too but I guess you are going to say their observations are tainted because they have an interest in providing SEO services.
From Spencer Powell’s video “How to Drive Remodeling Leads Using Social Media”:
“…Google typically dominates for driving the most leads and the most quality leads typically a higher conversion from traffic to lead is Google organic search but I wanted to dig into the data so I went and I found data.
We have a client in Georgia and over a four year span they had 21 of their leads out of 2300 almost 2 400 leads were from social media. So that’s 0.88 of their leads.
We have two clients in Oregon that I pulled one over a three and a half year span. So they had 14 out of 1044 leads were from social media. That’s 1.35 percent. This one was the outlier in the data but I wanted to include it it was 7.36 percent of their leads so 40 leads out of 543 were from social media. So that one was a little bit higher.
We have a New Jersey client, they were at two and a half percent that was over a three year span so 95 leads out of 3 700. Pennsylvania 1.77 percent over seven years. They had 15 leads out of 847. Toronto we had 1.23 percent. That was over a one and a half year time span and then Indiana. It was just under four percent so 3.8 percent over three and a half years so that was 33 leads out of 866. So below five percent for sure probably closer to one to two percent.
Social meda has its place but it is the CONTENT on your website that brings in leads and can convert them into clients. Use social meda to humanize the company.
How Does Blogging Fit Into Content Marketing?
For Building & Remodeling Contractors blogging is a great delivery tool in your content management strategy and can be used to tell the story of how your brand cares for it customers and delivers their expertise.
- A blog is based on your site and you control the message and own content we develop.
- Your blog is a form of social media, website visitors can subscribe to your blog and your website can also be engineered to post your blog posts automatically to your FaceBook page too.
- Your blog while a content delivery vehicle will also help improve your search engine rankings and blog articles and be created to focus on specific keywords or phrases that your target market is using in search engines.
- Your blog can help drive sales by focusing or going into detail about a particualar service or building and remodeling product people are asking about and searching for on the web that doesn’t necessarily fit into to the content structure on you website internal pages.
- You blog can help you establish authority by continually demonstrating your expertise in your building and remodeling market discipline.