Are you - or your people - spending the minimum 30 minutes a day being “active” on social media? Ask yourself the better question: should you be investing this amount of precious time in promoting your construction business in this way?
Of course, effective marketing supports your chosen position for your products and services and creates engagement with your business (or more specifically engagement with what your business brand stands for). But how cost and time effectively are you able to achieve this via social media?
Let’s have a closer look at this. Social media is an emotional experience. The reason it’s addictive is that every interaction with it results in a tiny dopamine “reward”. We show up in front of our smart phone screens to experience an emotion and let’s face it - it’s hard to elicit an emotion from anyone when you’re peddling your engineering and construction products and services. Concepts that are most valued in our industry like safety, reliability, productivity and cost management just don’t hit us in the way we have been conditioned to crave.
But this issue runs deeper. Consider how we typically show up as cyberspace consumers – we want to laugh, get angry, kill time (very often to kill time – just like I’m doing right now by writing this piece waiting for a late plane in Ballina Airport) or get up-to-date with news. That’s why it’s hard to promote your company effectively via social media, unless you find a way to relate your business to things people really care about in this particular context – fun, leisure, interests etc - or play to their fears and aspirations – wishing to be rich or not so poor now, wanting more work or to be retired, wanting to travel more and be thinner etc.
But what about Linked-in you say? When we trawl through the Linked-In feed we’re typically in work mode and there’s plenty of construction business content – particularly promotional stuff masquerading as content – to gloss over. But while we’re reacting and responding in a more professional capacity (at least for the most part) the search for an emotional “hit” is pretty much the same.
So while cyberspace gives us the means by which we can go wide and potentially get in front of lots of eyeballs, if it’s construction industry engagement we desire then the better answer is to go deep.
Rest assured though, digital marketing offers an answer. Of all the content sloshing about in cyberspace (ranging from those useless funny cat videos), the most engaging from a user perspective is a ‘deep dive’ topic of real interest – where something is explained in a bit of detail and in a way that’s helpful, thought provoking and maybe even a little entertaining at the same time.
Now you might like to consider how engaged your clients, customers and prospects might be if (a) your content was targeted directly at those (and only those) who want what you’re offering and (b) the topic speaks directly to the current pain that you know your prospects are experiencing and that your business can resolve……a pretty effective use of time and money would you agree?
