TCL Episode #36 – Social Media Marketing for The Construction Industry

Are your posts not reaching the masses? Have you tried online ads and found them not useful? You keep posting pictures of your work but you don’t see results? There’s a whole other world to the construction industry other than just the pretty pictures of the construction. “The Construction Life” is focused on that whole world, and wants the tradespeople in the construction industry to adapt and change with the digital times.

What happened in Marketing during the last 10 years is insane. If you are a tradesperson with no online presence, you might be missing out on tens of thousands of dollar’s worth of jobs that you can get with your website or social media handles.

Episode 36 has a special guest, the owner of “Social Media House”, Mike, who is dedicated to teaching business owners how to DIY their social media marketing.

Mike Moll started with an app to change the grocery shopping world but took a turn and started working in marketing and content creation. Mike’s clients took a chance on him 7 years ago and are still his clients. 4 years ago, he owned the company with a different name from the other two partners, and 2.5 years ago he made a “Social Media House.”

He develops

• Marketing campaigns
• Social Media/Advertising training

He provides in-house plans for SMEs and usually focuses on Google and Facebook Advertising.

He gets business owners on a path teaches them what to do. As Mike Moll tells how there are huge public companies that earn high margins on advertising products. They charge a good chunk from the business’s pockets for premium ad placement, and the traffic only comes if people go to their site. If you use the same budget on Google ads you will see the results will be more effective.

Why do you need a Facebook Page?

As per Mike, people under the age of 35 usually refer to the Facebook of a business, then go to their website. Whenever customers hear of a brand name, they want to validate it. The social media presence, active involvement in the community, and content creation reflect the credibility of the business. Especially for the new business, social media presence is a must!

Last 5 customers!

Mike uses a strategy where he tells the business owners to think of their last 5 clients. Think of their name, age, interests, where they live, and their pain point. This helps you decide which platforms they are using on social media. What they want to know about, what services did they get, etc. This will help you devise your content strategy.

Real-time FAQs

Business owners are then advised of considering all the questions their clients have asked of them. Whether it be the business acquaintances or clients, you need to turn those questions into answers and create your content. So basically, you are turning the real-time FAQs into your social media posts.

Website

Websites are not cheap, but with a website, you can craft a story which is not possible on any other platform. It works as a digital showcase of your work and services.

As a contractor, you can get a website for under $2000. Mike says that the important parts of a website are

• What is your Value statement?
• What exactly do you do?
• What does this mean for you?
• How does it work to work with you?
• What do other people say about you?

Testimonials

Testimonials are the digital version of positive word of mouth that is one of the biggest reasons for getting contracts. Testimonials show how you have done this work for other people. You can have B2B and B2C testimonials.

Human Connection

Try to bring some kind of value to your content. The content should be informative, inspiring, and entertaining. You can interview people, post informational stuff, something your client can relate to. You have to figure out your customer demographics and set up your profile.

Social media should match your personality. You have to make a human connection with your clients. It can be something trending on Twitter, something viral online, a local event, and so on. People might give you work because they like you for who you are.

Set up Google alerts

Google Alerts help you detect changes in your content and send a notification. You get notifications about new results that appear on the search engine relevant to the keywords/search terms you are using. You can get a notification about a company that has done something interesting, you can tag them and say these guys have launched or created this thing, and they deserve appreciation. These free shout-outs will help you get noticed because you are showing love.

Instagram- All about visuals!

A lot of people prefer Instagram because of its filters that make your work picture-perfect. If you have a good camera and shots, you can use Instagram. Or you can create content on both Facebook and Instagram. The hosts and Mike discuss how Instagram post reach has declined after they have launched IG ads. They have done what Facebook did years back. Earlier you could reach more people with more hashtags but now it will limit your reach. And the ads are only getting more frequent and once again tradespeople and their businesses need to pivot and focus their efforts elsewhere.

Email -marketing

Surprisingly, humans go back to the point from where they started. Digital marketing was started with email marketing and is going back to it. E-mail marketing is becoming a powerful tool in digital marketing today. You can start filtering your followers and get an email list and connect with them there. Look into SubStack where you can blog and post written content that is emailed directly to your clients and trades emails.

LinkedIn and TikTok

LinkedIn is great because you can reach many people there. Even if someone comments on your post all of their followers can see your post, it gets shown to every single person following them. It’s a source of getting attention. Reach is far easier than other platforms.

Tiktok is also incredible for construction but only if you are making small/valuable videos all the time. Mike gave an example of a Sales Trainer he knows who got 600,000 views on a simple video giving sales advice. Time-lapse videos are getting common, you can upload videos on Tiktok, but you have to be good at it… Tiktok even matches songs/music to the content you ought to upload.

SEO

Online presence is to validate your company. It is for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You get yourself noticed on Google. Because as a renovation company it might be very difficult because there are thousands of people doing this work worldwide. You have to get on the first page, make a profile on Homestar, Yelp, make social media profiles because you have to look big by filling the first page of Google when someone tried to find you.

Google ads

30% of almost all the attention is taken by the first three searches on Google. Someone searches for a keyword and you should be there with your business details and description. The first three search results are usually the ads so to capitalize it you have to use the right type of keywords. You have to bid for the ad spot and the price per click depends on the competition. While you can send a daily limit of how much do you want to spend on Google Ads.

The default match type for keywords is the broad match. Google doesn’t interpret the keywords and the relevancy. You can see the keywords/ search terms, you will get a full string of the clicks and some of them will be completely irrelevant to what you are offering. So, you use symbols. There are three types of

• Quotation marks, to make the keyword need to stay in place while broad search.
• Square brackets, Google search for only the keyword (s) in square brackets and nothing else.
• + sign before each word. This is a successful strategy, every single word with a plus sign should be in the broad match.

Hire Freelancers and Interns

Mark explains how there are interns who are available online to polish their skills and they work to create content for you for literally peanuts. Content is king, and when you post regularly, there are higher chances of you getting ranked. Check out websites such as Fiver and Acadium to find talent for any task at very reasonable rates.

Don’t delete a profile

If you think your social media profile sucks. Don’t delete it, that’s a big mistake. The easiest advice given by Mike is that you can post a picture of a black square with a text

“Okay I am gonna try now”

The new posts will be new you; people can see the old you and they will be impressed by your new vision/perspective about anything. You change your decisions, you adapt, you have to shift gears, you just have to be you!