With people’s attention pulled in so many directions, it’s tougher than ever to capture and retain it.
How do you cut through the noise and showcase your construction business in an engaging way? The answer is visual storytelling, utilizing a tailored video content marketing strategy for your construction projects.
People spend an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media every day, so it makes sense that 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. Business owners and contractors know that videos are effective in grabbing potential customers’ attention. In fact, research shows that video content will account for a staggering 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2025!
In this article, we will look at video marketing and how you can use it to increase engagement with your construction business.
What Is a Video Content Strategy?
Your video content strategy is the framework that ensures the video content you create is for the right audience and is aligned with your business goals.
A successful strategy will include the brand voice and tone you want to maintain across your content and the type and format of the content you should produce to best appeal to your ideal consumers.
From contractors to material suppliers, video is a great way to increase brand awareness and display your offerings to potential customers and industry partners.
5 Steps in Developing Your Video Content Marketing Strategy
Before you grab your camera, figure out what you want to achieve and how.
The following five steps will help you do just that.
Set Your Objectives
Are you looking to build brand awareness, increase your customer base, or target a specific audience? Your objectives should align with your overall business goals. Varying objectives will require different approaches, so be specific about what you want to achieve in advance.
Avoid vague aims like “attracting new customers” and focus on specific objectives like “showcasing professionalism and expertise to establish trust as industry leaders” or “increasing sales of building supplies by 30% within a year.”
Each video you make should have a specific aim, such as addressing common questions in your industry or showcasing a completed project. These aims will impact the format of your video.
Decide on your target audience
To create an effective strategy, define your target demographic. This will impact your video style, visual elements, and choice of social media platforms. Use buyer personas or ideal customer profiles to refine your strategy and ensure you’re targeting the right customers.
For example, if your primary service is high-end home renovations, your ideal customer will be someone who lives in an affluent area. If you sell roofing supplies, create a buyer persona for someone making buying decisions for material supplies.
Creating a customer profile helps you understand your ideal customer’s needs and desires so that you can tailor your content to attract them effectively.
Consider the account-based marketing strategy to help keep your video creation focused and with the most impact.
Set Your KPIs
Define what success means to you and how you will measure the impact of your videos.
To effectively track your content’s performance, it’s important to focus on social media key performance indicators (KPIs) and keep an eye on metrics such as engagement, video views, and likes. You can also gather customer feedback through surveys and questionnaires to pinpoint areas that require improvement.
Here are some key performance indicators to consider:
- View count: The number of times a user has watched your video.
- Watch time: The duration of your video (in minutes) that has been watched.
- Call-to-action clicks: The number of times clickable elements within your video have been clicked.
- Social engagement (shares, likes, and comments): The total number of shares, likes, and comments on your video, as well as the nature of these comments.
- Audience demographics: Understanding your viewers will help you tailor your content to the right audience.
It’s important to understand how KPIs operate together to get deeper insights. For example, looking at view count alone won’t provide much information. However, analyzing view count along with watch time will give a more accurate understanding of your video’s traction. Additionally, identifying your viewers helps segment potential B2B and B2C customers and what works for either.
Most importantly, start measuring your selected metrics from the start. Benchmarking will help track your video assets’ ROI, ensuring that your video marketing efforts are worthwhile while mitigating financial risk.
Decide On Your Budget and Resources
Plan a budget for video marketing.
If you’re working solo as a contractor without a marketing team, you might decide to create the content yourself. If that’s the case, it’s crucial to know where to spend your money. Plan out how much you can spend on recording equipment and editing software.
Alternatively, you may want to hire someone to help you with the production, at least to begin. This may work out cheaper initially, but if you intend to make video marketing a long-term part of your marketing strategy, it might cost more in the long run.
Larger construction companies typically have a dedicated marketing team to manage video content. When dealing with a larger budget, it’s important to make thoughtful decisions about prioritization. It’s important to working off of a solid video marketing strategy before making substantial investments.
Apart from the finances, you must budget time and personnel. Executing a winning video content marketing strategy takes time and effort, so take that into consideration when you plan.
Choose the Right Platforms
The final thing you’ll want to consider is where you release your videos. The key here is to consider who you are targeting to ensure you focus on the right platforms for the job.
For example, if you want to advertise general building supplies to a broad audience, consider posting on e-commerce platforms like Amazon. For more specific audiences, B2B marketing platforms are a better fit for reaching fellow industry professionals. Social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram allow you to segment your audience to target particular demographics, such as first-time homebuyers.
Types of Marketing Video Content
It’s best to start simple.
It’s crucial to remember that shorter videos tend to perform better. On the internet and social media platforms, it’s a constant battle to capture and hold people’s fleeting attention. Despite the temptation to showcase every aspect of your newly completed project, focusing on the most compelling features is more effective.
Make decisions that promote watching the full video. Short-form videos allow you to promote on booming platforms like TikTok, and audience research will be able to tell you if a platform is one your target audience uses.
Let’s look at the types of content and formats you can choose from:
Brand Story Videos
These introduce your company and set out your values and goals, raising awareness of your brand.
Brand story videos are an opportunity to tell your story. They let you answer questions such as:
- Why and how did you get started as a company?
- What are you passionate about?
- What drives you as a business?
- Why do you do the projects you do?
Show, don’t tell. You don’t want to tell people you’re great. Instead, show yourself in action, present your story, and trust your audience to come to the right conclusion by themselves.
Finally, remember to include your people—they make your company. People are inherently interested in people and what drives them to do what they do.
Testimonial Videos
Customer testimonials are a fantastic way to show people the great results you produce. Sharing feedback and success stories from your satisfied customers is a great approach.
Share customer stories to illustrate your business. Instead of asking for praise, have customers talk about their experiences, including project challenges, how they were overcome, efforts to fulfill their needs, and how you go the extra mile.
Be as open and authentic as possible to build trust. Every venture has project management challenges, so use those stories to show how you were up to the challenge. This is how you communicate your strong work ethic to potential customers and assure them that you will provide the same level of dedication.
Educational Videos
As with most businesses, you want to build your reputation for professionalism and expertise.
Through educational videos, construction companies can demonstrate expertise to prospects without the risk of sounding like a sales pitch. It’s the perfect example of ‘show, don’t tell.’
Do you have strategies for cost reduction in construction projects that don’t compromise quality? Do you use recycled materials like Richlite to make your projects more sustainable? Share your methods with the world.
Start with short explainer videos showing people what you’re doing and why.
Walkthroughs and Time Lapses
Walkthrough and time-lapse videos are fantastic ways to show your projects in all their glory so that people can get a real feel for what you do. They’re essentially product videos.
They’re a good way of condensing a lot of detail into a short space of time. For example, if you’ve worked on a large project such as a big house or an office block, a time-lapse or a walkthrough of the finished building is much quicker than showing clips of every construction stage or every finished room.
Effective Video Marketing in Construction
A successful video marketing strategy can be a fantastic way to showcase your construction projects. Take the time to decide what you want to achieve, set your objectives, determine your target audience, and you’ll be well on your way to increasing customer engagement with an authentic story that shows what you’re all about.
Don’t forget to consider which type of content would best suit your aims. A brand story video will allow you to show clients what drives you, while educational content will bring your expertise to the fore. Whatever you decide, a well-crafted video content strategy is a fantastic way to help you stand out.
Author: David Becker, Growth Marketing Manager at Leadfeeder