Commercial construction businesses work in various roles across the construction industry, including in construction and expansion projects, renovations, and general contracting and overseeing projects. But one thing that many commercial construction businesses have in common is a relatively long sales cycle.
For businesses like beauty brands, clothing stores, or restaurants, creating content is made easier by a shorter sales cycle. Brands can take photographic and video content there and then with their products almost daily. For commercial construction, this isn’t the case. So, what can you do about it?
In this article, we’re going to take a look at a long sales cycle and what it means for content creation in commercial construction.
Commercial Construction and the Long Sales Cycle
A sales cycle refers to the period from a customer’s initial awareness or interest in a product to making a purchase. For commercial construction, this is usually from initial interest to completion of the project. A long sales cycle simply means that this process takes longer than average.
As we mentioned above, the sales cycle in a restaurant is relatively short. You sit down, look at the menu, and order, then your food arrives and you have a product in front of you within the hour. The sales process is relatively short here, so content generation, whether PR from a restaurant critic or user-generated photography can be made and posted quickly.
For commercial construction, the complexity of the product (building things generally), the higher price point, and the presence of multiple decision-makers means that the journey from awareness to purchase is always going to be much longer. So, how do you overcome this when creating content?
Creating Content With a Long Sales Cycle: Tips and Tricks
Content is king. We know this already but we sometimes like to reiterate its importance in your digital strategy. Content is the stuff you populate your website with, post on your social media, and hope journalists will create regarding you. But, creating content when the projects you work on can take months and sometimes years can be hard.
Below are our top tips and tricks for content creation when you’re working with a long sales cycle.
1. Create Progress Content Throughout Projects
The first way to create content as a commercial construction company is to consider your progress. Keep a record of the progress you’re making and update customers and clients regularly. We also recommend saving all of this content and creating a longer video piece that shows the progression from nothing to the completed project.
2. Use Educational Content to Fill Gaps
This might include education about the construction process, about different aspects of your brand, i.e. if you use sustainable practices, or even about key issues within the industry. Educational content is great when there is a lull in real-time updates from your projects and can ensure you keep followers engaged and interested.
3. Explore Key Topics or Construction Industry Issues in Long-Form Content
Using longer-form content is great on social media platforms, like LinkedIn, or in blog format on your website. Addressing key issues can help establish you as an authority, encourage people to follow you for more expertise, and even provide highly shareable content.
4. Use Customer Testimonials
Content people often overlook is customer content. Using testimonials and reviews to market your business is always a good idea. You can use this content on your website, on a testimonials page, at the bottom of email marketing to remind people why they should choose you, and on your social media in video or photograph format.
5. Create Interactive Content
Interactive content can be anything from quizzes to assessments to calculators. Many construction brands use options like calculators or quotes for construction projects on their sites to boost engagement and even to open contact with new leads.
On top of this, interactive content is a great way for you as a brand to understand your audience better. If you’ve got a calculator or quote estimator on your site, you can use the information put into it to address your services and meet the needs of prospective clients.
Check out our web development services if you’re looking to add interactive features to your site.
6. Put Out Construction Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is essentially content that displays your deep expertise, innovation or authenticity as a business. It establishes you as a leader in the industry, lends credibility to your work, and is something people love to share!
We always recommend that thought leadership content be put onto your LinkedIn profile as well as your website. LinkedIn is the place for thought leadership as it’s where you’re most likely to engage with other professionals in your industry.
Defining yourself as an expert and someone who thinks innovatively is key to improving stakeholder relationships and attracting new followers and clients. It helps you to differentiate your commercial construction business from others in the industry and helps you to have a meaningful impact within your field
7. Use Multiple Content Formats
This list has already established the need for multiple content types, but it is worth reiterating. While you’re working on your longer progress video, consider creating educational blog content, email marketing campaigns to boost your client relationships, educational infographics for social media and more.
Be diverse in your output.
8. Address the Needs of Buyers at Every Stage
A long sales cycle has lots of stages to it. For this reason, you can create content that addresses each stage and the challenges customers might face. For example, you could consider creating educational content on client needs and specifications and how these may be impacted by budget constraints.
You could also develop blogs (and then condense them into infographics for your Instagram) on how to negotiate contracts and finalise agreements. Another idea to consider is creating videographic content with current clients to explore the construction process and what that’s like for the client. From this, you could also create case studies that address each stage of completed projects and how they were handled.
Final Thoughts
Just because you have a long sales cycle as a commercial construction business, does not mean you have no content to create. In fact, having a long sales cycle offers ample opportunity for you to go deeper with your content, be more innovative, and attract more clients.
We’ve covered a few of our top tricks, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want expert advice and content creation services as a commercial construction business, then why not give Rokir a call today?
We’re a digital services company with experience across industries, including the construction industry. Our content services will address the needs of a long sales cycle and can be combined with our social media strategy and blogging and PR services to ensure your content output is robust and reflects the brilliant work your brand does.
Contact us now and we can chat about how our services might benefit you.
Hi I’m Alex, Blog and PR Copywriter