Brand marketing is an incredibly important tool for creating positive, long-term relationships with the public. These relationships are especially important for construction and contracting businesses as we tend to work on referrals. That’s why an excellent brand marketing strategy is essential to your construction business’s success in the years to come.

Aside from helping you to form a better relationship with people who will eventually need your services, brand marketing will also:

Set your brand apart from your competitors
Create trust among the public
Drive sales by acknowledging clients’ concerns

Consider this your 2023 guide to brand marketing essentials for all kinds of businesses. Keep reading to learn more!

Brand and Branding 101

Put simply, a brand is how companies communicate their vision and what they stand for. It’s the identity and story of your company — the intangible thing that will connect you to your customer base while allowing you to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Branding, on the other hand, is the process of creating your company’s brand. It involves choosing the materials to support your brand, such as a logo, tagline, and any other aspects of your visual design and other features.

Once you establish your brand and branding, you’ll have a way for your customer base to visually associate with your products or services.

What Does it Mean to Market Your Brand?

Marketing and branding are terms that often get used interchangeably. However, they’re two fundamentally different concepts — yet both essential for business growth.

While branding is the identity of a company, marketing revolves around the tactics and strategies used to communicate that identity. In other words, it’s how you present your brand to the public on a continuous basis.

Why Is Brand Marketing So Important?

Why should you take brand marketing seriously? For starters, your brand is one of your company’s crucial assets. As mentioned above, it’s what gives your business an identity and helps the public remember that it exists. It’s also what encourages potential clients to become long-standing clients.

Here’s a deeper look into the reasons why brand marketing is so important:

It guides purchase decisions. Branding can easily become the deciding factor in whether a potential customer becomes an existing customer. In fact, a 2021 study found that 82% of the surveyed customers tend to buy from brands that stand for something. If your construction business stands for something meaningful whereas your competitors do not, potential customers will likely align themselves with you.
It expands on the identity of your business. Your brand gives you an instant identity, but without the marketing part, no one will know who you are. Marketing creates the bridge between your brand and your target customer base, allowing them to learn about your business and relate to it.
It helps people remember your business. Branding is what helps to make your business memorable. For example, having a unique logo or jingle that sticks in peoples’ minds. When you market your brand insignia across multiple media platforms, it helps people remember that your business exists.
It allows you to effectively promote your business. Marketing is a continuous affair that’s broken down into campaigns. While each marketing campaign has a specific goal, the primary theme will be to reach your audience to strengthen their association with your brand. Therefore, it allows you to consistently promote your products and services — new and old.
It builds employee support. Branding is something that can also build up employee pride. This is because branding your company not only means creating a business identity but also means creating a reputable workplace or team that upholds your business’s core values. Ultimately, strong branding will bring in strong employees who prefer to associate with your business’s reputation.

What a Brand Marketing Strategy Should Entail

Brand marketing isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes a lot of planning and effort to ensure that it’s effective.

There are three core components involved in creating a brand marketing strategy:

Developing a Strong Brand Identity. You want your brand identity to resonate through everything you do marketing-wise. Therefore, you need your brand identity to be strong and instantly recognizable when people hear your business’s name or see your logo.
Raising Brand Awareness. The only way to solidify your brand identity is to make the public conscious of it. Raising brand awareness means marketing yourself and ensuring that people become familiar with distinct aspects of your business. For example, they should know who the face of your company is, what type of services you offer, and things like that — just by seeing your company logo, name, or hearing certain tones in a commercial.
Building Brand Loyalty. While offering quality services is crucial to creating brand loyalty, you also need things such as your company’s personality, values, and story to create a stronger connection with your customer base. This is the type of bond that fosters loyalty, and it can only be created by having a strong brand identity and effectively creating awareness for it.

These three things will be the fundamental backbone of your brand marketing strategy — so make sure they’re not just strong but also consistent!

Creating a Solid Brand Marketing Strategy in 2023

Now that you have a better understanding of what it means to create a brand and bring that brand to life, we can talk about the steps you need to take to create a powerful marketing strategy for your construction business.

Here’s what you need to do for successful brand marketing:

1) Define Your Goals 🗒️

The first thing you need to consider when creating a brand marketing strategy is your overall business goals. You’ll need to ask yourself things like:

What do you want from and for your business?
What do you want to achieve through marketing and advertising?

Here are a few examples of goals most companies have for their brand marketing:

Increase their sales or revenue
Evaluate and strengthen their inbound marketing efforts
Improve brand awareness or recognition
Improve brand loyalty, trust, and authority

Your goals will also depend on where you are in your brand marketing journey. If this is your first time developing a brand identity for your company, then your brand marketing campaigns should be centered around brand awareness. If you’re further down the line, you’ll likely want to use your brand marketing campaigns to boost sales or position yourself as the expert within your industry.

2) Define and Research Your Target Audience 🎯

While casting a wide net may sound like a great idea, it’s not. This is because not everyone is currently in the market for the services you’re offering, and it’s a waste of time and effort to catch fish that you’re just going to have to throw back.

That’s why defining and learning about your target audience is so important to your overall brand marketing strategy. This starts by figuring out who your services apply to, who your ideal customer is, and where you can find them. It also involves learning about what their pain points (concerns) are, so you can address those pain points to put their minds at ease and build trust.

Once you determine who your target audience is and where they can be found, you’ll be able to put your brand message right in front of their eyes. Learning about your audience also directly influences your branding decisions, which is why you need to find out all you can about them.

3) Craft Your Brand Story 📚

You need to set the tone of your brand and establish what makes it so special — and that’s done by crafting a strong brand story that brings your company to life. A good brand story is one that is well-written, engaging and integrates the facts, feelings, and values that you want people to associate with your company.

What’s more, it should evoke an emotional reaction in your potential clients. To do this, you’ll want to reflect on your company’s mission and core values as well as the overall customer experience.

When done correctly, your brand’s story becomes common knowledge about your business, which further strengthens your connection with your audience and motivates potential clients to hire you for your services.

4) Choose Your Marketing Outlets 💻

You likely have a website where people can learn more about your services, request estimates, and more. But where else does your brand live on the internet?

Aside from paid advertising, you’re going to want to establish your social media presence. 75% of internet users hop on social media to learn more about new and existing brands. This means you want to leverage your social media channels to make a good impression.

Right now, the most popular social media channels for construction companies include:

Facebook
YouTube
Instagram
Twitter
LinkedIn

You don’t have to master all of these social media channels at once, but you will need to start with the one that will benefit your company the most. This will go back to your target audience research in finding out where your audience spends their time and gets their information. Facebook is highly recommended if you’re just starting out with brand marketing on social media, as it allows you to create a business page that garners reviews and more.

Your Brand Marketing Partner

Brand marketing isn’t easy. It requires a lot of time and effort, especially if you’re just establishing the brand for your construction businesses now. However, once you’ve nailed down your brand identity and crafted the perfect brand story, the hard part is over.

APX Construction Group serves as a direct and single point of contact for all of your construction management, contracting, design-build services, and facility maintenance needs. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our services.