As we begin a new year with new goals, I thought I would share some thoughts on how to best prepare your construction marketing strategy for the coming year in order to ensure that your construction firm is well prepared and focused on its marketing objectives.

Closing the loop on the previous year is the starting point for the most effective marketing strategies. See the diagram below for a visual representation of how marketing planning should look.

There should be a summary of last year’s goals, along with an update on whether they were met and why in the slide following the title.

Thus, we’ve achieved four major objectives. It concludes the previous year’s strategy. It focuses on the most important lessons learned from the previous year. It sets the tone for the year ahead. And it’s the yardstick by which we’re going to measure the new strategy.

If you haven’t yet defined the brand’s goals or are new to the position, you can skip this part. Nothing, on the other hand, communicates your knowledge and experience better than mentioning last year’s goals at the outset of your presentation and describing how well they were met.

Any research that doesn’t include in-depth analysis is a waste of time.

An effective marketing strategy must be developed based on current data, not on assumptions or outdated market insights that have changed since the research was conducted.

It’s not going to be a session of insight here. It’s a step in the market planning process. In an ideal world, your findings and observations would appear on each slide of your presentation. Survey results should be shared sparingly. A single slide listing all of the research that was used to develop the plan, along with a line summarising the key insights or rationale for each piece of research, is what we would suggest.

Segmentation

Segmentation is a market map, not a strategy, and as such, it’s part of the diagnostic process. You should be updating your segmentation model based on your data rather than focusing on specific customers at this point. Segmentation should be condensed into a single slide to simplify the presentation. Playing chess across multiple boards is impossible for most people.

Make sure your segments have a descriptive name that describes their behavior (rather than targeting), a population size, an estimated value, and your projected market share. Only these four items should be included. Everyone will be perplexed if you do so. In the end, make sure your data is up to date. Good segmentation should stay the same year after year in a stable market. There will be some changes in the market segments and the percentages of those segments owned by your competitors as a result of your previous strategy.

Positioning

Positioning is nothing more than the desired image of your brand. It’s important that our target audience associates our brand with this particular mental image. With the help of the previous slide’s portrait, we were able to identify the audience you’re trying to reach as well as their core beliefs and values. There are only three main components to your positioning. In order to begin, think about “what” you’ll be putting in relation to this goal. Competitors or substitutes that are in direct opposition to each other. You should also include an image of what your product “is,” which is the mental image you want potential customers to have when they see it. Take your time with all three of these questions, because they’re far more difficult than they first appear to be.

Objectives

You’ve decided on a goal. You’ve figured out how you want to position yourself in relation to your target. Finally, in your plan’s strategy section, you should lay out how you intend to accomplish this goal.

Sales and profit are, of course, the ultimate objectives. The question is, what marketing levers do you need to pull in order to get there? Is it necessary for us to make this target aware of our presence? Do they take into account our company’s name? Is it better for you? What about buying it more often? Why not get another one?

The best approach is always to have a single SMART objective for each target and three or four for the overall plan.

Tactics

You’ve made it to the end! Despite the fact that tactics are the third and final stage of the plan, I believe they should be organised by the target.

List the goals for each target and the tactics you propose for implementing the strategy in 2022 along with their associated costs as an effective way to accomplish this.

Budget

Finally, we arrive at the most critical slide of all budgets!

While most companies agreed on their marketing spend for the coming year long before you started working on your plan, they have not allocated it yet. If your plan is better, more ambitious, more likely to transpire than that of your peers presenting after you, there is every chance senior management will take money from them and invest it with you instead.

Good luck and if you need any help feel free to reach out to Little Lambe Consultancy… of course we had to get the obligatory plug in, sure why else would we be writing this!!