Ep 23: 3 Marketing Mistakes Construction Companies Are Making in 2025

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Episode Transcript:

This transcription is provided verbatim from the excerpts of the podcast video “3 Marketing Mistakes Construction Companies Are Making in 2025” uploaded on the YouTube channel “Construction Hot Takes Podcast.”

Hey hi well welcome to today’s episode I have a topic on marketing for you shocker shocker okay so we’re going to be talking about my pet peeves that I keep seeing with our clients in marketing okay and I don’t know pet peeve is a strong word but it’s like the things that I’m like “Okay we just got to tell everybody these things because stop stop doing these things and it will fix a lot of things for your construction company marketing.” Okay of course you know I work with these clients every single day and have here for the last 3 years and then I’ve worked in construction marketing and seen this for the last 15 let’s call it right sure um if your marketing plan one doesn’t exist or is simply consisting of a logo a website and a random newsletter or some dusty Instagram posts um then this is the episode for you uh we’re breaking down like my kind of top three reasons that construction company marketing efforts either fail or non-existent or um are just simply outdated and like what you can do to fix them it’s basically the first article I wrote when I first started working for Ascent where this is like my soap box and I’ll stand on it all day long and I have no problem writing a giant rant about all these things do you even need me on this podcast i do i do i think you’ll have some color to add so okay but and you can maybe give me some push back we’ll see all right um Okay so the first one I like to talk I turn my hat around for this one so thanks uh the first one which Ascent was very guilty of before I joined the team random acts of marketing mhm they didn’t feel that random they were scheduled they were organized it was quarterly newsletter and then we had like seven or eight major holidays that you quickly said “Nobody cares if I wish you a happy Father’s Day.” Nobody cares if you get a Veterans Day email or a St patrick’s Day email they’re going to be opening it to delete it so yeah just wasted effort okay but random acts of marketing include um an idea that you just had to just let’s just try it or um let’s just start posting on you name it social media thing and oh we should run an ad should we just like maybe we should just like run should just try an ad let’s just okay send it to the interwebs or um you know I’m just going to send out an email with a sale or I’m just going to send out a mass email to every single one of our customers to just check in um random acts of marketing are often times well-intentioned and may even be a standalone good idea mhm but just like in construction I’ve said this to some of our clients on sales calls before you’re a design build firm you don’t just show up on day one at someone’s house and start building something anything the bathroom it’s like no no you go through design and architectural plans and approvals and permits and you know exactly what you’re building the second you dig your shovel in the ground the first time and I think we see that and you can kind of comment on that we see that with our marketing clients they just come in like “We just want I don’t know a better website or something right?” Um you look like you got a story i Yeah so I talked to a guy a couple months ago he’s in California mhm smaller guy uh residential remodel contractor not our typical client but he was looking for marketing help and he was trying to basically generate more leads for his pipeline and um I asked him what he was what he was currently doing for marketing so he’s like I’m spending money on Angie’s List and I’ve got some Google ads running and I’m doing this and I’m doing that and I coined a new phrase and I called it casino marketing because you’re basically taking your money and you’re going to different tables trying different things to see if you strike it rich and if that doesn’t work you take your whatever chips you have left and you go to the next table and you try playing a different game and you see if you strike it rich there i said so you’re like you play roulette for a little while and that doesn’t seem to be working out so then you go over and you play blackjack and maybe you win a little bit at blackjack and you get a project so you play more blackjack but then you start losing your chips and then you go over here and you play casino war and he was like “That is exactly what I’m fucking doing.” I’m like “Yep you’re basically at a casino gambling with your marketing dollars and you’re not winning anything i mean you we need to pick a game that you’re good at teach you how to play it and then let you just go play that game until you start winning and get good at it get good at it.” What I see with our clients a lot of times they want they want results now or they wait actually too late to start marketing you know like let’s say they started their business and they gotten good referrals and they’ve been growing a bit right so they come to us and they’re at 35 million right but they’re stuck or they don’t know how to get so they’re like “Oh we need a market let’s market right?” And they just want to hire somebody and start taking action and I get that but also you know that’s one thing if I could just you know drill this into everybody’s mind anybody who says that they can just take your stuff and start marketing and getting you real lasting results is lying to you truly you need to take time to deeply understand the market and make a plan make a plan that is outlined that you can follow that’s based in research real numbers like do you even know your total addressable market what what’s a TAM i don’t heard that before you know like you’ve got to know these things in order to actually move forward with smart and educated marketing so okay I’ll get off of my soap box on that but random acts of marketing rarely work is what I’m trying to say they may work just like casino marketing which I love that yes you can use that we haven’t used that before together so I’m gonna steal that i love that you can use that just like Yeah you might strike a wrench once or twice right on something but you don’t know why or what and causation is not you know or correlation is not causation yeah in construction we often say you know a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while so Exactly so have a plan um the next thing is the misuse of social media and it’s one of two ways so I see it either like ghost town you have no presence at all which makes you look outdated and frankly out of business um and then well there’s three things really and then outdated content right okay who had a marketing person who did some stuff one time and then you never took it down and it hasn’t been touched in 5 years but it’s there um and your logo’s changed since then and you know it just it looks stale and old and that also makes you look kind of careless a little bit low budget and also like are you even in business anymore what are you doing mh um and then there’s the other side of the coin where it is way too much and like okay no one in construction at least of our clients is likely going to actually be viral or an influencer or people don’t really care at the end of the day but you know overposting and having a full-time social media person on staff to do all of your inrogress builds and here’s some time lapse or stuff nobody cares waste of money nobody cares it’s not going to win you a job stop wasting your money immediately and I’ll tell you exactly how to do social media smartly um so wait wait i do know one guy who is in construction who does a great job of using social media specifically Instagram to market and build his business and I’ve never met this guy who is it it’s uh it’s a guy who installs TVs and high-end sound systems and he’s in the Houston area and I don’t know his handle off hand i can find him put in the show notes direct to consumer though is he like for homeowners yes but the thing is he’s great because he’s basically taking you through the installation that he did in the house mhm and he’s doing commentary in the background the whole time he’s explaining exactly how he’s doing it and everything and he’s showing it off and he’s funny and he’s he makes little jokes and stuff he is probably where it’s at he’s really got uh he’s really got it down i enjoy his And these are like long form videos these are like 5 to 10 minute videos sometimes um that’s long for Instagram i will watch the whole thing it’s one of the only videos I’ll watch like that’s more than 60 seconds unless it’s like Eddie Van Halen or something like that yeah right or all the like uh dumb recaps of um old SNL clips that you like to watch yes I do like those too and NFL bad lip reading yes those are hysterical they don’t do those anymore no okay so anyway bring those back if the guys from NFL lip reading are bad NFL lip reading are watching this bring that back yes we will watch your content um yeah so there okay c there is a caveat right if you are a high-end uh residential remodeler we have several clients that are like that then Instagram is absolutely a platform you need to be investing in but you’re not investing in it to go viral you’re investing in it to showcase your work and connect visually with Nobody’s going to hire you to build their data center because you’re on Instagram exactly right so okay what do you do about this right so the point is across all touch points you want your brand to look cohesive right you want your brand to look like you are in business you’re actively have projects going on and that your branding is tight and um purposeful so what I recommend to a lot of our clients is you get you need a 100% across the board refresh right everything needs an update you need some new content you need to make sure all your branding is right and make sure you exist on all of these platforms and we could totally have a sidebar episode about exactly what to do on all of those things but the biggest thing to note is that if you just let it go to waste right it’s it just looks it looks unprofessional frankly in today’s day and age you might have gotten away with it in the past you may have gotten away with it even maybe it’s 5 years ago but no you have to have a presence and it needs to look professional and cohesive um for sake of time I’ll move on to my next point but I could be on a soap box on that for a long i will just add that social media Facebook Instagram LinkedIn they’re free it’s a free platform like it costs you a little money to generate the content maybe but you don’t have to pay to use the platform they are free like you should be leveraging them in some way absolutely and like okay let’s just throw in a little bone out there like post once a week like really that’s what you need if you’re just trying to maintain a professional active looking account a once a week post on all the platforms is enough and you can focus on you know we just want a new job we’re so excited and here’s a picture of you know um the building or whatever like people aren’t going to be looking at it for your photos they’re going to be looking at it for content um but also the other thing is it’s also if you’re looking to recruit employees they’re going to be looking at your social media as well so it’s a great place to recruit yeah it absolutely should be used for recruiting and I feel like we have to have a whole actually of how to use social media properly in construction that’s a whole another episode so we’ll put a pin in that but we could definitely talk about that but also your website and listen this is for all of you out there if you have not updated your website in the last three years it is ancient old decrupted and needs to be redone three years i know that’s like oh it’s yesterday no no it’s like worse than dog years websites age faster than dogs it’s it’s time to redo it and especially within the last 18 months everything you thought you knew about SEO has changed so we’re now optimizing for generative engine search not SEO so that’s also a whole sidebar conversation but if your website’s more than three years old it is completely extinct um okay this is a topic that you like marketing and sales being completely disconnected and or clients thinking that marketing is responsible for sales activity yeah i did a whole episode on this i know it was our first episode yes so almost a year ago that was a year ago wow so yeah marketing and sales are two two different things i I like the fishing analogy so marketing is figuring out which lake you’re going to go to stocking the boat putting a lure or a worm on a hook and putting it into the water and starting to try and attract the fish once a fish bites on that lure that is now sales is no longer marketing’s responsibility to continue to attract the fish that’s already on the hook it is now sales responsibility to reel the fish in determine if it’s a good fish and you want to keep it uh or if it’s not right for you and you throw it back that is sales job marketing should get you into a place that has the right kind of fish hopefully the right ones are biting if you’re getting the wrong kinds of fish you go back to marketing the wrong fish we need a bait we need a different kind yeah but man if I had a dollar for every client I had to walk through this exercise of helping them realize that marketing is not actually the problem the problem is your sales process well this is Glen Gary Graham exactly the leads aren’t weak you’re weak exactly i should have brought my mug today oh I should have brought my You should have brought your coffee for your mug that’s right um Yeah no it’s just like I’m almost tempted to never take on another marketing client unless they go through sales training first or would get an audit of their sales process because I think so many people also focus on marketing first before really taking a look at their sales process and especially in you know um commercial construction right GC’s like you’re I don’t know I I feel like that sales process isn’t looked at enough cuz things just sort of happen or they just get chewed in right or you have a relationship they tend to think that they send in a bid invite and or they get a bid invite and they send in an estimate a bid a proposal and then that’s it they just wait and see if they won or lost and there’s so much more that can be done before sending in the proposal to position you to win then the proposal kind of backs up that position and then there’s even stuff to do after that proposal goes in to try and continue continue to move towards winning that and being awarded that project and especially not just for general contractors trying to win from developers but subs trying to win from generals there is so much there that they don’t do cuz they don’t even know they can do it and everybody’s big proposals are so ugly you’re like if you just I mean the thing is if they’re all ugly you’re not winning because your proposal is pretty you’re winning on your number and your relationship but think about if you had a nice looking co professional cohesively branded bid and everyone else’s is ugly like gives you an opportunity to stand out right away it’s an edge right yes a small lift but an edge anyways that’s I think all our time for today but those are my three uh little soap boxes I want to jump on and um you know listeners watchers if you have questions thoughts feelings or responses to this would love to answer them in the comments like hit me up in the comments i’m happy to give you um some advice about your social media etc thanks Catherine well thanks for joining us today on Construction Hot Takes and uh check us out on YouTube Spotify Apple and we’ll see you on the next one