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Construction Marketing – The Good, the Bad & the Mostly Ugly

One of the services I provide here at Darren’s house of useless knowledge is a full media review ($149) which provides you with a detailed list of what’s right and wrong with your current marketing and advertising. It can be online or off, print, radio or television, it doesn’t matter.

Because of the down economy and tighter than normal ad budgets, I am running across some ugly friggin’ ads. The problem is, if your advertising looks like shit, potential clients will assume that your product or service is shit, and they will be less likely to buy.

The most popular ways to kill a campaign are:

Print:

  • Company name in headline equals kiss of death to the ad.
  • No website or email in the ad copy
  • Serious copy points omitted or forgotten from the ad
  • Not having a local number to the area you are marketing in

Online:

  • Not having a website at all
  • Using your site on Merchant Circle be your representation online
  • Casting too far and wide of a net with poor keyword selection
  • Having a landing page that doesn’t convert
  • Not having a contact form on every page of your site
  • Asking for too much info on your contact form
  • Not getting a proper email address. Meaning, it’s time to get rid of the Yahoo, Gmail, AOL email accounts and step into the 21st century…because your clients have!

Radio:

  • Having the principle of the company reading the spots instead of professional voice over actor
  • For the most part – being on the radio!

Television:

  • Not allocating enough of a budget to be effective
  • Having the principle of the company doing the spots themselves instead of letting an actor do it

Social Media:

  • Having a Twitter or Facebook page and never posting to them
  • Never responding to people who tweet, DM or email you from your social media platforms
  • Locking your Twitter profile so that each new friend request has to be approved
  • Spamming everyone in site by just pumping out your “specials” through your stream until you are left with no subscribers because they are tired of seeing pitches but no real content
  • Not having your web address on your Twitter or Facebook profile page

The issues above will kill campaigns. I see it all the time. But that isn’t the real problem. If you kill a campaign because the ads where bad but you just assume it was the platform then you will never use that resource again. And it just be a great place to advertise if you had the right message.

That’s why it’s not a bad idea to get your advertising looked at a few times a year to help you separate the wheat from the chaff. Because if you are currently employing some of the tactics listed above you are definitely losing business, it’s just a matter of how much!