Have you thought about how the look of your brand and design impacts your construction business? No matter what type of residential construction company you build with, your marketing collateral needs a design that attracts customers and helps sustain your business. Design is essential for all residential construction businesses, so utilizing these tips will help your business prosper.
Here are five tips for better marketing design in your construction business to attract more customers, drive sales, and put more money in your pocket.
1. Solve a problem.
Think about what type of problems you might face within your construction company. Misalignment, unexpected costs, unmet deadlines, and unpredictable weather can be some of the problems you or your clients face when building a home. Build trust by letting your customers know that you will solve their problems if they partner with you. Offer suggestions for them to stay up to date, and keep track of their project details and selections. Maintain a good reputation in your area by being transparent and easy to work with.
Think about the problem you wish to solve. Why is this a problem and what's the best solution? Think about whether you need to interview your customers, extract data from your analytics, discover a new way for your users to interact with your content, write a blog post that acknowledges their concerns, or something else. Finding out what the exact pain points are is the first step in creating a better experience. After you have identified the problem you can brainstorm the right solution.
For instance if you wanted to focus on building trust with clients and prospects you could focus on your website experience. Build stronger relationships with clients, and prospective clients, by creating web pages or newsletters that address frequently asked questions where your clients can find important information. Good web design and user experience is imperative to gain traction and keep users on your site. It’s also crucial to nail your first impression online with prospective clients. If your website or marketing materials are messy why should clients trust you with their home? Choose a clear CTA (Call To Action) to drive the customer where you want them to go, such as a button to view photos from other projects. Don’t forget to include all your social media handles so your clients can easily follow you on all of your accounts, this will help increase your follower count and make you more reputable. In addition, be sure to include a contact section or some way for the customer to get answers and learn how the building process works. Show clients and prospects that you will bring their vision to life.
2. Use psychology.
Captivating clients can be tricky, but with smart, creative design you can better hold onto the attention of your customers. It’s not just about making things look pretty, it’s about using emotion, psychology, and problem solving skills to deliver a design that captivates your audience and gets the message across. Don’t be afraid to make puns (where relevant), think outside the box, use hyperboles, or even humor.
Clients want transparency, for you to have a command of the project details, and for you to respect their budget. Without these, clients could leave a building experience confused, frustrated, and upset enough to leave bad reviews or not advocate for you with their friends and family.
Think about how they are feeling and what it is they really want. Do some research on the topic and how you want to present it. For instance, research and study the behavior of your clients. What types of posts and materials have they reacted to in the past and what has not earned as many responses? Reference the analytics from your website and your social media to map out the top most important ideas or topics and create a timeline for when you will be posting your material. Brainstorming topics can help you discover new and better ideas. Gather inspiration from other websites and your competitors before putting together pros and cons of each.
3. Be Consistent
Find a good color palette that fits with your brand and stick to it. Use secondary colors to highlight other elements and branding assets.
“Color can assist in attracting new customers, 76% of people believe that the use of color makes their business look more appealing and larger to clients.” – Colorcom
Different colors can convey a different message. Blue usually represents trust or loyalty, green is eco-friendly and natural, red can mean bold, striking, or powerful. Gradients are also a nice touch to add to content and can really make things pop. Think about the message and end goal, then take the first step in creating content they won’t forget! People will begin to pick up patterns in your branding and marketing, then before you know it they recognize it and look forward to seeing what you’ll do next.
Reinforce your brand by piecing together snippets of content that look alike and have the same theme and feel throughout. Use the same font for each type of marketing material. Visual hierarchy is important to guide viewers' eyes across the page, and lends credibility to the message you are trying to emphasize.
4. Don’t forget the details.
Remembering small details about customers goes a long way, and you can use this to your advantage by incorporating things they’ve said into your marketing design. Interview your clients or get quotes from them about their experience working with you. Businesses aren’t just robots, behind every brand is a team of real people that are making it work. By including your clients and your team, you help give your brand a personal feel and lets prospective clients see the value you bring.
CoConstruct makes it easy to keep track of all the details. By leveraging our construction software you improve your client relationships and expedite your building process.
Additionally make sure you use high definition photos from your jobsite for promotional material so you don’t end up with blurry or pixelated images. When clients see a blurry photo, they will think you don’t care about the details. If you don’t care about that detail, then why would a small crack in the wall, or a floor board slightly out of place matter either?
Carry details all throughout your marketing design, even down to your website CTAs. Always use dark text on light buttons or light text on darker buttons. Increasing the contrast makes things pop and stand out, it also helps let the reader know what is important. Your website font choice is another important decision that affects readability. For example, Open Sans, Quicksand, Roboto, Poppins, Raleway, and Inter are among some of the best typefaces to use for buttons and smaller text. As you can see below the top left button is easiest to read and uses a sans-serif font on a dark background. Material.io is a good resource for web design tips like this.
5. Make it simple.
The more complicated your design, the longer it takes for your clients to process and absorb information. Keeping your designs simple will eliminate the time it takes them to understand your message. You want to get straight to the point and focus on the most important details. Take for example the Nike logo.
Over time Nike simplified their logo and now only uses the infamous check mark or swoosh. This is a recognizable mark all over the world and when people think of Nike they think of the check mark. They've built their brand on simplicity where they no longer HAVE to include the word Nike - the logo says it all. Their marketing design proves that simplicity is key and can make a huge impact without being complicated. Stick to the foundations of you and your company, strip down unnecessary elements, and focus on what's most important.
We’ve pulled together some design tools you can play with for better marketing design. You can even Google the type of ad or material you would like to use and find inspiration from other businesses. See what looks good and fits your branding, then figure out how to implement your content into that design. Find a tool, create your branding, and stick to it. By exercising the bullets above you will be able to attract more people, gain awareness, and generate more income for your construction business.
Design tools for non-designers:
- Venngage – Infographic templates and inspiration to use for quick and easy layouts on posters, email campaigns and more.
- Picmonkey – Easily customize and create beautiful graphics for ads and social media.
- Canva – Tools and templates for presentations, video and other marketing materials.
- Google Fonts – Endless fonts used by designers across the globe.
- Material.io – Tips and examples of beautiful components for apps and web.
- Flaticon – Hundreds of icons to explore and use in your projects.
- MockupWorld – Search thousands of realistic mockups.
- Burst – Stock photography to use at your leisure.
- Graphic Burger – Plethora of graphics, icons and designs for your business.
