A guide to helping marketing managers to plan for 2024
It’s that time of year when marketing managers in the construction industry are reviewing their budgets for the upcoming year and planning where they should place their PR, social media and digital marketing spend.
Here, our PR team provides their top tips for creating construction PR and social media campaigns that really do make a difference.
9 marketing planning tips
1. Maximise good quality content
First of all, it’s crucial to know that good content is the key to maintaining an engaging and well ranking website. We recommend to our construction and building product manufacturer clients that we write 1-2 blogs per month on their behalf, which helps to direct more traffic to your website. We often find that at least 25% of website traffic arrives at the site via the blog – this is usually one of the highest traffic areas and why it really is worth making the effort.
We also recommend putting a budget towards generating thought leadership content for the magazines and online journals in the industry. Dragonfly PR has excellent contacts with the trade media and we create a 12-month features schedule for each client, this identifies when the most relevant magazines are running specific features.
We then negotiate inclusion in the main features 3-6 months in advance. The content we create for thought leadership articles can be reworked after being featured in magazines. We can transform them into a blog style format for your website or other sites which hold high domain authority, allowing us to secure a backlink. We have expertise in writing thought leadership articles that establish your brand as an essential resource for key topics in the construction industry. All content is optimised with relevant keywords to improve its visibility in search engine results.
Good quality content not only attracts more visitors to a website or blog, but also helps improve organic SEO rankings.
2. Focus on LinkedIn for b2b engagement
LinkedIn continues to grow its platform with business people. In June 2023, LinkedIn had more than 930 million members across 200+ countries – this is an increase of 60m new members within a year!
Other platforms like Twitter/X, are in a state of flux, whilst LinkedIn is providing a solid, reliable, productive channel for businesses to grow their network and develop new opportunities.
We recommend increasing activity and budget for LinkedIn during 2024. This doesn’t necessarily mean multiply the times you post per week, but investing more time on special areas, such as executive profiling and community management or LinkedIn publishing. It is important to really focus on who you want to target and what kind of content they want to read and engage with.
If you simply don’t have the time or the energy for this, then let our social media team review your LinkedIn page’s and make recommendations for the year ahead. We are constantly creating LinkedIn content calendars for monthly or weekly approval, where we schedule the posts, carry out responsive services and also community management. For more information email hello@dragonflypr.co.uk.
3. Make use of visual content for engagement
Want to create a video that’s good enough for use on LinkedIn or other social media platforms? Then your phone is a good place to start. The latest technology means it is relatively easy to produce and edit a video yourself.
Are you releasing a new blog, press release or product news story? Why not do a 15 second introduction to it and upload, along with the content on your website or via LinkedIn publish.
Visual content, such as infographics, images, and videos, can significantly enhance the impact of your PR and social media campaigns. It would be worth setting aside a budget for producing at least 1-2 short professionally produced videos per quarter to showcase your projects, interview technical managers, product managers or sustainability managers, creating as much visual, educational content as possible for your website, social media and YouTube channel.
Visual content is great to share through social media and can help increase brand awareness and engagement.
4. Create construction project videos
Videos of construction projects are a powerful way to showcase your company's capabilities and expertise. You can use videos to document the progress of your projects, interview key team members, and highlight the unique aspects of each project.
These videos can be shared on your website, social media platforms, and YouTube to attract potential clients and demonstrate your product’s benefits to contractors, developers or property buyers.
You can even share some behind the scenes footage. Allow your clients, followers and social media users to feel involved in your successful wonderful construction projects.
5. Create educational and how-to videos
Educational and how-to videos work really well in the construction industry. We could create videos that provide step-by-step guides on construction techniques, safety practices, or industry regulations.
By sharing educational content, you position your brand as a trusted resource and enhance your credibility.
Plus, educational content is trending right now on LinkedIn.
6. Combine SEO with your digital PR strategies
Organic SEO has many advantages over pay per click (PPC). Not only does it improve your search engine ranking consistently, it means you can retain that ranking for much longer than with a sponsored advert.
Good quality SEO content ensures you rank higher than your competitors. We recommend focusing on a couple of areas – generating good quality backlinks from high domain authority websites and journals and regularly monitoring performance of key words and phrases.
We’ve had some great results recently with generating backlinks from digital PR activity – far exceeding the larger budget SEO agencies that certain companies work with!
In 2024, investing in organic SEO will continue to be crucial for marketing managers in the UK construction industry. By optimising your website and content for search engines, you can increase your visibility and attract more organic traffic.
When we set out on any new organic SEO campaign, we carry out extensive keyword research. This allows us to optimise website content, so we can improve your search engine ranking. We use tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush to find relevant keywords with high search volumes and low competition, where we can optimise your presence online.
7. Concentrate on increasing quality backlinks
Backlinks, or inbound links, are really important in determining your website's authority and credibility. In the year ahead, it’s important to focus on generating quality backlinks from reputable sources to retain good search engine rankings.
While generating quality backlinks is crucial, it's equally important to make sure you don’t; have lots of low quality or spam backlinks that can harm your website’s SEO. We run a range of online tools to help identify and manage your backlinks effectively.
8. Build relationships with influencers
One effective way to spread the message about your products and generate good quality backlinks is by building relationships with industry influencers.
We can seek opportunities to collaborate with influential figures in the construction industry through guest blogging, interviews, or creating valuable content alongside them on social media.
When these influencers and publications link back to your website, it boosts your credibility and improves your search engine rankings. We can also engage closely with them on social media, encouraging them to try and share specific products.
9. Make the most of exhibitions.
It’s great to see so many of our clients planning to exhibit at and attend exhibitions in the year ahead, but how do you make the most out of them?
We support our clients by designing a dedicate social media and PR campaign to ensure they achieve their objectives for the exhibition. This helps to ensure they maximise traffic to their stand, optimise social media engagement and get their products and company featured in the media.
Drop us a line about your exhibition and event plans and we can create tailored PR and social media campaigns to put your company in the spotlight. Don’t worry if you don’t have any plans yet. Our PR team can carry out some extensive research to see what speaking, exhibiting and event opportunities are out there for your company.
A final word…
In 2024, marketing managers in the UK construction industry have a lot to consider, especially when there are so many channels for them to reach their audience.
At Dragonfly PR, we have over 20 years’ experience in construction-sector PR and marketing and can advise you on the best way to approach your online and traditional media activity in the year ahead. One of the reasons can do this is that we continuously monitor and analyse the performance of our campaigns and report back on a monthly basis with results.
For more information call 0114 349 5341 or email hello@dragonflypr.co.uk.