Above The Fold

As we enter 2018, we are happy to announce we have added to the Cline Design team. Corinne Cline (yes, she’s our daughter) has joined our family-owned company as Vice President of Content Marketing.

Corinne is a 2008 graduate of Proctor Academy. In 2012, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Political Science from Hiram College. The following year, she entered the Professional Pastry Program at The Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and graduated with a professional degree in Pastry Arts. Corinne also studied pastry at L’Institute Paul Bocuse in Lyon, France.

I recently returned from the Construction Leadership Network conference, where I had the pleasure of spending three days meeting with more than 100 of the best commercial contractors in North America. I have known many of these construction professionals for decades, and continue to be amazed with their resilience to sustain their businesses throughout tough times and boom times. It's a crazy and competitive industry that comes with a lot of challenges. Marketing is one of them.

As I presented focus groups and sat in on panel discussions, I made it a point to carefully listen to the things commercial contractors struggle with. With this in mind, I have assembled a construction marketing list—the top six things you need to know to effectively market your company in 2017:

As an inbound strategic marketing firm, we strive for the most effective ways to connect with our client’s (and our own) audience. Whether we are attempting to educate, entertain or simply engage, producing consistent and relevant content can pose several challenges: What types of content should we publish? How often should we publish? What format should we use?

In my opinion, one of the most valuable benefits of inbound marketing is the ability to measure your marketing efforts in real time. In the past, using outbound marketing strategies, we relied upon anecdotal information or focus groups, or we had to remember to ask people, “How did you hear about us?” to gauge the success of our marketing campaigns.

The internet has forever changed the way we do business. We can now buy whatever we want from wherever we want whenever we want. What used to be a company-centric economy has now become a customer-centric economy. Buyers are better informed about products and services than ever before, and this helps shape their purchasing decisions. This holds true whether they are buying a new coffeemaker, a new car or a newly-constructed building.

 So, it is only logical that we need to shift the way we market to adjust to the new sales environment.

Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and your services, where they naturally want to be—to learn more and to become better informed buyers. Naturally, your company's website plays a key role in how prospects and clients interact with your company.

By aligning the content you publish across the internet with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.