Episode 36 – Lynn Lambe
Top Tips For Marketing Your construction Company in 2021
Lynn Lambe is the Director of Little Lambe Consultancy, Ireland’s only dedicated construction marketing agency which was founded by Lynn in 2018. Lynn founded the business after spotting a gap in the industry for a dedicated agency that focused solely on construction. Since then she has worked with some of Ireland’s leading clients including KSN, DCT Group, Ashview Consultants, Lightning Protection International and many more.
Podcast Highlights
Is there still a place for traditional marketing in construction?
Ciaran:
Your dad there. I mean, I’m sure that generation would be from a traditional marketing point of view, yellow pages, banners, get good signage on your sites, word-of-mouth was huge. And when a company comes to you, are you trawling the differences between traditional and online? I mean, is there still a place for traditional marketing?
Lynn:
I think traditional and digital, I think they both need to blend together to create a proper marketing strategy, not just for construction, but for any company. Obviously, we were just talking about it, but your digital presence is what everyone is looking at now. So I think the construction industry is still very traditional and they have been, and they are still quite slow to adopt even to digital technology, so your likes of BIM and stuff like that. It’s a slow and gradual process. But for digital marketing, if you have a bit of a budget that you can put into Google ads, I think it is really, really worthwhile, especially if you can see that your competitors are doing it.
Lynn:
I think the industry, they still like to go onto the trading press and they still like to get a magazine at their desk, which obviously doesn’t happen at the moment, given the circumstances, but they do still like to go online and see the trade media and what’s going on, and who’s in the headlines and what’s happening. So I still think there has to be a blend of traditional and digital, in order to capture the entirety of the market. So I don’t think you can do one without the other, I suppose is the best answer to that question.
How can construction companies get their brand ready for 2021?
Ciaran:
Yeah. I mean, there’s no doubt that this year marketing would have taken a backseat in terms of people’s priorities, because there was just so much other stuff going on that had to take priority. But, you talked about tips there, how can companies plan ahead for 2021?
Lynn:
Yeah, I think the best thing to do as well, there’s a bit of time over the Christmas period, I would say just do maybe an audit of where you’re at at the moment. So take stock of everything that you have, whether that’s your website, social media channels, brochures, business cards, email signatures. Just view it all as one package. And just look at it like if I’m a new customer, what way do people perceive my business and the materials that I have on offer and the presence that I have online?
Lynn:
And I think then you can quickly realize where you need to get to, and then put in place the tactics on how you’re going to get there. Even if it’s small little changes, like updating a banner on your LinkedIn page, or refreshing your email signature, just small tips. They’re not very expensive, so I think they can be implemented pretty quickly. From a website point of view, if you have analytics have a look at them, see how they’re performing. There might be pages that you need to refresh, just update, to improve your SEO, which if you have access to the back end of your website, that might be something that you look at. But again, I think just take stock and then have a look at the tactics and the objectives, mainly your objectives for 2021. And then see how can I get there, and what does that industry want from me as a supplier or as a manufacturer?
Ciaran:
Yeah, I’ll add to that as well. So, from my side of things, we ran an outdoor living business once upon a time, and I remember we used to get a lot of….so we would go to Google Ads, we’d use Google Ads all the time. We figured Google Ads out in its early days. We were early enough, our competitors weren’t on there, which was just great. So we were buying up all the key words, literally ran the whole business off Google AdWords. But what was happening was we were getting a lot of phone calls from tyre kickers really, it was taking up a lot of time.
Ciaran:
And this probably comes back to my original point, actually, when I was talking about people putting their phone number down on the bottom of the page. It’s probably because they don’t want to be called by tyre kickers, and they’re saying, “I don’t really have the time.” But one strategy we use, which I’ll throw in there as a tip, that worked quite well for us, is that we started to take notes of what people ask for when they called us initially. What were the questions we’re being asked? And we started to develop content in this white paper stuff, PDF, any sort of questions.
Ciaran:
So we had this top five questions that people asked us. What were people looking for? And we’d literally just refer them to that. And then we were able to sort of communicate with them through… I’m not a marketer, I come from a construction background. I am a carpenter. When my phone starts to ring I start to look at problems and how to fix these problems. And that was one that really worked well for us actually. So we started to then push out one piece of paper, really, that answered all the questions.
