What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategy that involves publishing informative content about your product or service that brings value to potential customers. The purpose is to create brand awareness and build authority so you can ultimately generate more leads and increase your revenue. Depending on the type of product or service you offer, content marketing may be even more critical to your business. In this case, I will be discussing content marketing for heavy construction contractors.
Why Content Marketing is a Powerful Tool for Heavy Construction Contractors
Heavy construction is different from other types of contractors. Although each type of contractor has their own unique skill set, some have greater potential for danger and liability. Any job that involves working with large machinery would be considered high liability. This is why operators of certain types of heavy construction equipment are required to be licensed in so many states.
Content Marketing is Great Strategy for High Liability Industries. Any time danger is factored into a potential customer’s buying or hiring
decision, trust becomes paramount. This is absolutely true for heavy contractors. Shoddy road paving, pump drilling or electrical work could
cause larger problems in the future or result in properties failing to pass inspection. More importantly, someone could get injured which could lead to potential lawsuits. For these reasons, putting your expertise on display as a heavy contractor is critical. This is why content marketing is the best way to build trust to help generate leads from customers who want to hire a professional.
What Does “Put Your Expertise on Display” Mean?
An expert heavy contractor likely has thousands of hours of experience. They could have 10, 20, or 30+ years of experience in the industry. Anyone who has been in the business for a long time is going to know all the ins-and-outs of the work they do. They will know the intricate details of the job, tricks of the trade, and common pitfalls that may be encountered if the wrong person is hired. When you talk to a heavy contractor with that much experience, you can tell that they know what they are doing. The experience gives them authority and they can be trusted to perform a job to a certain standard.
A heavy contractor can have all the experience in the world, but if their expertise is not presented to potential customers, they won’t know. The best contractors in town are losing leads to handymen and brand new businesses every day because they have not made their skills available to potential customers online. Everything a business owner knows needs to be found on their website. When a customer comes to your website, it needs to be clear based on the content that your expertise is unmatched. If what you know and what you can do is not on your website, you have no authority and you can not build trust. All the valuable knowledge you have gained over the years need to be on your website.
How to “Put Your Expertise on Your Website”
Keyword Research
Putting every single thing you have ever learned as a heavy contractor on your website isn’t practical. It would make more sense to put information on your website that you know your customers are looking for. The good news is, there are keyword research tools that will show you exactly what type of searches your customers are making online. Any keyword, phrase, or question they type into a search engine is trackable and you can use it to make your content.
Creating a Content Strategy
When you start diving into the keywords being used by your customers, you will see that the possibilities are endless. You may even realize you can think of far more content to put on your website than you would have ever thought. With keyword research at your disposal, you could easily have hundreds if not thousands of pages on your website. For most people, producing that much content is not going to be realistic. A decision is going to have to be made on how much of this content is going to be put on your website.
One of the best things to look at to help with this decision is your competition’s website. If your top competitor has 300 pages of content, maybe beating that number becomes your goal. Once you know what the end goal is, speed is the next thing to consider. How quickly do you want to have these 300 pages added to your website? A year, two years, five years? The quicker you get the pages launched, the sooner your customers can see them and the sooner they will rank on a search engine.
Creating the Content
Although creating expert content may be hard for a content writer, it should be easy for a professional with field experience. Once you know what questions are being asked by the customer, you should be able to just go off the cuff to provide an answer. You can write the content, type it, or make a voice recording. It is recommended that you send this information to someone who knows how to edit and optimize it for search engines.
Editing and Optimizing the Content
At this point, the most important part of the process is complete. Now, the content just needs to be organized in a way that is easily understood by search engines. This may require the person who is optimizing the content to change some of the wording to ensure that target keywords are included. Relevant photos should be included to add a visual element to the information. In addition, proofreading and grammar checks will usually also be done by the person in charge of optimizing and publishing the content.
Conclusion
Content marketing can be confusing to people who offer local services. They might feel apprehensive about telling someone how to solve a problem when they want that person to hire them to do it. The reality is, most people are not hiring you because they don’t know how to do it themselves. The main reason they are hiring you is because they know as a professional you will do the job right and it will be done in a timely fashion. Even if you put a step-by-step guide on your website, the average person won’t be able to execute the task. What will happen however, is people will recognize your expertise and trust you to be the person they call when they have a need.