This is something that has made me think a little after receiving a call today from Stephen Cousins, from Construction Manager Magazine. The magazine of the Charted Institute of Building www.construction-manager.co.uk

It suddenly occurred to me that there may be many avenues in marketing that builders or perhaps other tradesmen may not be employing to keep ahead and ensure a steady workflow.

Traditional marketing techniques for builders may be by way of classified advertising in let’s say the Yellow Pages or local newspapers. Flyers through letter boxes and business cards in shop windows are also a popular method to drum up interest.

The biggest shop window however, maybe completely overlooked by many builders and that is of course the Internet. With the many millions of surfers browsing the Internet, every minute of the day, it seems only right that builders should have some sort of online presence with the hope of capturing potential customers and job leads. Remember! people are searching the Internet for information and usually for the solution to a problem.

Here at 4K Construction, Liverpool and Merseyside Building Contractors, we have developed our own little online strategy and one of the key things we concentrate on is communication with our customers or even potential customers.

One of the simplest things to achieve a good level of communication is by creating a blog which can be done in a matter minutes and can be absolutely free by going to any of the free blog hosting site such as Blogger or even WordPress.

By having your own blog, you can effectively keep your readers constantly updated and also aware of what your company is currently up to. Further to this you can create a high following of readers as people will soon start to recognize you as a reliable resource and your blog  posts will begin to carry weight.

If you have a company website, you can also provide a link to this which will also help the search engines find your main ‘pitch or sales’ page. Also remember to keep your blog posts keyword rich with any particular phrases that will help promote your business.

There are numerous other ways to help you promote your blog or site and in the past, having a My Space or Facebook page was a great way to do this but the trend now seems to be Twitter as it allows you to send ‘Tweets’ to let people know what you’re doing or planning for the day. Here at 4K Construction, Liverpool Building Contractors, we have a good number of followers on Twitter whom we regularly keep updated with what we are up to. I can’t say that Twitter has been tremendously successful in drumming up great business, however, we do receive more readers and visitors to our blog from it and that can only be a good thing.

So there you are! a few tips on how you as a builder, may be able to create a higher online presence and grab a few more customers at the same time.

Many thanks to Stephen Cousins from Construction Manager Magazine.

Until next time!

Kirk Smith

4K