Construction Marketing Insights gained from Ecobuild 2017

As Ecobuild draws to a close for another year, it’s time for construction businesses to sit down and evaluate the success of the show. Typically, this will involve measuring how many leads they acquired and what type of feedback was received, in order to shape business strategies and marketing planning going forward.

This year, we carried out a range of interviews to gain an insight into how construction companies are benefiting from event marketing, to help you make the right decisions for your own business.

Is event marketing even worth the cost – or if you’re a regular exhibitor – which marketing tactics can you employ next year to stand out from the crowd?

We also interviewed Managing Director of Ecobuild Martin Hurn, who gave us an insight into his thoughts on the show this year and the exciting plans for the exhibition moving forward.

For us at Pauley Creative, the interviews demonstrated the popularity and ever-growing interest with social media and email marketing in the construction industry, to engage with key audience types on a more personal level. In particular, Instagram marketing is something that a few construction businesses are starting to experiment with (check out my post here for more information).

It also quickly became apparent that construction businesses are becoming more aware of the impact of digital marketing and how they need to expand their knowledge in order to stay ahead of competitors. It was great to see a few implementing virtual reality and video into their exhibition stands to create a personal, hands-on and memorable experience for their visitors.

However face-to-face marketing still remains a popular choice for many construction marketers when it comes to gaining leads for their business, through building a good reputation and trusting relationship. Whilst this seems to remain a successful tactic for the industry, it’s also important to create a succinct, unified strategy that combines a range of online and offline marketing tactics. Jonathan Stock, Publishing Director at Architecture Today, touches on this in more detail in his interview.

Whilst many companies we interviewed chose to market their product or services slightly differently, and had different views on what they thought worked well, what remains crucial to success is having a strategic plan in place from start to finish.

What will work best to attract the right audience and most importantly, what will you do with the information retrieved once the event has come to an end?

Have a browse of the interviews below…