Construction Marketing: Win Tenders with Powerful Marketing Automation

Winning new business is every construction company’s top objective for growth and sustainability. The UK construction industry is poised for significant growth, with a predicted 8% increase this year despite the terrible weather at the start, and 7% in 2025, following a challenging year in 2023. This rebound, driven by larger project starts and a strengthening economy, highlights an opportunity of adopting strategies that can give your business a competitive edge.

As specialists in B2B construction marketing, we’ve finetuned proven strategies that support construction companies, like yours, deliver impact, growth, and ROI. Where there is typically 8 decision-makers in the construction tender process, our strategy of choice is developed around marketing automation.

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that can help your construction company streamline marketing efforts, ensure consistent communication and enable efficient sales processes. By automating repetitive tasks, you can focus on building relationships and driving growth.

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that can help your construction company streamline marketing efforts, ensure consistent communication and enable efficient sales processes. By automating repetitive tasks, you can focus on building relationships and driving growth.

Lead Generation: Captures and nurtures leads through automated processes across channels, ensuring no prospect slips through the net.

Segmentation and Personalisation: Allows for targeted marketing campaigns by segmenting your audience based on specific criteria, delivering personalised and relevant communications.

Automated Campaigns: Enables the setup of campaigns such as drip emails, follow-ups, and re-engagement efforts, maintaining a steady flow of communication with prospects and customers.

In other words, marketing automation creates detailed customer profiles based on their behaviour, enabling you to send targeted communications on what that audience requires. With this information, every communication can be aligned to key decision-making moments within the construction buying cycle. This requires a stella marketing automation strategy, one that considers all the people involved that make decisions on whether your tender gets the ‘yay’ or ‘nay’.

The tender process for construction companies involves a lot of scrutiny amongst decision-makers. Marketing automation provides a unique opportunity to address their needs and concerns, subsequently ticking their boxes before the tender process even takes place. But first, you need to create buyer personas for every individual in the buying cycle. These outline their values, challenges and pain-points, and purchasing triggers to help you formulate strategies for engagement. Here’s a few examples:

Facilities managers often initiate construction projects and play a significant role in in selecting construction firms. Their challenges typically include maintenance and repair management, compliance, and vendor and contract management. Facilities managers are often influenced by maintenance issues and efficiency improvements. So, your key messaging should be around how your construction company can automate the delivery of efficiency reports and cost-savings tips to highlight how your solutions can reduce operational costs.

Property managers work closely with construction companies on new builds and major developments, making them key decision-makers. They value ROI, sustainability, and market insights. They are often influenced by market opportunities, energy efficiency, and increased tenant demand, so send them market analysis and sustainability content to demonstrate your expertise in these areas.

Procurement managers manage the tender process, evaluate bids, and negotiate contracts, so these are the people that need sweetening up the most. They often face challenges in cost-management, supplier management, and technology integrations. If you use technology to enhance your operational efficiency, sustainability goals, and safety obligations, leverage this to win business. Additionally, provide comparative analysis and cost-saving alerts to showcase your competitive edge.

This sounds easy enough, right? Well remember, not every business is ready for your solution right now. It’s why you need insights to gather intelligence about people interested in your business, and send relevant communications based on their position in the buying cycle.

At Beach Marketing, we developed the 6-stage buying cycle. It’s our bible for B2B marketing success. It starts from ‘unaware’ to ‘signed and sealed’ and provides a route for construction companies like yours to capture leads and nurture them through the sales funnel. Marketing automation is key to our success, because it allows us to identify prospects on a lead scoring basis and encourage them to take our planned journey with appropriate content. For example:

Awareness Stage: These are typically website visitors. Use automated campaigns to convert these into leads with educational content and awareness-building efforts.

Consideration Stage: They’ve filled out a form. Great work! Now nurture these by providing detailed case-studies, webinars, and personalised follow-ups, helping prospects move towards a decision.

Decision Stage: Facilitate the final push by sending tailored proposals, testimonials, and direct contact from sales teams, ensuring a smooth transition from lead to client.

Now this is a very short version of what is typically a much larger journey and remember these are applied to every decision-maker in the tender process.

Marketing automation yields a multitude of benefits for construction companies. Save time and resources by automating repetitive tasks, allowing your team to focus on strategic planning. Maintain consistent and personalised communication, increasing the likelihood of converting leads into customers. Achieve higher engagement rates and better return on investment through targeted and automated campaigns. If that’s enough to spark awareness of your need for marketing automation, look no further.

Enter Sonar. Our very own marketing automation platform designed for B2B markets like yours. It’s an engine, a whole crew, a team of engineers, and a captain with a wealth of knowledge. In other words, it’s a managed service. Working with you to plot the right course and generate more leads and drive more contracts. Book a demo today with no-obligation and find out how Sonar can make a powerful impact on your tender outcomes.