Already firmly established since the mid-2010s, LinkedIn has become absolutely essential to the communication of construction and housing brands, particularly since the health crisis. Yet it is not always easy to build a (strong) presence on the professionals' favourite platform! To convince you to take the plunge, or to help you perform better there, we have gathered in this article all the good reasons why you should be ramping up on LinkedIn over the coming months!
Being on LinkedIn is not just about creating a Company page: it is about running it in a way that gets you recognised as an active brand that is worth following.
To reach your specification audiences
Ah… “specification” (also known as “the manufacturers' Holy Grail” in our construction and housing dictionary). Like most of your competitors, and as a manufacturer, you most likely dream of being the go-to choice for specifiers (developers, landlords, architects, contractors, etc.) and of being THE solution that appears in every tender specification document. And yet, it has to be said that specifiers are among the hardest (and slowest) audiences to reach in the construction ecosystem.
With that in mind, LinkedIn stands out as an essential crossroads for getting specifiers to hear about your solutions and win them over. Indeed, the platform has for several years now been the favourite social network of this audience*, and discussions between quantity surveyors, housebuilders and project owners are commonplace there.
But beware! Highlighting your strengths does not mean showing off. On the contrary, LinkedIn demands a well-designed, well-executed content and social media strategy. The equation is well known: the closer you want to get to specification audiences, the more you need to rely on tools and content designed to meet their needs. You will not win over construction specifiers with a navel-gazing pitch, but rather by covering topics that genuinely interest them and framing your communications with an editorial line that reflects your brand's values and objectives. News, site diaries, regulatory updates, white papers, podcasts, newsletters: LinkedIn is the ideal place to activate all this ROI-driven content! ;-)
03 June 2019
Geoffrey S.
6minTo secure your brand's visibility and awareness
In the age of social media frenzy, this might sound basic, but it remains a reality: it is essential for your brand to be (clearly) visible on LinkedIn in order to safeguard, at the very least, its brand image. Today, (almost) all of your competitors are present AND active on LinkedIn. Not being there projects an anachronistic image of your brand that probably does not do justice to the performance of your solutions. Whether or not you buy into the logic of social media, the conclusion is inescapable: if everyone is there except you, your brand will inevitably suffer an image and awareness deficit that will keep it from performing to its full potential.
Being on LinkedIn is not just about creating a Company account and posting at random: it is about feeding it regularly, with well-paced, well-balanced content that will get you recognised as an active brand worth following.
The don'ts for a construction manufacturer on LinkedIn
- Skipping the definition of an editorial line, a content strategy and an editorial calendar
- Duplicating content from your other social networks without taking LinkedIn's specific features into account (you do not post the same thing on Facebook and on LinkedIn — the audiences and usage are not the same!)
- Forgetting to train your sales teams
- Assuming LinkedIn is only good for recruitment or your employer brand
- Underestimating the power of well-targeted advertising (Reaching a construction quantity surveyor in Périgueux and a site engineer in Mulhouse at the same time? Yes, it can be done!)
To bring your employer brand to life
If LinkedIn works so well today, it is also because of its capacity to act as the world's largest HR department. On this network, you have a golden opportunity to showcase, articulate and illustrate the values, initiatives and DNA that define your employer brand. By existing on LinkedIn as a brand with strong values, you mathematically increase its aura and its leadership.
That is very good for spotting talent and easing recruitment, but it is also excellent for your brand's image and external standing among your audiences (chiefly specifiers). Today more than ever, the construction and housing manufacturers who come out on top are those who manage to build a strong bond with their audiences, sharing their challenges and offering them a vision that goes far beyond the expected framework of technical performance and the value for money of the products they sell.
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To harness the power of social selling
The icing on the cake: LinkedIn is an ultra-effective platform for supporting your sales force and helping them hit their commercial targets. Most of them are, in all likelihood, already on the network (in a personal capacity), where they can connect with their “real-life” professional contacts. The catch: without a clear editorial framework and without upskilling your teams (through dedicated training), there is a real risk that the social selling opportunities LinkedIn could offer your brand will descend into one giant cacophony.
Teams equipped to perform on LinkedIn are salespeople who have made the brand's tone and editorial line their own. They then draw on it to keep nurturing their own network by sharing and relaying the manufacturer's content. This unity and these individual skills are an essential link in your presence (and your results) on LinkedIn — do not neglect them!
Whether you are hesitating to take the plunge or need to clarify your LinkedIn strategy, specialist agency Convergence is here to support you. For more than 30 years, we have been helping construction and housing brands design and roll out effective strategies across all their communication channels.