Having a strong presence on social media isn’t just about physical structures, but about creating genuine connections that set the groundwork for success in the digital era. In this episode, we have Emma Tessler, founder of Ninety Five Media, reveal the construction CEO’s guide to building a strong social media foundation. Discover why diversifying your social media team, including field personnel, is crucial for authentic engagement. She also discusses how storytelling can set your construction brand apart and foster trust with your audience. Emma highlights the importance of crafting a diverse range of content buckets, promoting in multiple media forms, and more. Tune in now and learn how to maximize your presence!
Buy Eric’s Book: Construction Genius: Effective, Hands-On, Practical, Simple, No-BS Leadership, Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies – https://www.amazon.com/Construction-Genius-Effective-Hands-Leadership/dp/B0BHTRDY1T
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmatessler
Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stop-scrolling-start-scaling-podcast/id1635151196
Learn how to create content that converts: https://ninety-five-media.mykajabi.com/mym
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Brick By Digital Brick: A Construction CEO’s Guide To Building A Strong Social Media Foundation With Emma Tessler
Marketing is how you attract clients and potential clients to the top of your sales funnel. Without marketing, you’re not able to begin the conversation with people that leads them to do business with you. It’s essential that you have a clear marketing message that is communicated across a variety of platforms. In this episode, we’re going to talk about social media marketing with Emma Tesler, who is the founder and CEO of Ninety Five Media, a digital marketing agency.
Emma’s focus is helping companies connect with their ideal clients through a variety of social media channels. She’s an expert in social media. We’re going to talk about how commercial construction companies should focus their social media marketing efforts on an organic basis. We’re not talking about paid advertising. We’re talking about organic advertising. Now there’s going to be a lot in here on strategies, tactics and techniques that you can use for social media marketing.
Before you say, “I don’t have time for this,” you need to focus on this as the CEO of your company, because I realize you don’t have time for it, but someone in your company or someone outside of your company must take the time to go through the marketing effort if you’re going to be able to consistently generate business for your construction company. Read this because this will give you insights that you can then use right away to direct your own people on how they should be doing the marketing in your organization. Enjoy my conversation with Emma. Share it with other people in your organization or across your network. I appreciate you reading this blog.
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Emma, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
In a world where commercial contractors are not awarded a project because of a cool cat meme on LinkedIn, what’s the point of social media marketing?
It’s such a great question because oftentimes we look at social media as this form of funny marketing, random content trends that make no sense, but I would challenge you to begin thinking about social media as a search engine. The reality is when you are submitting an RFP or bidding on a project, you are getting searched by the companies that you’re pitching. While historically we have always gone to Google and we find your website and we go there and we go through your content on your site, the shift that’s starting to happen is that social media platforms are becoming the search engine that people are going to.
Gen Z, Millennials, older Millennials and Gen X are beginning to turn to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn as their form of finding out more about a company, whether that’s yours or your competitors. The number one reason to focus on your social media marketing and make sure that your content is more than a cat meme, but represents who you are, what you do, the projects that you create and the beautiful work that you produce is that you are showing up when someone is searching for you. What they’re finding is representative of the incredible projects that you produce and that your social media can help you win more projects than if you didn’t have a presence at all.
I like that framing. It’s obvious, but it’s not one that I’ve articulated myself that social media is a search engine. It’s important that people lay hold of that right there because you get to know a company, you’re putting in bids and they’re searching for you on the internet, and they’re using their social media to do that. To be perfectly honest, I hear the word TikTok and my skin starts to crawl. I hear the word LinkedIn, I think dull and boring, but effective because I’m on LinkedIn a lot. I have no interest in doing TikTok, but I admit that that’s my problem, not necessarily the platform’s problem. The question I’ve got to ask then is if social media is a search engine, where should a commercial construction company that is business-to-business be going in terms of different channels to begin to establish or grow a social media presence?
That comes down to a lot of factors one thing I would say when someone says to me, “I hate TikTok. It’s such a Gen Z platform. I don’t want to be on video. That doesn’t make any sense for my brand.” What I would challenge you to think is maybe it’s not the right platform for you, and it feels weird for you, but even you said, “I know that’s my problem. I know that that’s something I don’t want to do,” But even if you are bidding on projects and the person that you’re speaking to across the table may be a bit older and maybe they aren’t liking TikTok either, there are other people in the mix who get in their ear about that decision.
There are possibly younger people on the team who are scrolling through TikTok on a Friday night and they’re coming across this type of content then they bring it up at work on Monday morning and it becomes a part of the discussion. When you’re considering which platforms to be active on, there are two big ones. The first is, “Who is our target audience?”
In the case of readers, our target audience is large construction companies that we’re looking to win these projects. It’s B2B, but you have people in the mix. We are all people at the end of the day. People are working at these companies who are making the decision. That part of it is an element. There’s another element of discoverability and your goals for growth. Traditionally, word of mouth has been a big way to gain new business, but that’s shifting and changing. We’ve seen that happen a lot primarily over the past years since the pandemic. Now there is such a big shift to social media bringing in a lot of business for you and that potential that lays there.
The truth is if you are not tapping into that potential your competitor is. That’s one of the big reasons to hone in on and dive deep into your marketing. Another element of determining where you should be is your content bandwidth. As a company, how much time for human resources projects do you have available to showcase through your social media? Who do you have on your team that can help you capture it? Who do you have on your team to strategize around the content that should be posted? How many projects do you have that you can post about?
There are NDAs that come into place, location, travel and things like that. Considering what you have that maybe you’ve captured in the past. Sometimes an issue comes up where, “In the past, we were only capturing photo content and now TikTok needs all video. How are we going to accommodate and change our methods to meet these new demands?” Content bandwidth is often a very large determining factor in where you’ll show up.
Let’s talk about content bandwidth. I have a particular strategy that I use with my content creation where I can shoot a video that’s maybe four minutes in length. I can get the transcript of that, turn that into a blog post, a Twitter thread or a LinkedIn post. I can even cut the video into sections and post like a one-minute video on LinkedIn or if I was on TikTok, it would be on TikTok. Is that what you mean in terms of being able to perhaps widen your content bandwidth? As soon as you start talking about that, I’m trying to bid work, plan work, build work and get paid, and now you’re talking about TikTok videos. I start to feel maybe a little overwhelmed. Give us some insight there into how we can perhaps simplify and make it as effective as possible.
There are a lot of different approaches to repurposing content. I love that you found a method that works for you to pull slices from a long video. There are other trains of thought that maybe there are potentially better ways to approach it. What I mean by this is one method is having a core idea. Maybe your core idea is to go off the cuff with three elements that you want to make sure you’re installing in your commercial kitchen. These are things that you know because you are in the construction industry and you are approaching these elements all the time.
This is important here. What do you mean by a core idea? Is that for one piece of content? Are you saying a core idea for a company?
The core idea for a piece of content. From this core idea, what I would then recommend doing is you then create short-form pieces of content that can be utilized on different platforms. You may have one video. Let’s say you’re creating an Instagram reel or a TikTok video. You want it to be around one minute long. You could create a video of you talking to the camera and you are explaining these three elements to have in a commercial kitchen.
On the flip side, what you could also do is utilize video content from commercial kitchens that your company has already installed. You’ve gone through the construction process. You’ve built them out. Now you have these video clips and maybe they’re 20 seconds each, 3 clips add up to 60 seconds, and then you record a voiceover on that video or pull the voiceover from your original video, you talk to the camera and overlay it on this video.
Now you have a second piece of content of you speaking to the exact same ideas in a brand new way. That’s video content. You could of course then take the same three ideas and write them out as a LinkedIn post. What I’ll say about LinkedIn is that video content is performing well on LinkedIn. You may want to utilize one of the videos over on LinkedIn. If you’re going to then put it onto Instagram, it can of course live as reels, but you’ll want to finish that editing differently when you post it as a reel versus as a TikTok. There are absolutely ways to repurpose your content and take this one core idea and turn it into a million pieces of content. That could be a podcast episode for you as well.
You can think about it as, “How can I take this one idea and turn it into multiple posts?” What I would caution you against doing is copying and pasting between all of the platforms simply because the algorithms are getting very smart, their AI is reading the content and knows when it’s been produced on a different platform, hence why I recommend finishing your editing for Instagram and TikTok videos separately.
There are absolutely ways to make this easier for yourself and it comes down to who you have on your team to support you with. I don’t recommend that the CEO is doing this on your own. You should have someone, whether that is an in-house marketing department or if you’re outsourcing it. My company, Ninety Five Media is a digital marketing agency and this is what we do every day. We work with very large-scale companies who don’t have the bandwidth in-house and want to outsource it. There are a lot of options to be able to bring this content to life and market yourself properly.
Let me take you to when you start to engage with a company, I think one of the biggest challenges that a lot of companies have is separating themselves from other companies in a meaningful way in their marketing. In other words, one GC is like the other. You go to their website and everyone has an awesome team and we’re all extremely happy. Dave likes his dog. Sarah likes her cat. Fred likes drinking wine or something like that. How do you go about finding your voice, your brand voice, your brand identity in a way that is not just meaningful to you but also meaningful to the people that you want to sell your projects to?
Brand voice is an important aspect of your marketing. It’s something that should be clear before you begin marketing your brand because you want to make sure that your brand voice is consistent at every touch point that a potential client has with you. Let’s say you outsource to a social media agency, if you don’t give them the brand voice and they create their own for you, it’s going to feel very different than the brand voice you have on your website, maybe in your podcast and email marketing.
Brand voice is a really important aspect of your marketing, and it's something that should be clear before you begin marketing your brand. Click To TweetYou want to make sure that as an entity you have brand voice clarity that you can then pass on. The way that it’s brought to life on social media may feel different than in your email marketing or on your website because social media is inherently more entertainment-focused and should have a bit more of a fun twist to it. There are absolutely guidelines though that should be followed based on your brand.
In order to utilize your brand voice in a way that connects with your target audience on social media, it’s crucial to be clear on who your market is. Who are we speaking to? For example, during our onboarding process at Ninety Five Media, we have two main forms that we have every client fill out. Those forms are brand voice and ideal client. They are extremely important for anyone who is bringing your content to life to be very clear on because how you speak and who you’re speaking to determines everything. That should create your social media strategy and it should be evident in the content that you’re bringing to life.
One of the biggest challenges that people have with marketing is clearly identifying their ideal client. The reason why is that a lot of contractors will say, “I build for this guy, that guy, this type of work and that type of work,” and because their clients are across a wide range of identities or however you want to put it, they struggle with picking one thing. Why is it important? As a result of that, their marketing message is diffused and doesn’t resonate with anyone. Why is it important to pick that one ideal client and how do I go about doing that? How do I go about saying no to one voice and yes to another?
If the demographic of your target audience is changing that much, what I would then recommend that you tune into is what is important to them because you need to find that common thread between them. Do they all need to be one gender, in one location or of one industry? Not at all. What is important to them should be that tie between all of your content. Maybe they value having a team that is highly communicative, delivers everything on time and exceeds deadlines. That would then be what should be pushy in your content. Maybe on the flip side, all they care about is high-end construction, design and things that are going to last the length of time, then that would be the core of your messaging.
Speak to this for a little bit. If you take a stand in your marketing as a particular individual or as a particular company, some people are afraid that they will repel people from doing business with them that could potentially do business with them, but I find often that the best marketing has that combination. It’s magnetic in that it attracts and repels. What I’m curious about is do you ever find with your clients that they pick a particular brand identity based on their ideal client, a brand voice based on their ideal client, and yet they still attract people that are not exactly their ideal client, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but they still attract work that’s not directly related to that avatar or that ideal client. Does that ever happen?
That happens all the time. The reason that happens is because of the algorithm. The algorithm shows your content to these non-ideal audience members. I would agree with what you said. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing. What we’re looking for when we post content on social media is engagement. That is the first top-of-funnel element of the marketing conversion metric that we’re looking for. The reason for that is that when someone engages with your content, it helps that piece of content be seen by more people and by them in the future. Your future content will be seen by this person who is engaged with past content.
This in turn increases your brand reach and awareness, which helps your brand get seen by your target audience because the more people who are seeing it, the higher chance is that more people in that audience are of your ideal client. Especially on a platform like TikTok for example, where engagement is the key marker of success, you are looking for engagement of both positive and negative. I would argue to say that negative engagement on a platform like TikTok will help you more than positive engagement. I know that might sound crazy, but when you get conversations started in the comment section of social media, your content is going to blow up I wouldn’t worry about being seen by the wrong people. I would worry if you are not being seen at all.
As soon as you say that, I’m the CEO and I’m like, “I don’t need anyone saying anything negative about my company. If I post something on the internet about my company or a project, I don’t want anyone going into the comments and saying, ‘You build for that company? Those guys suck. They’re X, Y, and Z and this is why they suck.’ I don’t want any of that smoke. How can I create content that as you’re saying gets a variety of engagement with perhaps some of that negative aspect without damaging my brand in the first place?”
There are a lot of “negative” types of comments. One of them would be your client sucks. How could you work with them? They’re horrible people. That’s not ideal. Another form of “negative” comments or engagement could be, “Why’d you install that? I hate how that looks.” People on TikTok will say that all the time. They have no shame in their game. What that does is that gives you an opportunity to create more content. That gives you an opportunity to then reply to that comment with, “Here’s why we did it like this what that does is establish your leadership, thought leadership, authority and expertise in your industry.” It gives you obviously an opportunity to negate that negative commentary but also gives you more content to post about and it helps you show up as an expert.
There are a lot of ways to approach it to go down the path of negative comments because I know this may come up and this may be something that listeners have experienced. When you do get negative comments on social media because you will at some point, it’s inevitable, that there are different approaches to take to that negative commentary. The one that I would recommend going down is replying always. Deleting that message or that comment that’s publicly posted or not replying to it are two of the worst things that you could do. Engagers and users of social media want to feel seen. They want to feel that they’re being heard.
I posted something on LinkedIn and I know I’m different from my clients and the people reading, but go with me here. Some dude gets on there and he’s pitching me his product in a comment like this, “You should contact me for my services.” The first thing I do is I delete that because I have no interest in engaging someone like that who’s pitching me in the comments on my social media post. Now what you are saying is I shouldn’t have deleted that. I should have replied to it in some way. Is that right?
In my opinion, yes. That is another angle of comments and engagement, being pitched in the comments. My perspective on it is if you reply back to that comment, you now have two comments on your post. That shows higher engagement to the algorithm which helps your content be seen. Is someone else who’s going to consume that content going to be thrown off by the pitch in the comment on your post? No, we’ve all seen it. We’ve seen everything. That’s not a negative reason for me to not then engage with your content. If it’s super pitchy and it’s like weird and obtuse, then I like deleting the comment in that case makes sense.
The comments that I’m more touching on is if someone comments like, “You guys didn’t get back to me for three weeks. My product never arrived. Your guys never showed up on site.” Those are things we want to make sure are handled publicly and then handled privately as well. There are different types of engagement.
I’m the CEO of a construction company. I’m a $100 million company. The first thing in my mind is I don’t have time for social media and I don’t have much time for marketing. I’m building my team. I’m meeting with important clients one-on-one. I’m working on strategy. How important is it for me as the CEO of the company to consider being the face of the marketing efforts that I have on social media?
You don’t have time for marketing. That is the reality. You shouldn’t have time for marketing if everything is going well. That is why it’s important to have someone who specializes in marketing on your team, whether that is in-house or out-of-house. What that person should do for you is let you know exactly where you need to be involved. I believe that you as the face of the company should be the face of marketing as well. That does not mean that you need to be the only face of marketing. Most of the time, our recommendation will always be to have your team be present on social media. The reason behind that is that your team is generally who is the face of your client.
You, as the face of the company, should be the face of marketing as well. Click To TweetAre you able as the CEO to go to every project meeting to be on every call? Absolutely, no. Your clients mainly are connecting with your team, meaning that if they know who they would be connecting with via social media before they even sign with you and you win that project. That gives them a sense of familiarity with your team and your company already. Having your team show up in your content would be step number one, then as the CEO having your face infused in a certain percentage of your content throughout the month adds a cherry on top.
What we do for our clients is we will work with the team and determine, “Once a week we’re going to have a team-focused post.” There is a wide variety of ways we can get the team involved in the content, but maybe once a month or every other week we have the CEO’s face in that content. If that’s the case, then what we’re doing is we are providing specific instructions to the CEO. We know how little time you have on your hands to do this then it’s going to be the last thing on your to-do list at the end of the day.
We’re going to make it as easy as possible for you. Once a month we’re going to say, “This is the exact video that we need you to do. Here’s exactly how to show up in the video and what to say in the video. This should take you 10 minutes to record these 2 videos. Maybe that’s because you’re doing two takes for each of them and then you’ll be done for the month. That’s all we need from you.” I’d recommend finding a company or someone who can support you with that. That’s exactly how we work with our clients at Ninety Five Media to make it as easy as possible to show up because your presence through your marketing is going to help make that content convert higher for you.
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I hope you’re enjoying my conversation with Emma. I want to let you know that my book Construction Genius: Effective, Hands-On, Practical, Simple, No-BS Leadership, Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies. If you’re enjoying this particular episode on marketing, there are specific chapters in the book designed to help you with your marketing. It’s extremely important that you check that out if you want to turn your company into a predictable leads machine, market to the right clients with the right projects in the right locations, maximize educational marketing and make sure that marketing is working in your business on a regular basis. You can find a lot of advice in Construction Genius specific for construction companies to marketing in addition to leadership and sales.
What you do is this. You go out to Amazon, you search for the book Construction Genius. You read all the killer five-star reviews and then you purchase ten or more copies for you and your leadership team. When you do that, you then shoot me an email. In the email you say, “Eric, I purchased ten copies of Construction Genius,” and I’ll shoot you an email back and I’ll say, “Terrific. Let’s schedule a one-hour question and answer in leadership development class with your team that will do over Zoom.”
I would normally charge $3,500 for an hour of my time, but you have spent only about $190, maybe a little bit more because the paperbacks are $19.99. if you buy 10 of those, it’s less than $200. For less than $200, you can get an hour of my time working with your team, answering any questions from the book and giving you some bonus training. That is a killer value that you will find tremendously impactful for your company. I promise you you’ll find it tremendously helpful, and now back to my interview with Emma.
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There are some real good insights there and I want to make sure that everyone reads that. 1) Diversify the people in your company who are involved in social media marketing. You can emphasize the CEO, but you can also emphasize the people involved in delivering the projects. When it comes to construction, it may sound obvious, but I like to make the point that you’ve got to get the folks in the field in your social media marketing. in other words, you’ve got to get your foreman and superintendents communicating through social media.
As Emma was saying, that doesn’t mean they have to do it. You can go out. You can send someone out to the job site with a phone and shoot some videos there with the guys along with the job site footage, and that can be powerful. The second thing here is to make sure that you get a calendar of post types. That’s important. A diversity of post types, are you saying it ranges from both the media that you use and the content within the media or are you mainly emphasizing just video?
Definitely, both. We call the content types content buckets. These are important to make sure that you have nailed down as a company going into having a strategic social media marketing presence. I’d recommend having between 4 and 5 buckets that you’re able to rotate through on a weekly or biweekly basis, depending on how often you are posting.
Give me the buckets. Give me an example of five content buckets.
Content Bucket 1) Your team and maybe your CEO fall into that, but the team is one of them and the company is another. The team shows your guys on the field doing the projects, etc., working with clients. Company is more along like your values, mission, how you work as a company, your history, and then your CEO would likely fall into that one. 3) It could be before and after transformations, “Here was this ugly office, and here’s how we made it beautiful. Here was the background on the project.”
4) “Here is what makes us different.” Maybe it is more along the lines of the way that you approach projects and utilizing storytelling in this as well will be important. Maybe it’s more like, “This client came to us and they had redesigned their space ten years ago it was not doing well, or maybe they had a flood or something like that and they were moving into a new building.” You are telling the story of how you came in and what you did to make this a great experience for them.
That is going to highlight what sets you apart from your competition. Storytelling builds connection and trust with your audience. You might be reading and saying, “That’s similar to before and after.” Before and after should be focused on the visual. It should be like, “Here is this beautiful stunning interior or exterior building, whatever that is now the finished project and don’t you want this too?” type of thing. Your storytelling goes into that experience factor and what will set you apart from the other people bidding on this project.
That’s four buckets I’ve got there. Would a fifth one be the personal posts, is it appropriate to share something personal that’s not directly business-related but maybe humanizes you a little bit?
That goes back to the brand in particular. As a brand, how personal do you get? Typically you get more personal the smaller the team is. As your team gets big, sometimes it gets a little less personal, but oftentimes a fifth content bucket could be more trend-based content, something more entertaining. That could also infuse more of that personal aspect of we’re showing more faces. We are being a little bit more playful. As we all know, trending content on Instagram and TikTok is massive.
Trending content will get you seen by more people because it’s favored by the algorithm. When you can have somebody who is maybe a little bit more loose, fun and doesn’t care that much about their personal image on social, a younger guy is often a great person to stick in front of the camera and do one of these funny videos. You’re able to build an entertainment factor. That entertainment factor is something that a lot of construction companies are missing on social media. If you begin tapping into that, you will set yourself apart. It’s not going to look unprofessional. It’s going to look like you know what you’re doing on social media because that’s what consumers want from you.
Give me three ways that people are cringy on social media when it comes to their content, speaking specifically of B2B content. What’s cringy content that you should stop doing if you’re doing it?
Cringey Content 1) You are weirdly personal and it’s very obvious who’s running your social media channel. Maybe it’s very obvious that the HR person is running your social media channels. All they’re talking about on social media is like, “This is our team bonding event. We took a field trip here. We had a team lunch because it was someone’s birthday.” That’s good in sprinkles, but that should not be the entire marketing content strategy. It’s not a strategy. It is the reality.
2) If you are only doing photo content. if you are posting content that is obvious to someone watching that that project was done several years ago, it feels a little outdated. There’s no video content, you are going to get scrolled by. No one wants to see just photos anymore. You mentioned, “Is this just video content that I’m talking about?” The answer is no. You should have an infusion of video, photo and carousel content, meaning multiple photos in one post because that will give more variety. About 50% of your content should be video and the other 50% should be photo and/or multiple photo posts. That’s going to help your content feel fresh.
Old-school SEO is put out there in a blog post or a text post that is keyword-rich and that’s how you’re going to get found through the search engines. You’ve been talking a lot about the algorithm. I think everyone knows vaguely what the algorithm is. The algorithm favors video and images in many ways. What is the value at the moment as we record this in 2024 of text that is properly constructed using keywords?
There’s a lot of value. On TikTok, Your keywords in the text, video and caption are how your videos are being found. It’s more prominent on TikTok because the algorithm is smarter than on Instagram, which is ironic because it’s way newer than Instagram. That is absolutely how your content is being found. The Instagram algorithm is catching up and it is also going to be doing that probably within several months of recording this show.
The text that you are including in the captions of your videos, of the written text in the video, of the caption below the video are all ways that your content is being found. It’s very important that it’s relevant to what you’re saying. A big mistake people made was that on Instagram, and this was maybe a few years ago, they were starting to include hashtags that were big, but they weren’t relevant to the video and the algorithm was like, “What in the heck is going on? That doesn’t make sense.”
On Instagram, make sure that your hashtags are relevant to your content and that’s going to help you. Over on TikTok, there are a lot of trending hashtags that could help you and they’re not related to your videos, but at the core, make sure that your hashtags are related because if someone is searching for a specific hashtag, you want to be shown and found. Hashtags are very prominent. They’re going to help you. Some people don’t think that hashtags are important anymore and that could not be farther from the truth. Some of our clients’ content gets 90% of the reach just from hashtags. Make sure that you’re tapping into that strategy.
At the core, make sure that your hashtags are related because if someone is searching for a specific hashtag, you want to be shown and you want to be found. Click To TweetWith the hashtag thing, you’re speaking specifically there of TikTok and Instagram, is that correct?
That is correct.
I know a lot of folks reading this, a lot of them are on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is dull, boring and sometimes it’s very cringe, but the fact is it’s effective for a lot of people B2B. The LinkedIn algorithm seems to change that sucker all the time and one moment you can be getting tons of views and comments on your stuff and the next moment it’s crickets. What’s your advice here in 2024 for approaching LinkedIn?
On LinkedIn, hashtags are not going to help you as much as they will on the other platforms. However, that’s not a reason to not use them. I would use between 3 and a maximum of 5 hashtags in your content on LinkedIn, but make sure that they’re specifically for LinkedIn because they will be different hashtags than the hashtags that you’re using on other platforms.
How do I know which hashtags to use on LinkedIn? How can I find that out?
You can look at the usage of hashtags on that platform through the search bar. That’s a good place to start. I would also say that you can be more broad with your hashtags on LinkedIn than on any other platform simply because 95% of the users on LinkedIn are not creating content. If you are of the very small percentage of users creating content on LinkedIn, you are already different and going to be seen, which is why it’s effective for brands who are posting there.
You can use larger hashtags like #Construction or #OhioConstructionCompany. Those are hashtags that you would never use on Instagram because they have billions of uses and you’re never going to be seen there, but on LinkedIn, you do have a high chance of being seen. Another thing that you could be doing on LinkedIn, and I know a lot of companies are not doing this, is posting video content.
There was this rumor a little while ago that video wasn’t good on LinkedIn but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It does perform well because a lot of people aren’t doing it. When you can stand out and do something different, you are going to be favored by the algorithm and people are going to consume that content. I would recommend posting some of that short-form content that you’re maybe creating for other platforms over on LinkedIn and see how it performs for you because it’s probably going to do pretty well.
When you can stand out and do something different, you are going to be favored by the algorithm and people are going to consume that content. Click To TweetI want to do a quick pivot here because there are two sales that construction companies have to make and both of them are challenging and perhaps one is more challenging than the other. The first sale I’m referring to is selling your work to potential clients or existing clients. The second sale is not often thought of as a sale and that is recruiting people into your organization. Basically, you’re selling them on coming to work with you. Everyone is aware of the labor crunch in construction and the shortage of skilled workers. What is the role of my social media marketing in terms of making that sale?
In terms of making the sale to potential employees or contractors, your social media couldn’t be more important because that is 100% without a doubt where those people are going to go to determine if they want to work for you. They’re going to go to your website. They’re going to look at the other people on your team, they’re going to read your about page and then they’re immediately going to go to your social media, whether that is solely LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, they’re going to be able to see everyone who says they work for you and then they can go stock those profiles, which is probably what they’re also going to do.
Maybe they’re going to connect with someone else on your team and be like, “What’s your experience been like?” They’re going to consume that content, see the types of projects that you work on, read more about your values and see who is in your content. Is it all people of an older generation? Do we have diversity in ethnicities? Do we have diversity in gender? They’re going to see if they identify with the people on the other side of the screen. That is going to be a huge factor. If they determine if they want to work with you or not because that’s going to be one of the few touch points that they have with your company prior to the interview or maybe after the interview with one person that they’ve had.
Would you give the same advice in terms of the buckets of content when it comes to recruiting as you would to sell your services?
That profile that you’re going to use is going to be for both purposes. It’s mainly going to speak B2B and going to be targeting who you’re trying to sell to. At the same time, the way that you represent your company to potential buyers should be aligned with how you represent your company to potential employees. It should be attracting the right people on both ends.
Let’s say, I’m looking at my social media marketing and I know that it suck. I need to upgrade. All this time we’ve been talking here, we’ve been talking about organic marketing, not paid marketing. Give us the quick difference between organic and paid so that everyone’s clear.
Organic content or marketing is when you are posting to social media with no money behind your content. You may be paying someone in-house to support you or an outside agency to support you, but you are not putting money into the platform behind the content. It is performing organically on its own. On the flip side, paid media is when you are creating an inherent ad in something like Meta for Instagram and Facebook.
You are creating parameters on the backend. You’re putting money behind the content to be seen for X number of days, or you are boosting a piece of organic content, meaning you are putting money behind a post that you previously posted organically in order to add momentum behind the content and be seen by a more specific audience who is genuinely like maybe a little bit more of your target audience.
The big difference is, “Are we putting money behind the content?” To take it one step further, you have to have your organic marketing in place and doing well before you can explore paid. If you are someone who’s maybe thinking, “I’ve heard about paid ads. I think this may be something we want to do,” make sure you are starting with organic and having that down pat before you look at paid because if you start with paid before you pay attention to your organic, you’re going to be dumping money fast and not see the results that you’re looking for.
Why is that?
That’s because when someone finds your paid ad, they’re likely and you do want them going back to your profile, whether that’s on LinkedIn or Instagram. If they’re going back to crappy content on that profile and that’s not aligned with the way that your ad is presenting your company, it’s going to feel wonky and that conversion is not going to happen. You want your organic content to be representative of your brand, bringing your content buckets to life, showing what you can do and then making those ads aligned with the same values.
That was very clear. Thank you. My social media marketing sucks. I want to upgrade my game in the next year. Give me three things I need to focus on right now.
The Number one thing to focus on would be to make sure that you have clarity on your brand voice and your ideal client. That’s where you have to start. If you need to hire someone to help you with brand strategy, make sure that your visuals are clear, make sure that you have this persona of who you’re talking to, down. Get that in place first. 2) Make sure that you are putting a process in place to capture the content that you’re going to need to post a social. Maybe that looks like hiring a part-time photographer or videographer to go to your job sites once a week and capture content for you. Begin building that bank before you need it.
3) Make the right hire to support you in bringing this to life. Don’t try to make your PR person, your marketing person, it’s not going to go well and you’re not going to see the results that you’re looking for. Either bring someone in-house who can focus on it all the time, or hire an outside agency. There are many marketing agencies out there that can support you with this. Ninety Five Media is the best at this because I’m a biased opinion, but that is exactly what we do. We work with large-scale companies to come in and manage the entire marketing department on the digital side.
We help with all of the social media platforms we can support with podcasting, email, and make sure that you have this cohesive messaging happening across all of your platforms that brings to life your brand in the best light possible on your social platforms. Having your brand voice and making sure you’re getting the content are step zero then hiring someone to come in and bring it to stage is going to be that last successful step.
Let me ask you one last question. one of the main things I do with my clients is executive coaching. When someone contacts me and wants to do executive coaching with me, particularly if it’s like the CEO and they’re saying, “I’ve got this executive that I want you to coach,” the first thing I’ll tell this person is, “I may not be a fit for you. There are some steps that we need to take before I’ll even decide to engage with you because I don’t want to waste your time and money nor my time.” Having said that, if I’m looking for an outsourced marketing agency, what are some of the things that I need to be looking for in order to make sure that not only are they capable of doing social media marketing, but we’re a fit together as a company?
The number one you should be looking for is to make sure that they are proficient and experts on the platforms that you know you want to be on. Maybe it’s you’re coming into this relationship and saying, “I know we want to be on LinkedIn. We’ve been on LinkedIn forever,” it’s not great. We want you to help us take it to the next level. I want your recommendations on other platforms we shouldn’t be exploring. Tell me what you would recommend. They should be able to make a custom recommendation to you about which platforms you should be on and how frequently you should be posting on those platforms. That will showcase their expertise.
If they’re coming to you and saying, “What we do for all of our clients is we get them on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, those are the top three. That’s all you need to be on. You should be posting five times a week. That’s it and done.” That’s a red flag to me because that doesn’t feel very custom. I want to know why, “Why do I need to be on Instagram and Facebook? Why five posts a week? Can you break that down for me?” They should be able to answer these questions easily if they know what they’re doing.
2) Can they help you with content creation and content strategy? What I’ve seen with other agencies is that A) They’re not able to film the content for you and B ) When they ask you to film content, which any agency will, that’s not a red flag, they’re going to ask you to film some content that you may not already have, what guidelines can they provide to you to make that easy for you? They should make that process as easy as possible.
If we’re asking a CEO to film something, I’m going to tell you, “It’s going to take this amount of time, show up wearing this outfit, say these things in the video, look at the camera, don’t look at the camera.” It’s going to be specific. We also can fly out to clients and film content with them in person. Oftentimes, when we film in person, we’re able to get two to three months of content in three hours. That is a huge added bonus to finding an agency that can support you on that front as well. If you know, maybe you don’t have a videographer in-house, you’re going to need someone to fly out every quarter and film some content together. Be clear, do you want that to be on a professional camera and maybe a video camera, or are you okay with it doing that on iPhones?
For us, we have seen iPhone photography and videography outperform professional content. When we do content shoots with our clients, we do it all on our phones. You want to be clear on, does that aligns with your brand. If it doesn’t, okay, cool. Make sure that you have someone in-house to do that for you and maybe fly out your marketing team to support the creative direction of the shoot, the content that they definitely want you to get, etc.
Lastly, I would speak about your goals. This is something that sometimes isn’t shared with your marketing team and creates misalignment. If your goal is to grow a certain percentage that year or hit a specific number, make sure that you’re telling that to your marketing team and get their feedback on that number. You might want to have 3 million followers by the end of the year, and if you say that to your marketing team, if you’re like at 10,000 followers right now and you’re like, “I want to be three million followers by the end of the year, all organic, let’s do it,” and your marketing team is like, “No problem,” personally, I’d question that because that type of growth is a lot and you want to make sure that that’s a collaborative effort.
Instead of yessing you to death, I would want to make sure that that’s a conversation and they’re giving you constructive feedback. That sets realistic expectations because the worst thing that can happen is that you have one expectation, your team thinks it’s a different expectation, and then after six months, you’re like, “What in the world is going on?” Make sure that you’re providing clarity on your goals and that your team is aligned with them.
That was very clear. Tell us how we can get in touch with you, where we can find you on your socials and all that good stuff.
I’m the Founder of Ninety Five Media. That wasn’t clear already. We’re a digital marketing agency specializing in organic media. We have our website, NinetyFiveMedia.co. It has all of our information. I’m also active on every single platform under the sun, you can find us anywhere under @NinetyFiveMedia. Instagram is definitely where we’re the most active.
If you have any quick questions, you want to send us a dm, you can also email us through Instagram as well. My email is [email protected]. I’d love to chat about how we can support with your social media marketing specifically on the organic side to scale and help you see those results because what we see more often than not is that brands are posting and not seeing the actual ROI that they want to see. That’s always our focus for the brands that we work with. I’d love to connect if this was helpful and if you’re interested in chatting further.
This was helpful. There’s a lot of insight here and takeaways. I appreciate you joining us.
Thank you so much for having me.
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Thank you for reading. That was a great interview with Emma. There are lots of key takeaways there. You can download this to ChatGPT if you like and ask, “Give me the top five insights from the transcript,” and that will spit out for you an answer that perhaps you can look at and use and apply in your company in terms of improving your marketing. Speaking of improving your company, think about executive coaching. That’s what I do with a lot of my clients.
I’ll have the CEO of a company call me and say, “I’ve got this guy in my company, he’s been with me for many years, but he’s hit a ceiling.” The ceiling typically is not technically based, but it’s based on his behavior because he’s been promoted to a place where he’s leading a team of people and he knows how to build projects, but he doesn’t know how to build teams of people.
An executive coach can be a tremendous resource for that type of person if they’re coachable because they can provide a sounding board for their executive, helping them to figure out some of the issues that they have both behaviorally, relationally, and hold them accountable for specific actions that they’re going to take to improve their leadership. If you have someone in mind who has hit a ceiling and you’d like to see them go beyond that ceiling and achieve their full potential, an executive coach may be a fit for you.
This is what you do. Go to my website, ConstructionGenius.com/Contact, and then give me a quick message there. It’ll hit my email. I’ll respond to you within 24 hours and we can set up a short 10-minute conversation to figure out if or how I can help you. If it turns out I can help you, then we can book another time to talk in more detail about how. Thanks for reading. I’ll catch you on the next episode.
Important Links
- Ninety Five Media
- Construction Genius: Effective, Hands-On, Practical, Simple, No-BS Leadership, Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies
- Instagram – Ninety Five Media
- [email protected]
- ConstructionGenius.com/Contact
- https://10MinutesWithEric.YouCanBook.Me
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/In/EmmaTessler
- https://Podcasts.Apple.com/Us/Podcast/Stop-Scrolling-Start-Scaling-Podcast/id1635151196
- https://Ninety-Five-Media.MyKajabi.com/mym
About Emma Tessler
