When it comes to showcasing your best work to support your marketing campaigns, raising your brand awareness, winning future tenders and future custom, case studies are a powerful tool for the construction industry.
In the pursuit of securing future customers and work, there is no better way to demonstrate your capability and experience than real life examples of how you have delivered previous projects.
How to create a good case study
1. Be useful
A good case study should not only be interesting to the reader, but useful too. Show your readers how you faced and overcame a challenge, how you found a solution and how it benefitted the client.
2. Take someone else’s word for it
It’s easy to say how brilliantly you did the job, but getting the client to comment and give a testimonial adds far more credibility to your project and to your case study.
3. Go further than words
Include extra content to make the case study more interesting and visual. Include videos of the construction being undertaken, interviews with key people, technical drawings and some clear, striking photographs.
4. Promote it
A good case study is wasted if no one sees it. Once you’ve created the case study, promote it. Tell the press about it, include it in your publications and newsletters, talk about it at your events and tweet about it.
5. Use social media
The construction industry is very visual, and best promoted via strong imagery of projects. So think beyond showcasing your successes simply with words on the web. Visual impressions are your strongest tool and visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are the ideal shop window.
According to The Guardian, case studies go further than simply benefitting the company. Promotion of best practice case studies and events is essential to industry improvement, and social media applications are opening these to global input, sharing and inspiration. Here are a few examples of how Pinterest and Instagram are being used by construction companies:
The digital scrapbook world of Pinterest has 110 million active monthly users, and with 37% of UK users logging in to plan home improvements, an increasing number of construction businesses are now using Pinterest to showcase their projects.
Particularly useful for business to consumer marketing, Pinterest can, and should, be used to showcase your own previous projects and marketing content but a good Pinterest account should also be inspirational. So don’t restrict boards and pins to self-promotion, show some examples of your company behind the scenes to make your account more personal, and showcase great examples of other work, especially in areas relating to your company’s expertise.
Mezzanine floor specialist Spaceway supports the case studies it has on its website with a range of Pinterest boards. These include a board called Weekend Projects, broadening its content to make it more fun, useful and accessible to consumers.
Similarly to Pinterest, Instagram is image-driven and allows you to display photographs and videos across your profile, making it perfect for showcasing visual projects for the construction industry.
Consider building your visual content around a campaign. Rather than simply creating a case study after the project has been completed, Instagram is the perfect platform to involve the audience in the construction phase to build excitement. Department store Nordstrom created a 55-foot version of one of its dresses, depicted as a huge Instagram image on their roof. Live updates of the construction process via drones were posted to social media, ending with a time-lapse video of the whole installation.
Popular hashtags relating to the build and the industry will drive new users to find your project, and unique hashtags can be used specifically around a campaign.
Case studies have long been used as a marketing tool in the construction industry. But visual social media platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram have huge potential to broaden the reach of companies in the sector, enabling marketing campaigns and case studies to be far more interactive and visual.
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