Associations and construction marketing

I can think of few ready-made construction marketing opportunities as effective as thoughtful client-related associations.  With some thought and planning, you can access a ready-made decision-making group and integrate yourself into the world of movers and shakers, building relationships while obtaining the knowledge of near and medium-term horizon projects suitable for your business.

Of course, you can't simply pay your dues, join the association and expect to be instantly accepted and invited to bid (sole sourced, even) on lucrative projects.  In fact, if you join the group with that as your immediate and primary intention, you'll probably be shunned.

Your challenge is to put your business interests aside, and focus on how you can help the association's members achieve their objectives.  Your goal is to be seen as a giver rather than taker, a contributor rather than a leech.

As well, you need to accept that association participation requires a potentially long time frame for success.  If you've ever moved to a new community, you know that you may experience some initial welcomes and greetings, but it can take a while to build real friendships.  While you can accelerate the process (see below), you cannot "rush" it in the sense of hoping for results and rewards before you pay your dues.

Your way to accelerate your acceptance and return on investment is to discover effective opportunities to share and contribute to the group.  Notably, you are not constrained by your conventional business considerations. Associations have entertainment, sporting, and community service groups, as well as technical knowledge, business management and other support functions.  You simply pick the activity(ies) that interest you the most -- and where your natural talents are greatest -- and focus your efforts there.

You'll find you cannot join too many associations -- I've discovered that I can contribute intensively to three or four at most -- I'll give upwards of 25 per cent of my working time to this long-range marketing effort.

How much business can you win through effective association participation?  The amount can be truly incredible, especially after you start doing some work for members, and build on the word-of-mouth and relationships within the group.  In fact, a clue to which associations to join is to learn where your best and most satisfied clients belong.  Let them introduce you to their peers, contribute actively to the association, and you'll start receiving invited bid and sometimes sole source opportunities.

Note one other point:  While you can achieve many useful benefits from participating in your relevant trade or speciality group associations, your highest marketing results will occur when you focus your efforts on client-based associations.  So, for example, you might belong to the regional construction association, and you build schools.  Consider joining the regional school superintendents association as an associate member, as well.

When construction marketing is easy, it is effective

One of the biggest paradoxes of business development and marketing is that effort doesn't really correlate with reward, but if you don't put effort into the process (and accept that success can take a LONG time) you won't achieve much in the way of reward.

Gulp.  When you read this sort of posting, you might think that the right thing to do is wrap it up, buy a few lottery tickets and hope for the best.

That isn't exactly what I am seeking to communicate here.

Let's phrase it a bit differently.  You've probably heard the phrase that it is better to work smart than hard, but it is even wiser to work smart and hard.  "Hard" work might be grinding out dozens of responses to RFPs, whether or not you have solid relationships with the clients, "Smart," might be focusing your energies and bidding only work where you can be profitable and have a reasonable chance of success.  "Hard and smart" is taking the long-range view, focusing on activities you enjoy, and working through these enjoyable activities to build satisfying relationships with the people who count and can put you on the inside track for successful bids or RFPs.

In other words, allowing for the fact that it takes time to achieve success, doing things you enjoy but which put you in contact with potential and current clients is smart marketing.  Yeah, that means if you like golfing, it is okay to spend lots of time on the course -- if you enjoy writing, well, blogs are pretty effective (over time) and if you like sports, spending some time with teams and groups interested in both the sport and your business area will probably get you to where you want to go.

The ideal venue for these relationships is often relevant client-focused associations.  Spend time there, and you'll make things happen.

These ideas won't generate instant construction marketing success.   They are smart, however, and don't need to be too hard to implement.