#95: Scaling construction SaaS: the definitive marketing playbook

(upbeat music) Hey, this is Ryan from RocketSats, and you're listening to the SAS Marketing Weekly Podcast, the show that gives you actionable marketing strategies and campaign ideas to rocket your SaaS business. And if you want even more SaaS marketing ideas, go to SaaSMarketingWeekly.com to join my free newsletter. Hello, and welcome back to the SAS Marketing Weekly Podcast. With me, your host Ryan, the founder RocketSats, and we're back in the studio with Jamie. Hello. Good to be back. Good to have you back. And this episode is gonna be a niche episode about construction SaaS. It's how to scale a construction SaaS business with great marketing. So if you are a regular listener and you're not in construction SaaS and you may want to skip this episode, but you might learn something that's been pretty solid. It's not, pretty solid marketing principles in here. But the reason why I thought we would do this episode is because RocketSats is an agency. We work across all different B2B SaaS verticals. But if you were to ask me, what is the vertical where we get the most success, where we get the most results and leads for clients, it would definitely be construction SaaS. We have, we've worked with over 12 different B2B SaaS construction clients, the majority of them, we've got some really great results. And we just started to create this playbook where we just roll out the same types of campaigns. We know the types of messaging that work. If you know the channels that do work and don't work, and we're just getting some fantastic results. So we thought we'd make this episode today. If you are a owner, founder, marketer of a construction SaaS company, this should hopefully give you some advice in terms of the types of campaigns, ads, content, channels that you should be running in order to scale the business. So a great example of a client here at RocketSats, a lot of people have heard of this company called Phon, F-O-N-N. We've worked with them for over 18 months. And we, within the first six months of working with them, we've got them 220 inbound leads. And that really helped them rapidly scale the business. We created content for them, run the ads platforms for them, created the website for them. And then they got an eight-figure exit. They got bought by the access crew, which is like the ultimate goal that most companies are trying to do. We've also taken startup companies, as a company called ServiceFear. They were brand new construction SaaS company. They were doing zero leads. And we met them within the first year by optimizing the website, the messaging, building, very narrow funnels. We've got them to over 50 inbound leads a month. And they're still at that rate now. They're still with us. So loads of different examples of more mature companies, smaller companies, where this playbook does just generally work. So let's start with-- I probably want to start with the ads platforms that do and don't work for construction companies. Most sort of B2B SaaS clients, they think LinkedIn ads is the main channel. LinkedIn's got fantastic targeting. You can obviously be very specific in terms of industry, job title company size. You're going after, for example. However, we do find that LinkedIn ads generally is not very effective for construction SaaS companies. And so actually we put most of our budget somewhere else. So Jamie, why don't you talk about where we do actually get success? Yeah. So I think this is definitely something particularly in construction SaaS, like we just mentioned, where like but blue collar industries is where we know it's this in particular, is that those audiences can be found on LinkedIn. How active they are on LinkedIn knows the big question. And quite often, those audiences, like you're targeting like site managers, for example, like those people aren't on LinkedIn, typically as much as say like a salesperson or a marketer, or even HR person, to be honest. Just spend their time differently, different types of people, got different types of roles, and like you'll get on to this in a minute, even the nature of their work and how they're kind of spending their time not necessarily at the desk all the time, things like that. It makes a big impact on how much they're on the platforms. So where we typically see success with those types of industries, like construction, is meta. If we're talking about kind of like page channels and direct response and things like that. So Facebook and Instagram. Facebook and Instagram, yeah, sorry. So basically, like with those channels, like those people are spending time on those channels. Like this is kind of the big sort of like misnomer about B2B is that people don't, you can't reach B2B audiences on meta or on Facebook and Instagram. And you can, you absolutely can. And like this is where I think we kind of need to treat B2B as like separate parts sometimes. It's not a monolith, it's not just like one kind of industry. Like construction in particular is one where like, that's where you'll find like reliably, in my opinion, based on our experience and results that we've had, you'll find buyers and you'll be able to reach buyers. Those people are spending time on meta, they are spending time on Facebook and Instagram. So we devote a lot of resources there. And that's what we've seen as much as also far. Yeah, agreed. And also the good news is that meta is a lot more affordable than LinkedIn. Yeah. It's a lot cheaper in terms of a cost per click, cost per acquisition. The targeting's not as good. You can't say only show my ads to, you can say, show my ads to construction companies and these job titles. But the problem is meta is kind of guessing because when you register your Facebook and Instagram account, you don't say which company you work for and what your job title is, like you do on LinkedIn, that's where LinkedIn targeting is so good. So Facebook and Instagram have to kind of do a little bit of guesswork. But that is getting better and better. I think, what's it, update called? Androma. Androma. Androma. Androma. The target is got a lot better. Yeah. And we are just, we regularly see fantastic results of getting content out there. And then in terms of what type of ads that you should be showing construction people, not just ads, but also what content you should be creating, are most businesses just create bottom of the funnel ads, just about their platform, his screenshots of the platform, his features, his benefits. We find that those ads don't actually work particularly well for construction companies, certainly not as a one off. And I think it's quite beneficial for most construction companies because the marketing bar is low. A lot of construction SaaS companies, particularly the smaller ones, have been created by people that they've come from a construction background. So they're often not marketers. So by doing good marketing, the bar is pretty low. I tend to find. So creating full funnel marketing campaigns, where you're creating top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of the funnel and boosting that content with ads on meta and re-targeting people down the funnel, that's really where we get results. And what I've really found is leading with the problem is the big one. That's where we get so much engagement from construction SaaS companies. Because if you're targeting construction companies and construction people that work construction sites, the chaos of a construction site is mental. So if you think about your business, or my business as a marketing agency, I think my business has got problems in its chaotic sometimes. Imagine working on a construction site of a multi-million-billion-dollar site with just loads of crew and just, it's just a world of problems. It's a world of problems like, where's that drawing? And oh, we're digging the hole in the wrong place. How did that go wrong? Why are we communicating using this platform? My internet connection is not working on site. Oh, Dave not shown up. And oh, Chris has just been bad from the site because he's not got his qualifications. It's just like that multiplied by 100, like every single day. So it's just problem, problem, problem, problems. And psychologically, in marketing, if you tap into someone's problems and their pain points, that's where you're going to peak their interest. So if someone is on site, and they're getting really angry because they weren't sent the drawing on time, they turned up on site in the morning, and Dave was meant to send the drawing, but he didn't. Or his internet connection was down. So they didn't get the drawings. So they just sat around for half a day, totally in their thumbs. And they're raging about that, getting angry about that, shouting and swearing about it. If they then go on their lunch break and they're scrolling through their Instagram, and they see an ad that goes, not receive your construction drawing on time, because you've not got the right platform for it, click here. So psychologically, you're like, oh, I was just raging about that problem and there's an ad. That's magical. And that's how I find that it really works, you kind of content and ads. As opposed to being like, here's a SaaS platform. These are our features. These are our benefits. It's just constantly talking about the problem. So one of the best forming ads that we did for fun, that I mentioned earlier, was an anti WhatsApp campaign. So we did a lot of market research for construction sites and site managers. We said, how are you mainly communicating on site? How are your team communicating with one another? And the most common answer was WhatsApp. So there's a big WhatsApp group for this particular project. And everyone's in there. It's just chaotic. And then there's football memes in there. And then suddenly people are chatting about the whole of the alt. And then the drawing comes in that you need. And then the more football memes are coming in, it's just a mess. And there's compliance problems there. And it can just cause chaos. So if you have a platform that helps with communication, rather than talking about how you have a great communication platform, you lead by talking about the problems with WhatsApp. The dangers of using WhatsApp on a construction site. Are your team using WhatsApp? They shouldn't be. You can use an alternative platform for real estate costs. And they'll just solve all of these problems. Those are sorts of ads that start to perform really, really well for funds. And so just leading with a problem I can't explain. And that's the way to do it with construction companies. But yeah, anything to add on that side of things? Yeah, I think probably the big thing for me is that I think one of the biggest problems that construction audiences have had with sort of SaaS platforms and our marketing in our space is that we used very sassy language. We like you just mentioned, we lead with technology, we lead with features sometimes, and we lead with AI. because every one of this AI is very exciting, but like you just went back to, like as a construction professional, like getting AI into business probably isn't top of your priority list. Like it's gonna be nuances, but most of the time it's not what to keep in the market. And using that local language where you're talking about like really kind of dense technique, like techy terms and leading with the fact that we've got like cutting edge AI technologies, never gonna cut through with those people. So I think even like one, like learning how construction like you just sort of mentioned, learning how construction professionals talk to each other and what terms they use. Like even doing a bit of research on line into that it's gonna be really helpful. It's like how do they talk to each other on site? What are the terms that they would use to describe things? How would they describe their problems themselves? Just using that and turning those sort of like terms and stuffing to add is gonna be super, super important. And just focusing, yeah, like I mentioned, like you mentioned, sorry, on the problem. And the problem isn't their lack of AI or their lack of technology most of the time. It's gonna be a problem that's happening on site. Some sort of chaos, something that they're managing right now that's just not working for them. And yes, I just really removing the SaaS lens out of your brain. I think it's gonna be really important. (camera clicks) So I think it's gonna be really important. So I think it's gonna be really important. So everyone's gonna buy a platform across any industry. There has to be a trigger that makes me go, "Okay, I want a new platform. I have to solve this problem." And sometimes triggers can be quite rare. But on construction, the triggers are happening constantly. These constant triggers are going off in terms of, "Oh, the drawing didn't show up on time." "Oh, Chris has just been bound from psych to didn't have the qualifications." "Oh, it's just these constant triggers." And so you have to create content that you're there when these triggers happen, you're creating ads that it's just showing up in front of people and they're going, "Yeah, okay, I cannot have that problem happen again on psych. I'm gonna speed to these guys. I'm gonna do a free trial of this platform." So yeah, that problem aware, being ready when that trigger is kind of pulled on psych of these issues that are happening. But the other thing I want to talk about is the type of content that doesn't work for construction companies. So we've tried all different types of content. We know what works and what flops and what works, what doesn't. And generally, because people that you're targeting on construction sites or if they're in the construction office or whatever, they don't like blogs, they don't like white papers, and they don't like signing up to webinars. They're just very, they're just kind of busy people. They're on the move. It's just not really their thing. What we do find performs really, really well for construction companies is short form video and user generated content. So the best performing campaign we've ever done has been user generated content of construction people on site talking about the platform. And what's great is that that's cheap. You just have to tell your happy customers. So kind of like case study type stuff. So you just tell your customer, "Hey, do you mind next time you're on site next week? Do you mind just doing a selfie video of you with make sure you put your hard hat on." So it looks like you're on a construction site. And just talk about our platform and how good it is. Talk about the chaos that you used to have before you weren't using our platform. Just talk about how much it's just like transformed your whatever it is you do, the communication, or the speed of your project, or the project management. That works really well. And then try and keep them short. People often ramble on in these types of videos. But these 30 seconds, it's a 60 seconds, just like quick short user-generic content videos are really, really powerful, I've found. Rather than asking to read a big white paper or commit like an hour watching a web and archive of things. Those short, snappy campaigns work really well. And then also talk about the meta-adleting to landing pages is the shortest cut there. It's minimum time investment for these people I generally find. And all of your content has to be really optimized for mobile. Again, comes back to people being on the road, on site. If you look at your Google Analytics, you will find that the majority of your traffic will come from mobile. And a lot of marketers, because they do their jobs at a desk, because they forget to check the campaigns and the ads and the website on the mobile. So the mobile has to be really, really strong. I think I just add as well, on that point, you mentioned about, like, for you to be believed as a SaaS platform, sell into these people, like it goes back to that point that it's super important that you're believable. And like, like you just mentioned, someone putting a hard hat on, who's worked in the space. And it's like, they're believable to those people, because they've done the work. And they've actually done the space. They naturally, especially in these types of industries, and naturally going to believe that we don't understand their challenges. Because like, on a PowerPoint, while it's just news like, if I rocked up on site, me as a marketer, right? And I started selling them a platform face to face. I'm not going to be very believable. My brother, who is an ex electrician, so let's say we're talking to a bunch of sparkies on site. My brother rocks up and says, like, I was using this the other day. And like, this is my, like, I was before I was doing this, and now I cut it down my time. At the two of us, he's more likely to be the one who makes a sale, to be completely transparent in that situation. So I think it's just important that you are believable, and you use that kind of user-generated content, people in the space. Be like construction specific. And that means not being a SaaS platform. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, that's a great example. There's a lot of skepticism in construction. Yeah, there's a lot of like cowboy builders out there, and a lot of issues kind of. So people, trust is huge in construction is what I'm saying. And yeah, you give a very good example there. If you don't have enough case studies, enough social proof, enough user-generated content, people actually, people like them, construction people that are using the platform, then you naturally can move it a bit skeptical, like, okay, do these, you know, like, I just not sure if I trust this company. But if you just start seeing loads of videos, so people are using it, people are just like you, same job title, construction, where in the hard hats, then that's massive. So social proof and testimonials and case studies is important for any business, any industry, but I think particularly for construction SaaS, it carries a lot of weight, just because of that kind of skepticism about, like, even tech. A lot of them are, you know, very tech of us, construction companies. That's a big challenge is that you're working with people from a, sometimes from a different generation, or they're just kind of old school, and just, you know, not using too much tech. So trying to introduce tech to them, like you said, a marketer trying to give them tech, so not this, whereas if, like, the example you gave, one of your peers recommending it, then you're going to start to sit up and listen, essentially. And the other one I want to talk about is competitor comparison campaign. So we had a lot of success with this, working with a font, service, fear, ram tracking, a lot of our construction companies, but we always do a competitor comparison campaign. And this is particularly helpful when you're going after big deals. So when you're going after those larger construction companies, because the larger they get, the more likely they are to be using some kind of technology already. So, like, I gave previous examples of, like, people using WhatsApp for communication channels and things, that's mainly going to be the sort of small and medium companies. But if you're going after these big deals, they are going to be using some sort of a platform most of the time. So procure, for example, one of the biggest players in the space, you need to get them to move away from ProCore to you. So you need to do competitor comparison campaigns. You need to understand why is that platform, what are the problems with it? Why is your platform better? Is it pricing? Is it features? Is it customer service? Is it just the fact that that platform's clunky and it's overkill? And it's just maybe the UI is not so good. So whatever it is that your USPs are against that platform, whatever, whatever big platform these companies are using, competitor comparison campaigns work really well. So a landing page that it depends in terms of like, you've got options with the competitor comparison campaigns, like how much are you going to call them out? You know, a lot of companies are a bit shy to kind of name the competitors and they just want to only talk about themselves. That's up to you. That's a brand decision. I can't tell you what to do. But most of the time, the construction companies, the construction staffs come into a brave and bold, they reap the rewards from that. So construction buyers, they appreciate directness. You know, pretty kind of black and white. This, I'm going to name ProCore for example, these are the features. We have better features. We have better pricing. We have faster customer service. You know, don't completely like slag them off. We kind of want to touch you. I'm actually going to come in here and say, because I think you can even looking at the phone example, phone was one where we were kind of trying to win business from ProCore. In my opinion, this is a good rule of thumb. If you're a smaller business and there's a huge incumbent, particularly if the huge incumbent's been there for a while, call them out by name. Call them out by name. Don't be afraid to do it and call out why you're different and why your position differently to them, why you're better than them in that particular space. Like that, in my opinion, when it comes to competitive comparison, that's a good rule of thumb of when you're not going to backfire from a particular competitive comparison campaign. When you're a smaller player, going after a bigger player. Sometimes when you're at a parity, that's when I can see that sometimes it puts in sour taste of people's mouths. My very strong point of view on this is if you're a small player, go after the big one. They already have the pain. They already use the tool. They already might be underserved by that people. The cells are going to be easier. So just go after them and call them out by name because that's what their problem is. using Procore, for example, in that situation. Like, their pain isn't gonna be, we need a tool, their pain's gonna be, I don't like the tool, it's not working for me, it doesn't work for my particular use case, and figure out how you talk about that. - Yeah, no, I agree with that. I admire the bold stance on that. It generally, yeah, it's a good idea, I think particularly for construction staffs, it's to be bold with that. Oh, the other thing I'm gonna say is it is legal to do that. You know, I think it kind of wasn't, like maybe sort of 10, 15 years ago, like you couldn't, like bid on competitors' keywords on Google, but that's now changed. As long as you're factual, as long as you're not lying, and saying something about a competitor that's not actually true, you get in trouble with them then, as long as you stay in fact, they don't have these features, we do, they have this pricing, we have this pricing, then yeah, it's totally legal and fine to do that, and you can really reap the rewards from doing it. But the other thing I wanted to mention was about how you can use intent data. So intent data is an incredible way to understand, get a list of companies who are in market potentially ready to buy, and planning application data is publicly available. So if there's a site that's just been given planning application and you know that there's, you know, a big project about to start, this big, I don't know, block of residential flat units that about, is about to be done on this site, that's intent data. You know, there's gonna be a company that's gonna be about to do a massive project on this. So they may well need a new software to help them run this. So you can use, and there's various kind of publicly available information that give this planning application data available, you can, I'm sure you can even build some kind of an AI tool to kind of scan those websites to give you notifications of when planning application gets made, and then try and find out which company is gonna be working on this site, connect with them on, say LinkedIn and other social platforms, and try and DM them, try and get the phone number and do the call calling thing, try and do ad campaigns to them, to be very, very specific about, you know, that particular project they're about to start. So that's a really interesting piece of intent data. There's other ones of like the classic intent data signals across kind of works across any industry, but companies that have just raised funding, you can also set up alerts to say, if a company is just hired a new job title. So let's say if a new site manager has just joined the company, you can use, so what tools can they use like display to tell you that information? - Yeah, display, there's lots of, I think clays are really helpful one for that, but you can use lots of different data providers for that. Clay would be, I think, particularly if you're a smaller business, a little bit more favorable in terms of price point, but like, even if you just get started, a lot of things like a pot of stuff like that as well, for a lot of price point would work for that in terms of job changes. - Yeah, and the final thing I want to say is also, construction SaaS do well internationally. So our biggest, this big client I mentioned earlier that we had a lot of success with FON, they actually got acquired, and the main reason for the acquisition by the access group was to basically take FON to America. So that can be your exit strategy in terms of, if you nail one particular market, so if you're a UK company, for example, and you have really successful massive growth like FON did, you can get acquired by a company that thinks, well, I'm just gonna roll this out in America and make this massive, you can have a big exit there, or you can do it yourself. You know, you can go to America, they have the same problems, they use the same tools, they have the same challenges, the same chaos, so it shouldn't be that much for lift to do the same campaigns over in America. It will cost you more money from a marketing point of view, it's more expensive to do ads out there, because it's just one big option than everyone's trying to target America, but that's the kind of good news for construction SaaS, is it can very easily be transferred over to America. We have a lot of construction SaaS clients in Scandinavia, as well, again, same problem. Say, so it's a pretty much kind of global problem and very similar, I'd say technology, so that's also good news for construction SaaS that can work in multiple countries. However, I would say if you are small and you have a small marketing budget, you don't wanna get too excited and start to go for the whole globe. You're gonna boil the ocean, as we say in marketing. You wanna start narrow, and you wanna make sure you've just nailed a particular segment of the audience, get results, get ROI, and then increase the marketing budget, and then go into different regions, but the good news is that there's a lot of regions that you can go into. Right, let's do a quick recap. How to scale a construction SaaS company. You want to create content and ads that's talking about the problem more than your solution and your features and your benefits. Construction sites are chaotic. There is constant problems that are happening on site. So if you create ads and content that talks about these problems, addresses these problems, teaches people how to solve these problems, they're likely to have them going on their Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and seeing content about that thing. They were just winging and complaining about, you're gonna get engagement, you're gonna get lead at the top of the funnel there. Then as we move into the middle of the funnel, that's where you really wanna get user-generated content of site managers, for example, on site. Using your platform, talking about how good it is, how much it's helped them. Because construction people need to trust your platform and they probably won't trust a marketer. They will trust fellow construction people. So it's really important that that social proof side of things is happening in your business. And then finally, at the bottom of the funnel, that's your landing pages. They need to be optimized for mobile. Lots of construction people are on the move, they are on site, they're not sat at their desk all the time. So you must make sure that all of your campaigns are structured for the mobile phone. And then in terms of actually getting that flowing with leads, marketing intent data is really, really helpful. So you can use tools like clay to identify when new people have joined the business. Like let's say, for example, if a new site manager has joined the company, or let's say, if a company just raised funding, or also planning permission is a really amazing intent signal for you there. And the last one is competitor comparison campaigns. A lot of these big construction companies are with these bigger companies that they're not happy with, not happy with the pricing, the features, the clunkenness, the customer service, so compare them versus you and why you're better than them. That is the summary of how you can scale a construction SaaS business. But if that sounds like a lot, and you don't have the resources, the marketing people to deliver that, you can work with my agency, Rocky SaaS. We essentially do that for you. So we have pricing that starts from as little as 5,000 pounds per month, which is roughly what you would pay for a new in-house marketer. And we can deliver all of the campaigns that I just mentioned. We can create a SaaS marketing strategy that is proven to work with other construction SaaS companies like we've done with Farn and Service Fear. We can also create content for you. We can run the ad platforms. We can do the competitor comparison campaigns. Basically everything that we talk about in this podcast, we can do that as your external marketing team. So if you're interested in that, go to rocket-hiphon-sass.io, book a call with me. We'll get Jamie on there as well. And we can talk about working together, but obviously no obligation. We can just have a chat about your marketing challenges. But thank you so much. If not, see you next week on the SaaS marketing. (upbeat music) Thank you for listening to the SaaS marketing weekly podcast. Now, if you are a founder or a marketer of a B2B SaaS business and you are struggling to generate leads, you should check out my demand generation agency Rocket SaaS. But roughly the same price as hiring one in-house marketer, you will get a full team of marketing experts to create you a demand generation strategy and execute on content, ads, leave magnets, and website optimization. All designed to scale your SaaS business and generate you inbound leads. To find out more, please go to rocket-hiphon-sass.io where you can apply for a free SaaS marketing strategy call with me. (upbeat music)