Having spent over a year working closely with marketing managers in the construction sector, I’ve come to appreciate just how tough of a gig it can be. Unlike industries where brand-building and customer experience take centre stage, construction businesses often prioritise technical expertise, product performance, and commercial relationships. Marketing is still too often seen as a “nice-to-have” rather than a core driver of growth.
But that seems to be changing rapidly. As competition intensifies and customer expectations shift, the most successful construction firms are the ones where marketing has a strong, strategic voice. So why is marketing still struggling for recognition in many construction businesses—and how can marketing leaders make their value impossible to ignore?
Why marketing still feels like an underdog
The construction industry has traditionally been dominated by sales, operations, and technical teams, where commercial achievements are only truthfully attempted through acquisitions or merchant relationships. Marketing, meanwhile, has often been perceived as a supporting function—there to create brochures, manage the website, and put on a good show at trade events. The B2B space especially tends to treat marketers as pencil pushers and personality hires, so credibility is hard to come by, and therefore budgets are more difficult to secure.
The reality is that marketing has the potential to be one of the biggest drivers of revenue in a B2B environment, as experience and data have shown that all the best practices apply just the same as they do to B2C spaces. Marketing influences brand positioning, generates leads, supports sales conversations, and even helps shape product and service offerings. So why does it still struggle to get a proper seat at the table?
Misconceptions about marketing’s role
In addition to the negative, but rapidly changing perceptions of construction as a whole, marketing in construction has its own challenges in fighting preconceived notions. Many decision-makers in construction still see marketing as a cost centre rather than a revenue driver. This tends to manifest itself as a doom cycle of underinvesting that leads to underachieving, that then in turn results in further lack of investment, as it is impossible to generate proof that marketing is delivering return on investment. Anecdotally, this self-fulfilling prophecy often leaves marketing managers feeling hopeless and paralysed to fight for resource that they can’t guarantee will pay off.
To win credibility, marketing leaders must speak the language of the boardroom—growth, revenue, and profitability. According to Bruce Rogers, Chief Insights Officer and Head of the CMO Practice for Forbes Media “Marketers are investing more, yet most are unable to connect their investments to enterprise value, leaving CEOs and Boards uncertain on the true value of marketing“. This means that, in addition to reporting on engagement metrics (clicks, impressions, social followers), marketing managers need to show how their initiatives contribute to sales pipeline growth.
But more importantly, this cycle signals that the foundations of the marketing strategy may be inaccurate. Aligning marketing KPIs with business objectives is step one of any marketing plan, but it is on marketing managers to ensure that these objectives are honest and ring true to the internal culture of the organisation.
If the company wants to increase market share in a particular segment, it’s easy (but not necessarily cheap) enough to demonstrate how marketing initiatives are being put in place to drive that shift. But if the actual honest ambitions that internal stakeholders have for the marketing function differ from what you’ve set out in your annual strategy, achieving success is unlikely. No amount of positive stats will get your recognition, if the stats you are showing aren’t what the boardroom is measuring you on. As abstract as it sounds, this is much more of an important consideration than most would assume, with research by McKinsey indicating that misaligned companies generate 18% less EBITDA.
Therefore, step one of a construction marketer’s job isn’t just aligning the marketing strategy to the overarching commercial plan, it is understanding what internal ambitions for marketing are and how you can achieve them. Marketing is different to most other functions within an organisation, especially in construction. This is not just because everyone thinks they can do it (I’ll leave that rant for another blog), but because marketing means a different thing to everyone.
Depending on your organisation, the expectations of marketing could be anything – from show stopping creative campaigns that bring fame, even if they don’t bring in revenue, or, conversely, performance campaigns that bring in qualified leads, when you know what the organisation really needs is brand building. The only way to earn enough credibility for the marketing function, so that it can eventually deliver on the strategic marketing goals in the mid to long term, is to work out what needs to happen to get internal buy-in and then do that first.
Only when marketing can prove that its activities contribute directly to the genuine goal the wider stakeholders have for it, it stops being seen as an expense and starts being valued as a growth driver.
A focus on short-term sales
It is no secret that the sector thrives on individual relationships, tenders, and long sales cycles, and that this dynamic tends to leave marketing behind, disregarding an entire avenue of growth generation because of a belief that B2B spaces aren’t susceptible to the same mechanisms of brand recall as consumer-focussed markets.
It also doesn’t help that marketing’s longer-term impact on brand perception and demand generation is harder to measure in the short term. If you’re dealing with decision makers who are already sceptical about the impact the marketing budget is making on the yearly turnover, chances are you don’t have enough leeway to run brand campaigns for long enough (and with enough budget) for it to start impacting the bottom line.
In the same vein, marketing budgets are often the first to be cut when times get tough, simply because their impact isn’t always clear to non-marketers, so there’s no perception that what’s on the chopping block is integral to the business’ growth plans.
Quite frustratingly, marketing is often expected to prove its worth in the same way as sales, overlooking the fact that its influence extends beyond direct lead conversion. I will be honest with you, I haven’t found a silver bullet solution to this one yet, so if you’ve got one – I’m all ears.
There are instances where no amount of theoretical resource and no number explanations on how building mental availability works move the organisation’s focus from immediate sales. However, as we’re working on changing perceptions of marketing within construction, here are a few things I’ve found helpful to evidence the value of longer-term brand building which isn’t immediately reflected in sales stats.
Building an attribution model that encompasses the entire customer journey. It seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many campaigns are launched without proper attribution modelling. Please don’t misunderstand this point – if you’re running a brand awareness campaign where the number one objective is to create brand recall and the biggest win is getting your very clever ad in front of as many relevant people as possible, it will never fulfil the purpose of a lead generation campaign. However, giving the decision makers in your organisation a better understanding of the entire funnel – both it’s demand generating and demand harvesting parts, will give you a better chance of making a case for brand-building campaigns that won’t yield immediate sales results. As Les Binet puts it “The longer-term effects of marketing generally need to be evidenced through things like econometric modelling and testing. If you can frame the discussion in terms of short and long-term financial flows and show hard evidence, then I think finance people can begin to be convinced.”
Explain the impact of brand-building and the consequences of its absence. Sometimes, I hate to admit, it’s no longer useful to keep preaching about how stronger brands mean more repeat business, less price sensitivity, and ultimately better margins and profitability. Sometimes, it’s more effective to point out the risks of not paying any attention to longer-term brand metrics, not only because you risk depleting all existing demand, but also because of the threat of competition. One of the bigger risks in construction, where marketing often takes a back seat, is that your competitors could be doing everything by the book and may outdo your marketing initiatives with not a lot of time and effort. So by deprioritising marketing, “CEOs risk leaving the door open to disruption by more digitally savvy competitors on their watch“. Building brand recall is a big opportunity, sure, but it’s very important to also convey that its absence is a vulnerability. And not a small one at that, according to 2023 research by Nielsen, if you let your brand decay, future sales tend to decline at a 1:1 ratio.
It goes without saying that macroeconomic factors are a huge influence on how stakeholders tend to view marketing expenses and their correlation to a tangible influx of paying projects and customers, so my last bit of advice on this one is to time your conversations carefully.
Customer and market insights gap
One of marketing’s greatest untapped strengths in construction is its ability to bring customer insights to the table. When marketing is relegated to an administrative and cost-cutting function, marketing decision-making tends to lean on gut feels and hunches.
As I’ve worked on more and more marketing strategies within the sector, I am more and more terrified of making decisions and recommendations without solid data to back it up – and you should be too.
In an industry where relationships and technical expertise have long been the dominant drivers of success, marketing’s value lies in what it knows.
Many marketing teams don’t fully leverage it to secure their place in strategic decision-making. And when marketing isn’t leading the conversation on customer behaviour, competitor positioning, and market trends, it gets stuck in a reactive role—constantly justifying its existence rather than driving the business forward. When marketing controls the narrative around customer insights, it shifts from a supporting function to a strategic advisory role.
Chances are that, if you’re a marketer in this space, you’ve been asked to prove the ROI of a campaign, only to find that the data needed to track conversions is patchy at best. You want to build a compelling case for more budget, but without hard evidence linking marketing efforts to revenue, it feels like you’re making a best guess. And it goes beyond just campaign reporting. Construction companies love talking about product innovation, but how often do they validate what customers actually care about? Too many businesses assume they know what drives decision-making—only to be blindsided when competitors overtake them with a more aligned offering.
And I get it, when your budgets are stretched too thin and when you’re being asked to do more with less, as many construction marketers have reported last year, the last thing you want to do is allocate budget activities like research, which won’t immediately result in awareness, let alone sales.
Most construction marketing teams know they should be doing more structured research, but too often, it’s deprioritised in favour of short-term lead generation. The irony? The best lead-generation strategy is a deep understanding of what makes customers choose a brand in the first place.
So what sets the well researched marketing plans apart from the rest and how can you replicate it? Well, put simply, the best marketing leaders in construction are owning customer and market insights—not just as a function of marketing, but as a strategic business asset. They’re embedding themselves in sales conversations, setting up regular market trend reports for leadership, and ensuring that marketing’s value is backed by evidence, not just intuition.
They also undertake consistent research across key customer segments, and track brand perception over time, flagging early warning signs and capitalising on strengths. Without this, businesses risk making branding decisions based on internal opinion rather than customer reality. And if your messaging fails to consider your brand’s perception and address your customers ambitions and pain points, the path to gaining the needed credibility for the marketing function will be messy and uncertain.
But don’t let marketing’s occasional underestimation in construction discourage you -remember that marketing is the only function that can connect brand perception, customer behaviour, and market trends into a strategic growth narrative.
The construction companies that recognise its strategic importance will be the ones that lead the market in the years to come. So, suppose you’re a marketer in the construction space and you feel brave enough to have those difficult internal conversations. In that case, you should feel empowered knowing that you are giving your organisation the best possible chance at considered, long-term growth.
