Is construction marketing off the pace? Who knows?!
All marketers are created equal, but are some more equal than others? And how equal are construction marketers? Lets’ find out…
There’s a fascinating thing happening in marketing strategy at the minute, where a lot of the major educational institutions, trade bodies, econometricians, and superstar marketers seem to broadly agree about marketing effectiveness and resultant best practice. It’s a gross over simplification of the work of the likes of Field & Binet, Andrew Ehrenberg, Jenni Romaniuk, Professor Byron Sharp, Paul Fieldwick, Daniel Kahneman (and more), but there’s increasing consensus that the findings of their efforts can be broadly synthesised as:
(creativity + consistency) x budget = fame and sales
Mercifully, after years of straw-man arguments around creativity, media spend etc. only being for B2C brands, it looks like marketers across sectors are starting to wake up to the reality that – for the most part – business is business and marketing is marketing. In fact, there’s lots of research on in-market performance that demonstrates the ‘best practice gap’ between B2C and B2B is closing.
Marketing data – The big picture
How does construction marketing fare comparatively? Who knows – the lack of data on construction marketing is becoming increasingly noticeable, and problematic.
Before we get to that, let’s look at what’s happening elsewhere and see how data is broadly aligning – and whether the findings ring true in the world of construction marketing. A useful starting point is Gartner’s annual marketing survey. While the data pulls from a sample size of 395 CMOs from some of the planet’s largest brands (median turnover of $5.3 billion), it provides a useful bellwether of how senior marketers are seeing economic conditions, and where they’re investing – handy intel even if the budgets one’s managing are several levels lower.
In the 2024 edition, Gartner found that marketing budgets have fallen to 7.7% of overall company revenue (splutters…), down from 9.1% in 2023. It’s worth noting here that marketing budgets cover everything from salaries, agency fees, media, and martech.
The good news, consistent with SLG’s previous advice on compounding effects in marketing and the empirical law of double jeopardy, is that media spend has held up – with efficiencies being driven elsewhere. Other research from the likes of WARC tells us that while overarching spend is, in fact, up, it’s increasingly being concentrated with fewer (digital) media companies, so there’s some best practice being followed, but there’s perhaps an opportunity for further refinement by placing creative in high-attention, broad beam media (as per the guidance of Les Binet et al) as market conditions improve.
How does B2B stack up?
These efficiencies likely mean reductions in labour/salaries, agencies and martech – the latter of which is interesting given the drive towards AI. Perhaps many of these larger businesses have already invested aggressively enough to be able to do more with less? Interestingly, when we pull this down into B2B markets, courtesy of LinkedIn’s very recent 2024 B2B Benchmark Report, we see a similar picture emerging – with 23% of budgets going on paid media (vs 27.9%), and 21% on agencies (vs 22%) two in three using generative AI already, with a 20% increase in spending on this over the past 12 months. Unsurprisingly, increased productivity has been suggested as the primary driver.
Happily, this tech-first approach appears to be with a view to freeing up resource for increased creativity, further accelerating business effects brought about through that increased media purchase, with nine in ten CMOs advocating bolder creative (which should please everyone keeping abreast of the work of System 1 no end), with 67% putting increased spend behind brand building efforts.
(On the subject of System 1 thinking, 70% of respondents reckon they’ve developed creative that stands out in the past year, and I’d suggest that their data on B2B creative suggests otherwise, but I digress…).
Plotting the Horizon in construction marketing
So, if the broader trends look to also be true in B2B sectors, are these findings also true in construction? It’s time to find out, as we launch our annual Horizon survey.
For a long time, construction marketing has, seemingly, been content with being the poor relation of other sectors/markets, including B2B ones, when it comes to data and insight. In fact, the lack of data about construction marketing prompted us to launch Horizon back in 2022, something we are committed to continuing and sharing with the sector for free every year.
Last year threw out some incredible insight, like the nugget that many senior marketers intended to run north of ten campaigns in 2024, or that marketing budgets were set to increase by 3% in spite of market conditions, or that ‘brand awareness increase’ and ‘positively enhance brand perceptions’ were marketers’ two main aims – despite being KPI’d on lead generation… It’s all here for you to digest: https://www.slg.agency/horizon-2024/
And we want you to be part of making construction stand tall amongst its peers, and for construction marketers to have the same volume and quality of data that their peers enjoy – enabling you to benchmark yourself against relevant parties, rather than inappropriate brands in inappropriate categories.
The first step to any good quality decision making, marketing-related or not, is data and insight. So, play your part and let’s make sure that we understand how the construction marketing landscape looks heading into 2025.
Links:
LinkedIn:
https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/b2b-benchmark/2024