How Construction Marketers Should Use Instagram Stories to Sew the Seeds of Construction’s Future

Want to deliver a constant flow of entertaining free marketing communication with your construction business’ future clients and colleagues? It’s time for Construction Marketers to implement Instagram Stories as part of their marketing campaigns.

The majority of construction business’ may consider Instagram to be the last place to conduct serious marketing activity. A social media channel obsessed with selfies, travel, fitness and consumer brands is surely no place for construction. However, if it is a place where the future of the construction industry belongs it’s surely worthy of consideration.

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories has been a feature of Instagram since November 2016 and enables users and brands to provide a stream of photos or video to their audience. Each photo or video appears in the story for a short period of time (5-10 seconds) and is available to watch again multiple times over a 24 hour period.

Construction business’ may be thinking, that’s an awful lot of effort for such limited exposure. However, if we look carefully at how it may be used and the potential benefits of using Instagram Stories this will hopefully encourage Construction Marketers to take it seriously.

Using Construction Business Instagram stories

In the responsible hands of your staff on the road, on site or in the office there is a never ending source of valuable content promoting your business you can capture to achieve sustained communication with an engaged audience.

Benefits 

• Maintain a continuous flow of branded communication to future and existing clients and colleagues
• Build your business personality, by showing your team in the working environment
• Showcase specific projects from the day and keep a running story of their progress
• Demonstrate products being used and installed
• Educate customers on the quality services you provide
• Utilise your team to capture content takes minimal effort
• Instagram stories is a free platform to use (unless the sponsored story is adopted)
• Establish branded hashtags
• Drive traffic to your website (this isn’t possible via normal image posts)
• Create positivity by associating your construction business with a marketing channel associated with fun and entertainment
• Instagram Stories appear at the top of Instagram providing immediate visibility to users
• Your stories will become part of the users story stream, delivering seamless integration of your messages
• A great way to showcase your attendance at events, or really high profile projects
• Stories can be saved re-used for other social media and marketing communications – For this reason alone it could be a worthwhile investment of time as it removes time associated with video creation.

2017 Instagram Statistics that Tell a Story

On this evidence Instagram Stories has some attractive benefits, but the statistics supporting the social media channel should be the most encouraging to Construction Marketers. Engagement with brands is 10 times higher on instagram than on Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest and 84 times higher than Twitter. The engagement compared to Twitter is staggering, and with most construction companies heavily involved on that social media channel it would be wrong to ignore instagrams potential.

Demographics

The age bracket of 18-34 represent 61% of the total share of overall users, whilst 60% of the 17.2 million users are above the age of 25. Instagram users are youthful, but this should be seen as an opportunity for Construction Marketers to place the business in a environment where they can build awareness with the industry’s future. The potential for construction is strengthened by estimates suggesting that in 2017 70% of brands will be on instagram.

Sustained Stories

As with all social media channels, instagram stories requires a sustained stream of content to build and establish a positive relationship with your audience. If your construction business is completely new instagram, you might consider using team members already on instagram to drive traffic to the account to build an initial foundation of followers.

Instagram Story Guidelines

• To prevent significant damage to your brand, construction business’ are advised to apply guidelines as they would to any social media activity. Emphasising the importance that business reputation is on the line.
• Where possible it is recommended that content is as entertaining or as informative as possible to prevent followers from switching off or skipping your story
• The live in the moment aspect of instagram stories may be of some concern, construction marketers may consider gathering and moderating content first and re-issuing once approved from a single source. Alternatively, it may be beneficial to moderate content as and when it is posted.

Instagram Stories in Summary

Despite the potential, I can imagine Construction Marketers will have some resistance towards making the leap into Instagram Stories. In a similar way to the industry being relatively slow to embrace other social media tools.

On the surface Instagram stories may seem even more of a risk, due to the inability to re-share content easily, time commitment through the day, lack of automation available and no guarantees of return.

However, Instagrams level of engagement compared to other social media platforms and potential reach into a future client base justifies trialling it within a construction marketing strategy. All that is required is time, a team motivated towards delivering consistent quality content and your construction business could be seen as a leading example for the industry.

What are your thoughts on instagram stories being used a marketing communication tool for the construction industry? Is it a worthwhile investment of time or just a social media channel that will take up your time for little return. Have you tried to use it before and what were the outcomes and response levels. It would be great to hear your thoughts below.