Alan Gayle is a sales and marketing consultant specialising in the construction industry and working in the stone sector for more than a decade. In this column he offers advice on how to make an impact in the market. This month Alan re-visits advertising.

This is month three of my review of the marketing subjects I’ve covered over the past four years. This time I want to cover advertising.

When I say ‘cover advertising’ I really mean scratch the surface a bit because it’s far too big a subject for me to tackle in a few words. But I’ll attempt to give the most important elements as they relate to our industry.

Let’s cover first things first: Does advertising actually work?

Yes. If yours doesn’t, you are sending the wrong message to the wrong people.

Carefully targeted advertising will raise awareness of your company and/or promote a particular product or service.

But it does need to be carefully targeted. We’re not working with multi-million-pound budgets like Nike or McDonalds, so it’s critical that we get the most from our advertising spend.

While some companies spend a lot of money on creative, attention-getting design, in the construction industry I think it’s far more important to place your adverts in the right place.

Beautifully designed adverts in the wrong publication will yield poor results. Poorly designed adverts in the right publication will yield better results.

Well-designed adverts in the right publication and with the right message will yield the best results.

But make sure you know what you expect the result to be. If it is to get people to contact you, don’t forget to give them a reason to contact you and a way to do it.

It’s important you consider where your target customers ‘hang out’. What do they read? Which websites do they visit?

If you want to reach architects there are dozens of publications that will offer you what seem like wonderful deals on advertising. But do architects actually read them?

Advertising in Architect’s Journal, Building Design and RIBA Journal might seem expensive but we know that architects genuinely read them, so if that’s your target audience your message is likely to reach a higher proportion of it in these publications. Cheap advertising is not cheap if nobody sees it.

Building magazine or Construction Enquirer are the places to be seen if you want to reach main contractors. If your customers are specialist contractors then you can’t beat the specialist trade magazines (NSS, for example is a direct route to the stone industry).

Most of the best-read publications in the construction industry also have advertising opportunities in their regular email newsletters. It depends how many people actually open them (which is not the same as the number of people they are sent to), but they can represent extremely good value.

Here are some KeyNOTES on advertising:

1. Know what you want to achieve from the advertising
2. Spread your budget over a series of three or more adverts rather than just one as repetition creates familiarity and familiarity creates trust
3. Carefully consider where to place your advert
4. Keep it simple – try to focus on just one theme
5. Create an interesting headline or slogan – but don’t get too cryptic!
6. Use good quality photography – and it is usually best to get the ads designed by a professional
7. It’s a good idea to advertise your promotions
8. Always include a CTA (call to action) – ask people to do something, such as visiting your showroom or entering a competition
9. Adverts on the right-hand page of magazines are more visible
10. When using email, it’s the number of people that open it that counts, not the number it gets sent to.

Alan Gayle has worked in sales and marketing roles in the construction industry since 1993. Following a successful career with some of the UK’s leading building product manufacturers, he has worked in the stone sector more than a decade. He now runs keystone Construction Marketing, a marketing agency specialising in the construction industry. The agency works with building contractors, subcontractors and building product suppliers to help them increase their sales and improve their margins.