When marketing to the construction industry, identifying and targeting the right stakeholders—whether subcontractors, main contractors, or architects—remains a nuanced challenge.
Rocket Content, a specialized content agency focused on the construction and engineering sectors, aims to fill a significant gap in the market by providing high-quality technical content suitable for engineers.
By leveraging their extensive experience and industry knowledge, they create training materials, white papers, and guides.
We spoke with Karen Fletcher, one of Rocket Content’s co-founders, about how Rocket Content has leveraged curated content to navigate the intricacies of B2B marketing in construction, establish themselves as thought leaders, and continually engage their audience across multiple platforms.
Karen said that their clients were requesting content tailored to their specific niche within the construction industry.
While it might seem like all construction content is niche to outsiders, there is actually a significant gap in highly specialized content and thought leadership for these unique areas.
So, for example, instead of a generic piece about supplying good indoor air quality (not niche enough), their clients wanted content about good indoor air quality for warehouses, offices, etc (there’s the niche).
With just a small team of two, filling this content gap pushed Karen to find a solution allowing them to provide this content without having to research and write it all themselves.
They were using a service called Paper.li, hosting blogs on a single-page site without different categories and with less content.
However, when Paper.li sunset their operations in April 2023, Karen needed to find another solution that could help her provide the level of service her clients and audience had come to expect, and Paper.li recommended UpContent to Karen.
UpContent not only filled this void but also offered new opportunities for growth.
“I quite quickly realized that UpContent had the potential to make something more of the information we were sharing, and so the result is that we spun off that sort of news and blog section into a product that we call The SectorScope,” Karen recalls.
Karen worked closely with the UpContent success team to create a multi-page site that included high-quality, third-party content categorized for those in the construction industry looking for the latest news.
With carefully crafted Topics and Collections, Karen can review and approve the content she’d like to have featured on The SectorScope’s website and socials in minutes, rather than trying to research and create every idea they want to share content on each week.
“UpContent is a really powerful tool. I see an article and think, ‘Oh, yeah, that's good news for next week.’ I click and approve it, and I am done. It saves an entire job's worth of hours, like 40 hours a week. It's given me a reporter,” Karen says.
Because of the success of sharing the curated content from UpContent, alongside the content Karen is still creating, they are continually launching new content verticals to share specific content around.
“The UK government is driving technology and science, and obviously, that's driving the building of massive laboratories. But we spotted that trend and recently launched a new section on the site, ‘Science and Technology Buildings,’” Karen says.
Because she has freed up the mental space usually taken up by creating content, managing a team of journalists, and publishing tasks, Karen says she was able to stay ahead of the trend instead of trying to chase it.
“I haven't had to go out and find a specialist journalist and start again with my press releases. That whole section about Science and Technology buildings came from me having the time to notice, ‘Oh, actually, this is growing now. Lots of money is coming from government support. That's a big opportunity to lead in knowledge and information.’”
But how does Karen know any of this content is working, and it's not just exciting to see all the articles lined up and organized?
Because of UpContent consistently supporting a robust and fresh library, the amount of content they share hasn’t been the only thing that’s gone up since using UpContent.
“We have used [UpContent] to draw attention to ourselves online through LinkedIn; that's our key B2B social channel, and we find that's the best,” Karen says.
“We found that by using UpContent’s capability to gather stories and their integration that's brilliantly linked to Hootsuite, we can then quickly take the lead stories from the week, and then run social posts through that system.”
Not only has SectorScope’s online following been on a steady upswing since launch, but it has also helped raise Karen and her husband's thought leadership and social profiles.
“UpContent enables us to show the market that we understand our sector and the key issues within construction and engineering,” she says.
In the first 18 months of The SectorScope, they grew from 0 to 500 followers organically and have seen increasing engagement on posts on the brand page.
From April to July 2024, Karen says their overall post impressions for The SectorScope were more than 17,000, with some posts generating thousands of impressions on their own.
“Over the past 30 days [June 15, 2024-July 14,2024], we've picked up 31 followers. So we're picking them up all the time,” Karen shares.
But it’s not only The Spector Scope’s social presence that’s growing because of the curated content they’ve added to the mix; it’s also. Karen and her husband’s profiles as well.
“From my own profile in the past seven days [July 8, 2024 - July 14, 2024], I've had 1,106 impressions on a current post, and 698 unique page views, which means they're coming to see what it is that I do as the editor of The SectorScope,” Karen says.
“So our name is out there, and we are getting our face out there.”
Karen says that if she has learned anything from her more than two decades of marketing experience in the B2B space, it’s that you have to meet your potential and current customers as humans and where they are spending their time.
“That means having content at every possible contact point, online and offline, and in as many formats as possible. That includes things like news, showing that you understand their problems, building empathy, and building relationships,” Karen says.
No matter what industry you’re in, these are the building blocks for building credibility and establishing your company as the go-to solution for the problem you solve, and that comes from showing that you not only know what you’re talking about, but also what your customer cares about.
Looking ahead, Rocket Content plans to expand into more specialized content areas, driven by the flexibility and efficiency UpContent provides.
“It's becoming more important to meet your customers where they are because they could be anywhere and looking at your content in so many different formats. So, being able to present things that are interesting and new and keep people coming back to your site is really important,” she says.
If you’re looking to create more new ways to meet your customers and prospects online, watch a free less than five-minute demo to see if UpContent could help your team be the thought leaders they are.
Or, if you’d like to read more about how we have helped other companies share their expertise, check out some of our other success stories!