As a general contractor, how do you stand out online?
A featured project or case study? A list of the markets you serve? A headline about building trust through transparency?
Those matter. The challenge is that most of your competitors are leading with the same things.
When every homepage looks alike, it's hard for a prospect to see what makes you different.
And the finished building usually isn't what they're deciding on.
What your clients are really buying
Commercial construction projects can take months to years to complete, with many stages and approvals that must happen. Over that time, things will go wrong.
Your prospects know this.
So when they're choosing a contractor, they aren't only asking who builds well.
They're asking who will pick up the phone when something goes sideways, and who will walk them through it.
They're buying the hand-holding.
The transparency.
The way your team handles a problem in month seven.
But how do you communicate this to prospects looking to work with you?
What a brand video Communicates that photos and text cannot
A brand story video shares the who, the what, the why, and the impact of your business with the people you want to work with. For a general contractor, that means showing the work behind the finished product.
Your people. Prospects get to hear from your project managers and superintendents before they ever meet them. They see who will be on their site and who they'll be calling.
Your process. How you plan a job, how you communicate updates, and what happens when something changes. When a prospect sees the systems you already have in place, they can picture their own project running on them.
How you handle problems. This is where you stand out. Hearing your team explain how they worked through a real issue, in their own words, builds more trust than any list of capabilities.
Your expertise. Your team talking through decisions on site shows a prospect you know the work, without you having to say it.
Your clients' experience. A client testimonial lets someone who has already been through a project with you describe what it was like. That carries weight a prospect won't give to your own claims.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, there are 24 pictures in a single second of video. In about three minutes, a prospect gets what they'd otherwise have to piece together from your entire website.
Where it fits in winning work
A brand story video isn't going to close the job for you. That isn't its job.
Its job is to move the right prospect to the next step. They land on your website, watch the video, and reach out because they already have a sense of how you work.
That's why it works as a lead qualifier. The prospects who reach out after watching it already like how you operate. The ones who aren't a fit find that out before they take up your time.
It also works as an outreach tool. Send it with a bid, share it before a first meeting, or put it in front of a developer you've been trying to reach. It does the introduction before you're in the room.
And it can shorten your sales cycle. When a prospect already trusts your process, there's less to prove in every meeting that follows.
Show them how you build
Prospect have plenty of general contractors to choose from, and a lot of them list the same services you do.
What's hard to copy is your team, and how you take care of a client when a project gets messy. The problem is most prospects don't get to see that until they've already signed.
That's what a brand story video is for. It lets someone meet your people and hear how you work before they ever call you.
We make brand story videos for companies across the Southeast. If you want help telling yours, start here.
Visit merrillfilmgroup.com to learn how to tell your brand story.