My company is a construction management firm with a very unique project delivery system.

I would also reach out to bloggers, industry analysts, and other "influencers." Since your approach is unique, you need to educate the market and let them see and experience that you are credible.

Without a doubt, speaking a tradeshows and conferences will help accomplish this goal, but getting influential people in your market to assist will also be a good idea.

When approaching top bloggers, focus your pitch specifically to each person on your list. Read their work ahead of time so you understand their focus and interest. Then, send a personalized email explaining why your service is special AND why it is perfect for their particular blog. Each email to an influencer must be customized to that person's specific interests.

Be prepared to invest personal time with each of those folks, to be sure they really understand what you are doing, why you do it, and how it is unique and valuable to the market.

Hope this helps, and just leave a comment if you want clarification on any of these points.

Tom,

To start, explore LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, find communities of interest related to your particular business, customers, partners, and related parties. You can search and I'm sure will find various discussion groups that are relevant.

Begin by watching -- observe the dynamics -- and then ask questions or answer questions posed by others. Just participate in the discussion, but do not sell!!!

Successful participation in social networking is based on conversation and not selling. Offer your support and expertise in a substantive way, and over time your reputation and credibility will grow. There is no immediate silver bullet; it just takes time and investment of energy.

Good luck!

I looked at your company web site and noticed that you seem to be primarily focused on local business in Illinois, which may mitigate the value of some of the above advice that is more nationally focused, e.g. trade shows, magazines, etc. I know that you said you had not gotten much out of direct marketing, but that might be because of the specific channels you selected, as for local businesses DM is often the most effective method. In your case, working through certain kinds of state associations you could probably obtain mailing lists that are very targeted to the kinds of customers you are looking for and would not cost a lot.

On your site you have a useful set of categories for the types of organizations for which you have done construction projects in the past and elsewhere on the site you mention the types of stake holders with whom you work. These things make a good basis for a Google search that will identify the kinds of organizations that will have the lists you need, as follows:

"illinois association" Municipal OR Healthcare OR Veterinary OR Religious OR Banking OR Retail OR Commercial OR Recreational OR Arts "real estate developer" OR architect -residential -attorneys -lawyer -trial -defense -litigation

Let's pick it apart a bit. In Google, using quotes keeps words together and eliminates noise, so if you took away the quote marks around "illinois association", you would get millions of hit about illinois and millions more about associations, with the quotes it isolates references to organizations whose names start with this phrase. This is followed by your customer categories separated by OR. The caps are important here, as it tells Google to find things containing any of the words separated by OR. Without it there would be an implied AND, making Google look for pages that contain all of the words, which is not what you want. Following the categories are the stakeholders. Note the use of quotes around the first one, a phrase that, if not kept whole would bring in a million realtor's sites and other similar noise. Also note that the stakeholder terms are singular, which may be counter-intuitive. You are looking for more than one architect, but remember a single architect's site will not show the plural form and therefore would not show up in a search where the term is pluralized. On the other hand, the singular search term will always find plurals as well, like "Jones and Smith, Architects".

Finally, the series of words at the end of the search expression each preceded by a minus sign tells Google to leave out pages that contain any of these words. I excluded residential because it appears that you do not do residential construction and I excluded a variety of words related to lawyers, because otherwise you would get a lot of noise related to property attorneys and the like.

The above search produces a very manageable number of hits, around a thousand, that contains references to many associations from which you could probably obtain member mailing lists and maybe even some editorial exposure on their sites, like the "Illinois Association of Museums". But, you will also notice another beneficial result that I didn't expect. The few pages of the results are predominately for architecture firms who work on the kind of project you are looking for and who have received awards from the kinds of associations discussed above. In other words, this query not only produces lead sources, but it also produces quite a few actual leads.

Another good resource for search-oriented lead generation is Jigsaw (http://www.jigsaw.com/) which will enable you to produce very targeted lists of individuals with contact data for people in the companies and roles that usually hire your company. Even a free account can give you some good results, but a paid account is not much money and definitely worth it, as it will give you more useful information and eliminate a lot of busy work, like stitching lists together from individual pages, etc.

Tom,

You are very welcome. I looked at your site and I think your message of "collaborative construction" is very compelling and would make a great basis for this kind of strategy.

Good luck,

Tim

Mr. Krigsman,

You mentioned reaching out to bloggers, I understand that there is a new wave of networking that is available through the internet, but I have limited knowledge of this medium of communication. For I start, I need to do some research on what these tools are, how they can best be utilized and then get engaged. Your insight regarding the power of influencial people is on target. Thank you for your insight and encouragement.

Respectfully,

Tom Thornton

Help clean the oil spill. That's a big spill and will require a huge group effort to clean the mess up. Construction will be needed for repair and maintenance, crew recreation and medical facilities. These will need to be deployed in fairly dense arrays.

That ought to get media coverage at the very least....

To everyone who was kind enough to take the time and provide me with their input, many thanks.

Tom Thornton