INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
How to Build a Marketing Engine That Actually Scales in Construction Tech

Lessons from 10 years of go-to-market strategy in the industry

Here's what most construction tech founders miss: marketing isn't the function you turn on after product-market fit. It's the function that helps you discover what your market actually wants.

Lori Peters has spent the last decade building go-to-market strategies across multiple construction tech startups. When she joined her most recent venture, Document Crunch, the product already existed and the team had early traction. Yet one pattern kept emerging from conversations with founders: those who regretted not investing in marketing sooner saw dramatically better outcomes once they did.

The insight wasn't about sales acceleration, though that improved. It was about understanding how a relational industry actually buys and building your entire go-to-market motion around that reality rather than against it. Construction tech operates on principles that reverse nearly everything founders have learned about B2B marketing. Understanding those principles and building around them separates the companies that scale from those that struggle.

TL;DR

Construction tech doesn’t scale with traditional SaaS marketing. It scales through trust, relationships, and showing up in person.

• Marketing isn’t post-PMF. It creates PMF in construction.

• Digital-first funnels fail; events, communities, and regional presence win.

• GTM evolves from testing → geographic presence → full sales/marketing alignment.

• Community is the biggest growth flywheel; word-of-mouth compounds faster than ads.

• Credibility (especially from construction-native founders) is a massive advantage.

• AI has shifted discovery from SEO → GEO (generative engines like ChatGPT), but trust still rules.

Bottom line: the companies that win build marketing around relationships, not metrics.

The Construction Tech Marketing Paradox

In enterprise SaaS, the playbook is well known: minimize in-person engagement, optimize for self-serve, build scalable digital funnels, avoid expensive conferences. In construction, this approach fails completely.

Conferences and events rank among the biggest lead generation channels for construction tech companies. Other SaaS businesses actively discourage their teams from attending them. The difference isn't cosmetic. It cuts to how these two markets fundamentally operate.

Buying in construction is deeply connected to relationships. Buyers prefer not to handle things on their own. There's a lack of trust in solutions from companies they've never come across. They need to understand the people behind the product, know their construction background, and believe they'll be supported when things go wrong. Word-of-mouth expansion becomes the metric that matters most.

What looks like inefficiency on the surface is actually the natural outcome of a strategy that prioritizes relationships over metrics. When you build the right foundation, word-of-mouth doesn't feel like an antiquated holdover. It feels like the inevitable result of doing things properly.

The Three Evolutions: From Testing to Alignment

Marketing strategy rarely arrives fully formed. Instead, it evolves through stages, each unlocking new capacity for growth.

Stage One: The Test-Everything Era

Early on, the playbook is simple: test everything, measure what sticks, then scale that. This means building partnerships with adjacent companies, hitting the conference circuit, pursuing PR aggressively, and doing the podcast rounds. The philosophy is to make noise everywhere and see where it resonates.

This approach works, but with geographic limitations. Early users concentrate in regions where your network already exists. The lesson here matters: in a relational industry, you grow where you already have credibility. Trying to scale nationally through digital channels alone produces disappointing results.

Stage Two: Geographic Expansion

The breakthrough comes when you realize expanding nationally requires physical presence. You can't build relational trust through a screen. Instead, you go where your customers are. You build community intentionally. You invest in field marketing and develop sales teams that own specific regions. You embed yourselves in local construction associations.

This isn't about sponsoring one event and moving on. It's about establishing consistent presence over months. One conference appearance doesn't build relationships. Months of showing up, sponsoring local initiatives, and becoming a trusted fixture does. This requires patience, but it compounds in ways digital campaigns never do.

Stage Three: Integrated Go-to-Market

Marketing excellence in isolation has limits. The real breakthrough comes when you unify your entire go-to-market machine. Sales, marketing, business development, and field partnerships stop working separately and start operating from shared ICPs, shared messaging, and shared goals.

This alignment becomes harder to copy than any single tactic. A competitor can match your messaging or your event strategy. They struggle to match the coordination across an entire organization.

The Counterintuitive Plays That Compound

Several tactics emerge when you understand construction's relational nature. They seem counterintuitive until you see why they work.

Community as a Strategic Asset

Building an intentional community around your company isn't a marketing tactic. It's foundational infrastructure. This means branding your customers and advocates as something meaningful and establishing customer advisory boards not just for feedback but as a network of trusted validators. These initiatives don't generate immediate revenue. They generate word-of-mouth that spreads faster than paid campaigns ever could.

Peters describes the impact: when customers become part of a named community, they invest more deeply in your success. They share your story with others. They help you recruit talent. The compounding effect shows up not in quarterly metrics but in the kind of growth that feels effortless because it's driven by people who genuinely believe in what you've built.

The Credibility Multiplier

Construction tech founders who actually came from the construction industry have an unfair advantage. This single positioning detail dissolves a significant barrier of skepticism. Generic tech companies can't replicate it. It's not because the technology differs. It's because buyers trust people who've lived the problem.

Being a founding member of communities like "Built by Builders" amplifies this advantage further. It signals that you're part of the industry's fabric, not just trying to extract value from it.

The Data Trust Problem

Construction buyers increasingly question AI solutions. They ask: Is this built for my role? How is my data being used? Will it work with construction terminology and workflows? These are legitimate concerns that require direct answers.

The solution isn't dismissing skepticism. It's addressing it head-on with specificity. Showing that your solution was trained on construction data. Demonstrating understanding of construction workflows. Building conviction that you know their industry, not just their problem.

Trust is built through specificity. Skepticism arises from generic solutions. This principle applies beyond AI to every aspect of how you position your company.

The Evolution of Discovery in a Generative Era

Construction tech marketing is shifting faster than most realize. The traditional playbook of ranking for high-intent keywords is becoming less relevant. Why? Because construction buyers now search ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity before they search Google.

This shift requires a different approach. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is replacing the traditional SEO focus. This shift demands a different approach: where SEO once focused on capturing search intent, generative engine optimization focuses on visibility across the entire internet. When AI systems scrape content to answer buyer questions, your presence on industry publications, guest posts, and earned media becomes critical. PR matters more. Your visibility across multiple channels matters more.

But here's what hasn't changed: the fundamentals. Trust, specificity, and relationships still drive the majority of purchasing decisions. AI tools are simply expanding where you can be discovered and by whom.

Building Your Construction Tech Marketing Playbook

If you're starting a construction tech company or scaling one, here are the principles that matter:

Hire marketing early and make it count. Don't wait until you have traction. The person who helps you discover your relational go-to-market model has as much impact as the person who builds the product. They're equally foundational.

Map your relational geography before you allocate budget. Your customers congregate in specific places. Certain conferences matter more than others. Specific associations carry weight in your market. Your marketing budget should follow your customers' geography, not traditional rules about digital efficiency. This shift alone changes everything.

Test broadly, measure ruthlessly, scale selectively. You can't know what works until you try. But you also can't afford to fund everything forever. Establishing measurement frameworks early and letting data guide your next investment matters more than choosing the "right" channel initially.

Build community intentionally from day one. Community, advisory boards, and peer networks aren't things you bolt on later. They're foundational infrastructure. The companies that win are the ones that understand this and invest accordingly.

Align your entire go-to-market function around shared purpose. Marketing alone doesn't scale construction tech. Neither does sales. The magic happens when sales, marketing, business development, and field partnerships operate from the same playbook with shared targets and shared goals. This alignment becomes harder for competitors to copy than any individual tactic.

What's Next?

Construction tech is shedding the slow-to-adopt reputation that haunted it for years. Buyers are becoming more sophisticated in how they evaluate solutions. New discovery channels are emerging as AI enters the equation. The industry is changing faster than most realize.

Yet the core principle remains unchanged: trust built through relationships is still the ultimate competitive advantage. The companies that win won't be the ones chasing digital growth tactics and ignoring this reality. They'll be the ones that build marketing around it.

What does your construction tech go-to-market playbook look like today? Are you prioritizing relationships and in-person presence, or have you found success with a different approach? Reply and let us know. We genuinely read every response, and we’re always curious to know what's working (and what isn't) for companies at different stages.

Check out the episode with Lori Peters here 👇👇👇

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