Rich Newsome
It’s essential that you seek out the right information before embarking on any construction marketing campaign.
Failure to do so may result in a considerable loss in time, effort, resources and, ultimately, money.
It may be tempting to go in all gung-ho with blogging, SEO, website improvements and PPC, but taking a step back in the initial stages of any campaign will pay off ten-fold in the long run.
And asking smart marketing strategy questions is the most efficient route to smart answers.
This post is for anyone responsible for the marketing activities of a building product business. You may be new to the role; you may be a seasoned marketer looking to adopt a new way of working. Whatever your current situation, here are some essential questions you should be obtaining before you can fully benefit from the delights that digital marketing has to offer.
Read on to find out more…
1. What Business Objectives Does The Construction Marketing Strategy Need To Support?
Whilst, on paper, this seems simple enough, it can often get overlooked.
Define the end game. Marketing for your building product business has the potential to move it to a different place to where it sits today.
Whether it’s a larger market, to serve more customers, sell more products or to deliver additional services, if your building product business hasn’t defined what they’re trying to achieve, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
So, begin by defining your business objectives, and do so in a quantifiable manner. Here are some examples to consider:
- Increase revenue from £2M to £2.5M
- Maintain a profit margin of 12%
- Increase average order value by 5%
2. What Metrics Determine Success Or Failure For My Building Product Business?
At the start of the process, ask yourself,
“how are we going to determine whether our efforts have been successful?”
Then you should make sure you have the tools in place to report on that information. For example, if success is defined as the number of new leads generated through organic traffic, but you don’t have a process for documenting the origin of a lead, then you’ll have no way of being able to answer this question.
It’s all about determining the scorecard before executing. It’s difficult to measure progress if you haven’t set up the system ahead of time to include the metric.
Thankfully today there are many tools on the market that can help you obtain these metrics. We strongly advocate HubSpot as a sound investment to enable you to be smart about your marketing strategy before you begin to implement it.
3. What Is The Budget? How Much Should I Spend?
There is no easy way of looking at it: to generate real and lasting results from marketing, your building product business will require investment.
This can be a sore subject for many building product business owners who are scared to invest in something like ‘digital marketing’ – particularly if their understanding is limited - so it’s crucial that you figure out how much you need to spend.
How do you figure that out? We recommend:
- 10-15% of your overall budget should be spent on planning, implementation and integration tools, such as HubSpot.
- Include the cost of utilising internal and external resources. Content creation, list segmentation, market research and so on will be a difficult task for the lone construction marketer. Will you need to utilise the skills of an external agency?
- Find out how much of your building product business’s current profits you can comfortably invest back into the business to support future growth. The worst thing you can do is go out of business trying to fund your marketing efforts.
4. What Construction Marketing Strategies And Tactics Have Been Used In The Past?
It’s a good idea to take a look at previous successes and failures. This is where a full creative audit is necessary. This will give you total visibility into everything that your business has done so far, giving you a clear view of the big picture.
If your company has done nothing to support digital marketing efforts, feel free to move briskly on to the next point!
5. The Competitive Landscape Of Your Building Product Business
Whilst you may not be able to accurately scope out what your building product business has done in the past, you might be able to examine your competitors – the people with whom you’re competing for sales and awareness.
The building product industry is heavily saturated with stiff competition, so you’ll need to audit those companies that have the monopoly of Google’s first-page rankings. Look at what they’re doing and how it compares with what you’ve done. Identify what’s working for them and what opportunities you have to steal their traffic.
6. Positioning & Messaging For Your Building Products Business
Before you even begin producing content, you need to know who you’ll be talking to and how you should talk to them.
This doesn’t mean guesswork and assumptions.
So many building product manufacturers think they’ve got a handle on who their key audience is but fail to recognise that a growing percentage of key decision-makers are now millennials.
These digital natives consume information in a vastly different way to their boomer predecessors.
Millennial architects will be looking at ways to make their lives and jobs easier, in a carbon-friendly and sustainable way.
This means serving the right technical content at the right time.
The only way to dig deeper and find out more about your audience members is by actually talking to them, which is why Buyer Persona research so imperative in order to best align your positioning and messaging.
Furthermore, your Value Proposition should act as that ‘single source’ phrase that everyone in your organisation lives and breathes. A Value Proposition is a short sentence or two that encompasses who you are and what you’re about.
A Value Proposition doesn’t outline your USPs; rather it specifies clearly the problems you solve and who you solve them for.
So, understand your Buyer Personas and have a clear understanding of your Value Proposition.
7. What People/Resources Are Available To Assist In Implementing Your Construction Marketing Strategy?
Your resource availability should guide your strategic marketing plan, so take an inventory of the people, inside and outside of your organisation, who can assist with the implementation of your plan.
Outside of your company, you should consider bringing in the expertise of industry thought-leaders – even better If they have a particular specialism in the building products and construction industry.
Outside agencies will help you implement these necessary changes in an effective, yet efficient manner – meaning you will start to see results in much less time.
One of the biggest reasons why strategic plans go unexecuted is because no one thought through who was going to do the work.
Your Construction Marketing Strategy Is Your Foundation
Tactics alone won’t be enough to generate the results you need. Creating an overall construction marketing strategy is one of the most important jobs you’ll do as a marketer.
So, follow these seven tips and enjoy the ride.
If you’d like any support on implementing a strategic marketing plan, don’t hesitate to speak to an expert today.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.