Dorian Wallace
The decisions you make can impact your business's ability to operate effectively for years to come.
Amongst these decisions, is one particular area which you cannot afford to get wrong; your business data.
What Is Business Data?
The role of data in construction marketing is to empower business leaders to make informed decisions based on facts, trends and statistical numbers.
However, with the superabundance of information available, business leaders must be able to filter through the noise to access the key insights needed to make the best decisions possible.
Business data comprises a multitude of functions, that include but aren't limited to:
- Sales data
- Customer contact information
- Website traffic statistics
- Marketing performance
- Return On Investment (ROI)
- Operational costs
- Employee output
- Strategic overviews
By using data effectively, you can streamline the process of manufacturing your product, marketing it, and getting specified. Without sufficient data, you have no choice but to make crucial business decisions blind
The Dangers of Bad Data
Damaged Brand Image
It’s important to remember that poor-quality data creates mistrust, especially in industries where regulations govern relationships or trade with specific customers, such as construction. Maintaining good-quality data can be the difference between compliance and millions in fines.
Conversely, if the data’s wrong, time, money, and reputations can be lost—reflecting adversely on your business and lowering customer confidence.
Operational Inefficiencies
Poor data quality is a severe issue for businesses. Inefficient business processes that rely on data from reports to ordering product material, and just about everything in between can be negatively impacted by poor data quality. These inefficiencies may result in very expensive rework efforts to validate and fix data errors, instead of focusing on core duties.
Missed Opportunities
If you don't have a firm grasp on what's happening in your business and within your customer base, you risk missing out on lucrative deals, specifications or customer needs that a competitor with a more advanced understanding of data may capitalise upon.
Incorrect Budgeting
Inaccurate data may lead marketing and sales teams to spend money on the wrong channels or waste time trying to reach customers who do not exist. The result? No revenue from those expenditures and wasted time on non-existent customers.
Best Practice For Data Capture
To capture useable data you must first understand what information is vital for your decision-making process.
For example, if you're a building product business that has an online store, website traffic will be a critical Key Performance Indicator (KPI) you will need to obtain, however, if you generate most of your business through running CPD, then you will need to capture information on those who attend.
Once you've decided on the KPIs most important to your business, you must then select the right CRM, suitable for your needs. Your CRM should be a central point and single source of truth for all of your marketing intelligence regarding your customers.
What Is A CRM?
CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. Many CRMs will be cloud-based, managing and recording a company’s interactions with its customers and prospects.
A CRM records all customer data, including contact information, interactions with sales reps, purchases, assets, effective marketing channels, ROI and quotes/proposals.
It acts as a single source of truth for all departments, allowing them to access data and understand each touchpoint in their customer experience. A complete customer profile is developed through this understanding, and a solid customer relationship is built.
With a robust CRM, you can make informed decisions based on the behaviour of your audience.
Read more about CRM, with are purpose-built blog: BEGINNERS GUIDE IN UTILISING A CRM SYSTEM FOR CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES
What CRM Is Right For Your Needs?
Most businesses will have some form of a CRM, whether that is a legacy system that requires a large amount of manual time like Excel, or a large clunky CRM that requires significant investment, like Salesforce, or Microsft Dynamics.
Good CRMs capture customer data. Great CRMs leverage that data to help you understand your audience better which in turn enables you to do the things that grow your business.
By doing this, you're able to target specifiers far more effectively, than your competitors can. Giving you a competitive advantage.
HubSpot is our CRM of choice for this exact reason. It is built for the needs of decision-makers, marketers, and sales reps. It doesn't just capture data, it organises it in a structured way to allow you to access the most usable insights... In minutes, not days or weeks.
HubSpot offers solutions to every aspect of your business:
Sales Hub
The HubSpot Sales Hub, allows businesses to track, manage and communicate with leads.
Only one-third of the average sales rep's day is actually spent talking to prospects. The rest? - admin.
Sales reps spend 21% of their day writing emails, 17% researching leads, 12% going to internal meetings, and 12% scheduling calls. With the HubSpot CRM, you eliminate the repetitive tasks hindering your sales team from growing your business. Sales Hub's ket features include:
2) Sequences
3) Task queues (in terms of priority)
6) Eliminate data entry altogether
Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub is a comprehensive digital marketing solution that integrates email marketing, campaign automation, and CRM. Equipped with a vast array of features and capabilities, any marketing team of any size can find the solution they're looking for with Marketing Hub. Its key features include:
1) Free CRM
3) Landing Page, Web Page, and Blogs
6) Social Media Integration and Management
Operations Hub
Operations Hub empowers operational teams to optimise their processes with features that enable data syncing, data cleaning and advanced automation. In other words, everything is in one place with less jumping from software to software. Key features include:
5) Webhooks
Service Hub
Service Hub leverages your CRM, and data obtained in the sales and marketing processes to provide a holistic suite of tools for your customer service team. Service Hubs' key features include:
1) CSAT: customer satisfaction surveys
2) NPS: customer loyalty survey
3) Automation
5) Live chat
Conclusion
Data is essential for businesses to grow and prosper. Therefore, your organisation needs to make informed decisions based on accurate information rather than just relying on guesses or gut feelings.
Not only will you develop a better understanding of your customers, but using data can also create new business processes that will help you stay ahead of your competition. Data provides opportunities in every aspect of the business, so it’s essential that you find ways to improve operations by changing how you do things.
By making sure that everyone works together towards the same goal – proactively managing data – your company can achieve great results, not just today but also in the future.
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.