Josh Simpson
We always hear the phrase “work smarter, not harder”, and in many cases it’s true. If you know an easier way to reach a goal, why not use it and get there before your competitors?
Working smart essentially means figuring out what your strengths are and building a network around you to build upon those in order to reach goals in the quickest and most efficient way possible.
The easiest way to work smarter may be through the use of technology: building your tech stack. In this blog, we will be looking at what technologies you may want to consider for your building product company for smarter working, and gaining an advantage over your competitors in 2021.
Analytics and tracking tools
Put simply, analytics and tracking tools show you how your online activity has performed over a certain time period, whether it be a week, a month or a year. You can also use these tools to compare results from previous periods to highlight any change.
These tools allow you to see what’s working for your business, as well as where these results are coming from. For example, a simple, free tool like google analytics can show you a whole host of metrics, such as the number of users on your website, as well as where they have come from, and what pages they have visited.
This can help you identify your audience behaviour, and use conversion tactics on your most popular pages to help guide your audience from prospects into leads, and these leads into eventual customers.
This allows you to work smarter as your sales team are no longer chasing dead leads. Instead, they’ll engaging with fresh ones that have come to you when they’re ready. This will allow you to focus on attracting qualified leads, rather than chasing lost ones.
Team management tools
Time is often wasted through people unsure of what they’re working on today, or taking too long on tasks. This is where team management tools, such as ClickUp, can help.
Since we implemented it here at Insynth, we found productivity increased. We could track time spent working on tasks, and could easily plan out our days to see what we had to do.
There are only so many hours available in the working day, so minimising the amount we waste is essential to working smarter. If our team can go from task to task with little downtime, surely that is better for everyone?
Given how all tasks are in one place, team management tools eradicate the need for daily briefings with your team, which take up valuable time. This time can then be spent by your team to plan their work day, and begin working earlier than they usually would.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation is the process of streamlining your digital marketing efforts to make them more effective using technology. Automating your digital marketing doesn’t just increase efficiency, but it can offer a more personal experience to your customers.
Using marketing automation, in conjunction with analytics tools, can help you identify what works for your business, whether that’s post times, email formats, or even how you engage with your contacts. And once you identify your strengths and what works, you can do more of it, to increase results.
Marketing automation also increases the efficiency of your team, as they are not having to focus on basic admin tasks, as these can be scheduled and automated, freeing up more time for your marketing team to focus on long term strategy and bigger picture projects to help to progress your business.
Playing to the strengths of your marketing team and allowing them to be creative will bring your business long term success, which is why marketing automation will be so important in 2021.
Email marketing
Tying into marketing automation comes email marketing. It is essential to your business that your contacts are engaging with your emails, not reporting them as spam, and not unsubscribing.
Personalisation is key when it comes to email marketing, as 72% of your audience will only engage with personalised emails.
In the construction industry especially, why would you want to contact a specifier with a marketing email better suited to a contractor? It is essential to get the best results that you approach the right contacts with the right emails.
HubSpot allows you to do this easily, as not only can you create and send all of your marketing emails through it, you can separate your entire contact database into lists, and send your marketing emails to the most appropriate list.
Content management systems
A content management system, such as HubSpot, allows you to manage your website and upload content in an easy, straight forward way. The easier it is to use the more likely you are to use it.
This is essential for your building products business, as more often than not, prospects will have questions about what you offer. If you can answer those questions to the masses through the use of content marketing, it will enable prospects to make informed decisions about your business or product.
This enables you to work smarter as instead of having to answer the same questions repeatedly, you put the answer out there once, and through the use of SEO, you can reach a wide audience of people who may not know about your business, and introduce them to whatever it is you provide.
The use of a CMS in this situation cannot be stressed enough. As in the time it may take to approach whoever is in control of your website, to produce, approve and publish this content, your competition may have already closed the deal with the prospect.
Customer relationship management
A Customer Relationship Management system enables you to manage customer data, as well as support sales management, deliver insights, integrate with social media and facilitate team communication. Cloud-based CRM systems offer complete mobility and access to an ecosystem of bespoke apps.
This is integral to working smarter in 2021, as you can have all the data you may need wherever you are, rather than having it all stored on a hard drive.
Having the right CRM system in place can make accessing customer data incredibly easy for your team, which may give your sales team the edge when talking to clients, as they will be able to use past deals to entice your customers, and it will be right in front of them.
Conclusion
Getting ahead of your competitors in 2021 will be essential to your building product business’s success. With marketing being arguably more important than sales, you will need to invest to get the most from it.
The world changed in 2020, and we all saw that everything an be done online, and digital is the way forward. Working smarter will be a game changer in 2021, as it will allow you to focus your efforts on more technical tasks, and develop new ideas to take your market by storm.