Today, Insynth met with marketing and sales executives from construction companies across the UK for a seminar hosted by CEO, Leigh Simpson, on transforming digital marketing strategy for business growth.
Sponsored by Barbour ABI, Insynth's seminar gave insights into content marketing, promotion, video, SEO and ever-evolving technology, sparking conversation amongst guests.
Here's an overview of today's digital marketing lessons.
The pace of change online is quicker than ever, and it's only getting faster. This is down to technology. By 2020, Gartner predicts that customers will manage 85% of their relationship with businesses without talking to a person.
This is why your online presence needs to be stronger than ever. The construction sector often isn't quite as quick as other sectors to use new technology, yet technology opens the door to where your customers are; there are countless ways to reach out to them online and maximise your sales.
In the modern world, buyers want information on demand. Research can be done anywhere on a smartphone. In fact, over 60% of research is now done on mobile devices, potentially away from the office.
Buyers have all the power, not sales people. When you make your content easily accessible, you facilitate the research that happens 24/7 and prospects are more likely to buy from you.
If you don't adapt to the digital shift, you'll find that your products or services become irrelevant in the marketplace. You need to keep up with your surroundings: what are people looking for today? Will they be looking for the same thing tomorrow? Look at what happened to Blockbuster, Nokia, Yahoo...
The company that will be the biggest in the world in 20 years' time doesn't exist yet. That's how quickly markets move. Netflix, Apple, Uber, Amazon? None of these companies existed 20 years ago.
This is why the role of sales teams is changing. Buyers no longer need so many face-to-face interactions when making buying decisions. Too much face-to-face interaction can now actually inhibit sales. Customers don't want to be 'disrupted.' They will look for your solution when they're ready.
In this on-demand culture, time has become your biggest competitor. With the rise of online marketing and online payment systems, we're surrounded by high service level expectations and the ease of engagement. Friction is your enemy. If anything slows your online process, you're more likely to lose customers.
Use the internet to drive your business not only widely, but internationally. You'll always be competing internationally for online search.
Your content needs to be created in line with the specifier's journey. Are they researching options? Considering your products/services in particular? Making their final decision? Provide them with content that fits their current position. Your content needs to achieve one of four ambitions:
These are the four stages that specifiers and customers typically progress through in their buying journey. Content should be angled for each.
Getting found on Google is getting harder every day. Competition is constantly growing, and it's easy for your content to become a needle in a haystack. Many overcome this through pay per click strategies, but this can be particularly expensive. Although PPC provides a short-term boost, it's rarely an affordable long-term strategy.
Content and SEO strategies are long-term implementations that can consistently grow your online presence.
Your content is more likely to rank when you optimise it with
While you can gate the content listed above to gain information about your visitors, don't gate technical literature, BIM objects, technical drawings, price lists and specification clauses. Most visitors won't provide their email address for this content and will look elsewhere if expected to. Anything that will help a specifier or customer to specify or buy must be easily accessible, else they'll go to your competitors' websites.
For gated content, create thank you pages to follow downloads. Thank your visitors and explain what will happen next (will they receive a copy in an email?). You could link additional relevant content and relate your overall message to the buyer's journey.
Follow up with an automated email response based on the visitor's stage in the buyer's journey. You may want to enrol them for further emails or add them to a workflow. Only 13% of businesses follow up downloads at the moment.
Are You Ready For Video?
While email is still the most favoured method of communication of business, video is on the rise. It's already the preferred method of consuming information.
Video increases recall, response, engagement and email open rates.
There's more to video than words. Communication is 7% words, 38% tone of voice and 55% body language.
Video allows you to harness the vocal and non-verbal aspects of communication. You can use it to project your sincerity and authenticity. Video humanises your digital sales and marketing.
There are three types of one-to-one video:
Use these in every context of your online communications, whether on your website, in your blog content, in your email marketing or on social media.
With a good tech stack, you can expect an increase in website visitors, leads, business close rate and sales revenue. Technology can be used for quality graphic design (Canva), SEO (SEMRush/Moz), Project Management (Trello), traffic insights (Barbour ABI) and website visitor recording/heatmap analysis (Lucky Orange).
The full slide deck can be viewed here;
When you tailor your digital marketing strategy to the latest Google algorithms and understand how these impact SEO, to A.I so that you can improve customer experience, to optimised content that's primed for visibility, and to video marketing so that you can engage your prospects on a variety of platforms, you'll be on your way to growing your building products brand in all the right directions.
| Read More ■ How To Get Your Building Products Website To Sell ■ Should You Discuss Price On Your Building Products Website? ■ Construction Marketing Tips: A Beginners Guide To Link Building |
About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing consultancy based in Shifnal in the West Midlands. Insynth employ the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to help building product manufacturers grow their businesses by aggressively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.
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