6 min read

How To Get Your Building Products Website To Sell

How To Get Your Building Products Website To Sell

Your website should be your best salesperson, generating leads, helping customers, working 24/7, consistent, always on-message, technically proficient and measurable.

Often, building product companies view their website and digital marketing activities as independent marketing communications activities instead of joining the dots and seeing the big picture - how they can work together in a systematic way to drive leads and, ultimately, sales.

With ever-improving technology and software, it can be hard for you to keep up with what websites can do these days and how sales and marketing automation can improve customer service, increase conversion rates and shorten sales cycles.

Most construction and building products companies have a website and presence on social media. They also use email marketing and provide content such as case studies, brochures and CAD drawings.

But how do you bring all of these activities together to increase traffic, leads and sales?

More building product brands are getting serious about digital marketing. By ensuring that you follow a few basic steps, you can improve the effectiveness of your digital assets and make a real difference to your sales and bottom line, and avoid getting left behind by your competitors.

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Treating your Website as a Salesperson

Your website should be your best salesperson, generating leads, helping customers, working 24/7, consistent, always on-message, technically proficient and measurable.

Often, building product companies view their website and digital marketing activities as independent marketing communications activities instead of joining the dots and seeing the big picture - how they can work together in a systematic way to drive leads and, ultimately, sales.

With ever-improving technology and software, it can be hard for you to keep up with what websites can do these days and how sales and marketing automation can improve customer service, increase conversion rates and shorten sales cycles.

With four easy steps, you can increase traffic to your site, generate more leads, and ultimately grow sales from your website and support digital marketing activities - with just minor tweaks to your website.

Understanding Your Sales & Marketing Funnel

An easy way to think about the way your customers engage with you and the journey they take is by visualising a funnel. Your audience should enter through the top and exit the bottom as a customer.

Basic Inbound Sales Funnel

To do this effectively, you must consider your audience's needs at each level in the funnel. If you have any weaknesses in any of your processes in the funnel, it will leak, and you will lose valuable potential customers and sales.

Monetise this - the average life of a customer is around seven years. Multiply your average order size by seven. That is the cost to your business of losing one customer. Scary, right! Now let's see how we can fix those leaks.

 

Step 1: Increasing Website Traffic

Increasing your qualified website traffic is the first step. The more visitors to your site, the more opportunities you have to show people how you can help them. 

Your online presence is driven by people searching for and finding your products. If people can't find you online, then you're fighting a losing battle.

Insynth has found that 98% of architects prefer to conduct product research on manufacturer's websites, with 9 out of 10 going to search engines to do this. Therefore, your website must be visible for what it does, rather than its brand name. But how do you do this? How do you get found for specific terminology? - the answer is more straightforward than you think.

Construction Keyword Research & SEO

Keyword research and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) are crucial here. If you can identify the exact terms and phrases that your ideal customers use when searching for you or your competitors' products, you can start to reflect these in your marketing content, which will get you found online.

Analyse your website and your competitors' using tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console or SEMRush.

Also, look at the traffic sources to show you how your customers discover and reach you, and then ensure that you focus more effort and budget on the high performing ones.

It is also worth looking at the bounce rate of your most trafficked pages. Anything over 50% would show a serious opportunity for improvement, and you should consider revising these pages to make sure that they align better with the standard search terms that are used to find them.

Once you've looked at these areas, you can establish a plan on how to write and promote content that is aligned with what your customers are searching for and on the platforms they are using.

 

Step 2: Building Trust

A common mistake is assuming that once you get the traffic flowing, the sales will follow. Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple.

Just as you wouldn't walk into the first shop you saw and buy the first jacket or shirt you spotted, architects, building service engineers, and other building professionals need to assess the options available to them. And ensure that the products perform in the way they need and fit the budget. Make sure your solution is the right fit for their project.

So, once you get potential customers to your site, your goal is to build trust and credibility.

The best way to build trust is to help your potential customer by providing them with the information they need. Make everything that they would need to make an informed decision readily available.

Give careful thought to what content you don't need will hide behind a form and what will be open. Design or Specification guides and Whitepapers have high value so that they can be gated. Make sure that performance data, sales collateral and case studies are freely available.

You build trust by answering specifiers questions, helping them with their problems, and delivering as much value as possible.

Turn everyday questions into blog posts so that they are easy to find - remember, people may be looking for the answer on Google rather than your site.

 

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Step 3: Converting Interest Into Leads

Once you've built trust with your audience, then you can offer opportunities for them to go to the next milestone: convert.

This is where someone takes the step from being a passive online viewer to an active potential customer and transacts some personal info for quality content.

Introduce appropriate calls to action (CTA) to your webpages to offer access to valuable content on topics that will help your prospects in their role or solve common pain points. Ideas for content include;

  • Product calculators
  • White Papers
  • Specification Guidelines
  • Ebooks on how current trends or regulations apply to them
  • How-To guides

Take your prospect to a well-designed landing page and capture their email and name details, enabling you to continue to nurture the lead with personalised communication until they display the signals of being ready to specify you or buy.

Linking your website into a modern CRM system will manage the lead capture, highlight the pages that the prospect viewed, distribute the lead to the appropriate team and even notify you when the prospect next comes to your website.

When you do get your visitors to convert, and you can track this, you'll start feeling like your site is working for you.

Don't be fooled into thinking that your job is done. Now you need to develop the lead and get it ready to be passed on to sales.

 

Step 4: Nurturing The Lead & Handover To Sales

Now that you have the lead, you need to qualify the prospect further.

To do this, have a ready-made nurture programme developed for each of your products and services.

Focus on going deeper into your product, and how it solves the problems and challenges they face. Provide social proof, such as case studies, reviews and testimonials.

Work hard to overcome buyer fear, and ensure that any of the concerns they may have about using your solution are covered. Your prospect will carefully evaluate your solution against your competitors, so make sure you have all the answers readily and easily available.

Manage this process with email marketing, webinars, and offers of product demonstrations.

Again, guide your prospects back to your site at every opportunity, where your CRM system can help you identify the areas that your prospect is interested in. You can also track their engagement with you on social media to seek further signals of buyer readiness.

Once all of these areas are covered, and the prospect is still engaging with you, you can pass the lead to sales, safe in the knowledge that the sales team has the highest chance of converting this lead into a sale.

By nurturing and building rapport with them, it makes it easier for your prospects to say "yes" when you reach out to them to purchase your product.

 

Do You Want Your Website To Be Your Best Salesperson?

The web can drive leads and sales for you if you focus on these four steps: Growing Traffic, Building Trust, Conversion, and Lead Nurturing.

If your website is not designed to be found by your audience, inform them, educate them, convert them into prospects and then nurture them towards a sale, then you are missing a trick or two.

Don't worry, you are in good company, as most websites generally act as an online brochure. But you can stand out from the crowd and elevate your business by acting before your competitors do.

Right now, we are offering free 30-minute website reviews, identifying the easy wins available to you. During our session, we will look at your online profile, your website and review your competitors too. You will then get at least five recommendations to improve the performance of your site.

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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 ImplementationWeb DesignSales AutomationSEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.

Book A Free Consultation Today.