Olivia Atkinson
Hopefully by now you’ve got a pretty good idea of what 2020 looks like for your building materials company. If not, this blog should open up some areas that you might not have considered, or start discussions internally.
It’s healthy to review where you’re at as a company and how you are being perceived in your market. Most marketing reviews and strategy planning takes place yearly. This is your opportunity to not ask why but why not?
The construction and building sector is one known for it’s traditionalism, with this comes the reserved approach to trying new things and experimenting.
This blog consists of questions to try and kick-start your marketing strategy plans. Ask yourself…
Why Are We Doing This?
Growing a business isn’t easy, in fact it’s hard work. That’s why it’s so important to really understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. What is the purpose of the work you do? Why are you helping your customers? What is most important to you about it?
By answering these you should reveal your deepest values. This can really help to ensure your value proposition is correct and resonates with not only your customers but your employees too. For example if answering the questions above revealed that your values lie with honestly resourced UK materials then make sure you’re audience know that.
What Is Our Grandest Vision?
When your business is winning, achieving its goals, your team is thriving and you’re doing everything you set out to do, what is happening? How big is your team? Where are you operating? How are you known? What’s you’re revenue? Who are your customers?
Answering these questions will undercover how happy you are about your current position and should outline where you want to be. For example, you may want a bigger team, have customers in a new market, expand to a bigger office.
Who Are We Serving?
If you don’t know who your target audience is then you can’t communicate effectively to them. What audiences are critical to your success? Is there opportunities in other markets that you are yet to explore?
Don’t forget to include your own team in this answer as you serve them too.
How Will We Know We’re Achieving What We Set Out?
Setting goals and benchmarks for success will help you measure your progress. If you set a goal for the year, then break it down to a monthly number, this makes it more realistic and keeps you focused.
Reporting on your progress should look at the details not just the bottom line numbers. You should dig deeper and look into client and employee retention, new customers, increased purchased with existing customers and more.
Once you create that powerful picture, you can begin to imagine how you can make your goals achievable.
The deeper you go with the data you currently have, the better you will understand and identify key areas to target. For example there is likely to be seasonal patterns from customers in the education, healthcare and care sector due to receiving budgets at certain times of the year.
Look into how you can maximise this and how your sales reflect on the opportunities available.
A CRM system such as HubSpot can be key for data collection. By logging all deals and sales, you can start to identify why some people didn’t turn into a sale. You can also find similarities in the sales you did get, did those contacts all make the same touchpoints?
The more you know about your customers the better you can serve them.
Identifying the key turning points for your clients is key, however you can’t do that without having tried a variety of marketing tactics.
How do you know that social media isn’t the place where all your customers are? Or actually that people like receiving a monthly email newsletter that educates them about specifying your product?
Without proving that things don’t work, there really is no excuse to try them. Even when they don’t work there is always testing that can be done and heat-maps to find out why people aren’t engaging.
Your marketing 2020 plan should include as a minimum the trial of if not consistent:
- Social Media Promotion
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Ensuring Your Website Is Clearly Understood By Your Customers
- Print Media
- Content Offering
- Sales And Marketing Automation
Identifying the areas and platforms to start taking advantage of will prompt you to take action. Begin by scheduling the process for each different marketing area you’re going to focus on. Then move onto budgeting and pricing out the cost for moving forward.
A budget helps push the work you do that bit further, however there are things you can start doing without a budget including, email marketing, social media promotion and reviewing your website.
Conclusion
The most important thing is to ensure you keep taking steps forward. Whether you do it yourself or you work with an agency, your input is critical to developing a successful marketing campaign.
Outsourcing can help structure your plan, action it and ensure it’s delivered with the best marketing expertise. Your input as a company is also crucial to success and you shouldn’t leave everything to an agency as you know you’re audience best.
Although we offer expert advise and recommendations, you will always have the final say on what’s delivered to your customers and prospects.
If you’ve not worked with an agency before, make sure to ask questions. We find ourselves as an agency talking to people that pay another agency to ‘Do their marketing’ or ‘Manage their SEO’ and they have no clue as to 1. What they’re actually paying for and 2. If it’s working.
Data is key, the numbers don’t lie. If something works you will have the stats to back it up. You should be looking at data monthly to review. Equally if something doesn’t work you need people that are inquisitive and experimental top find out why.