Marketing In The Construction & Building Materials Industry – 2019

Marketing In The Construction & Building Materials Industry – 2019 – Report 

Introduction

The goal of this white-paper (long blog), is to provide you with ideas that  will dramatically increase the success of your marketing. The results that will be created if what we discuss during this whitepaper are implemented, will increase your customer base as well as the life time value of those customers, creating a compound increase in your profit and therefore money in your pocket.

First of all, my name is Josh Bardsley and I am just like you. I am a business owner whose job it is to make my business grow, pay my employees and provide clients with an exceptional service. Every business has the same fundamentals and this has become so apparent to me and my team at Avalanche Enterprise, my marketing agency of 8 great people, after spending so much time working with businesses in all shapes and sizes across the world.

Two of our favourite industries to work in is the construction and building services industries due to the reliance on collaboration and the level of repeat business that can be achieved if the business is set up properly.

Over the last 5 years, my team at Avalanche Enterprise have run campaigns in every corner of the construction and building materials industry. Our career in these industries began with a panoramic door distribution and fitting company in 2014, a time when LinkedIn was rarely used as a marketing tool for this type of company (It was difficult trying to convince them, but more on that later.). Since then we have worked with many types of businesses and even more types of business people, achieving success every single time. We were able to achieve this success through practical business tactics and diligent testing measuring, all of which I will go through later in this document.

Marketing – Our Mentality

You all came here to learn how to grow your business, so I won’t bore you with pages of marketing theory and will do my best to put our mentality into some key learnings. The first item on our agenda is focus. We all want more customers and more revenue but these two key factors of business success are not something we can just ‘have’ more of. In order to achieve more customers and more revenue, there are three areas we must FOCUS on increasing:  

1. 1. Lead Generation
      
      At Avalanche, we define a lead as a target market prospect that has given their permission to have a conversation with you or one of your team. This may be an inbound lead who has filled out a form or a person that has replied to your outbound marketing that has agreed to further communication. We must fill our pipelines with as many leads as possible as this, alongside conversion rate (Sales talk) are the only factors we can personally work on. We will teach you some sure fire ways to increase your lead generation in this white paper!

• Average Spend

Average spend has a huge impact on revenue and is an often easy way to create substantial returns without investing huge sums of money. There are multiple technologies available to make sure that your clients are spending more money with you. By adding in subtle and value adding touch points to your communication chain, you can create upsell and cross-sell opportunities that will lead to an incremental increase in revenue.

1. Retention & Repeat Business
   
   A staple for marketing in the construction and building materials industries is focus on repeat business and retention of relationships. Due to our ‘compounding’ focus, adding in simple technology to make sure that your current customer base are communicated with at an optimal rate and in a targeted manner, will increase the number of times they purchase from you. A slight increase here can provide you with substantial increases in revenue and profitability.

A simple 10% increase across the board in these 3 areas should lead to a 30% increase in revenue right? Not exactly. Due to the connection between these elements, the compound interest effect will take effect and you will see the following play out:

By increasing Conversion rate, Avg Spend and Avg Number of Visits by a tiny 10%, revenue is up 33.1% or £370,720 for our example business.

How do we increase these key elements?

The above looks great right? Everyone would enjoy another £370k in their organisation to fuel growth or that lovely new car you wanted. These numbers are easy enough to achieve for any business and below we’re going to go through a few that can be implemented right away.

1. Marketing Plan

One of the three major plans any business should look to include in their overall business plan is a marketing plan. Without one, it’s like trying to reach a destination without a satnav, it can be done but a little harder than necessary.

A good marketing plan should highlight firstly your unique value propositions and unique sales propositions. These are items that define who you are and why people should buy from you. Making sure these are written down in the plan means that anyone delivering the plan will be able to lean on them when they come to strategy.

Making sure all strategies are branded correctly, have the same UVP’s and USP’s will move the compound effect in your favour and mean that touches from all marketing strategies will count towards that prospects trust relationship with your organisation.

See Jay Conrad Levinsons ‘Guerilla Marketing’ for more information on how many ‘touches’ it takes for a prospect to go from cold to trusting customer… It will probably shock you!

Once those are set, detail out all of the key strategies you want to test and measure in your marketing and plan out at LEAST one quarter in advance in weekly blocks of tasks. This is best done on a spreadsheet and should showcase who is doing what and by when. By doing it in this way, it will be far easier to keep people accountable to their roles.

If you would like to purchase a marketing plan template, we would be happy to sell you the one we use for our clients at a price of £99+VAT. Just email abigroves@avalanche-enterprise.com

2. Business To Business Lead Generation via LinkedIn

For the construction and building materials industry, lead generation is obviously a vital piece of what makes the business successful. It is easy to get caught up the flashy marketing strategies available to you from PPC to expensive events but these are only great returners if the basics are managed.

When we explain LinkedIn marketing, we focus on conversations. What I mean by that is, the more conversations that you have with people within your target market, about orders or general relationship building conversations, the more successful you will be. Your team should be talking to new target market prospects each week, without fail.

LinkedIn is able to provide that for you if used correctly. Harnessing the power of LinkedIn Sales Navigator to communicate with target market prospects and focusing that communication on conversations will yield fantastic success and create a strategy you can lean on at all times.

When thinking about where to start, define your target market and become ok with having conversations with a lot of people. Make time to communicate and I can guarantee your success.

3. Brochure Request Advertising

This strategy can provide both a leveraged way of generating leads as well as bolster your manual lead generation strategies.

Developing a strong brochure or channel/reseller partner proposal is a vital tool for most manufacturers and distributors. It allows you to put your UVP’s and USP’s that we discussed in the marketing plan into action, showcasing the mission of your organisation as well as why you are superior to your competition.

LinkedIn as a tool for both manual distribution and advertised distribution. Manual distribution is the process of messaging your connection base and asking for permission to send over said proposal or brochure. We would expect a 20% positive response rate from these messages and it is a great way to reach people in a cost effective manner.

If you are using sales navigator, you will be able to segment and tag on industry. If we are searching for trades or building companies for example, we will be able to target on size and location as well as many other attributes.

LinkedIn advertising is a great tool but you will need some budget. We suggest testing with around £250 to get a real base on the cost per download rate you will be achieving. For this, we would create a landing page and a download form of which prospects would have to fill out if they wanted the brochure, creating a data capture point that will provide as a tool for further communication, which follows nicely into our next point.

4. Data Management & Segmentation

I do a speech every now and again that has the title ‘How well managed data and marketing can instantly increase the value of your organisation’ and I also help very large organisations determine the unlockable value of potential acquisitions using this very process.

A simple segmentation inside your crm (We recommend www.activecampaign.com – Email me joshbardsley@avalanche-enterprise.com for a 20% discount) of your old customers, current customers and your prospects and then the holding of as much segmentable data as possible like order value, number of purchases, industry, location etc, is a sure fire way to one, add a ton load onto your net worth and 2, unlock a lot of new marketing opportunities.

Segmentation and management of databases is in our opinion the number one most underutilized revenue generation tool in businesses, especially in building materials companies as your clients literally cannot do their job without you, their supplier.

If you do one thing from this whitepaper, make sure it’s that you compile your data in one place and segment them, even that will give you a major advantage over competition.

5. New Customer Automations

I will refrain from getting too technical here, however, this strategy is an important element to note. In our experience, one of the poorest parts of the sales process in the building and construction material industries is the follow up… Be honest with yourself, do you follow up fast enough? I read a study the other day that said you are 60% more likely to win business if you follow up within the first hour.

Whilst you can never replicate the human touch of a relationship, especially in this business, we can make sure that basic communication is done and automated, creating a failsafe if things get busy and a customer is waiting.

Analysis of your customer interaction points and where comms could be automated i.e order forms, new enquiry follow ups, newsletters, support forms, cancellation forms etc, will show you where you can both save and make money with automation.

More Strategies?

There are many more practical strategies that work and if we were to list them all, this would be more like a book! The point of this whitepaper was to provide you with some real world insight into the strategies we are using on a daily basis to generate thousands of leads for clients across the world.

From the initial mindset introduction, the marketing plan and the 4 or 5 key implementable strategies, your return on investment from the time spent reading this will likely be extremely high.

My advice at this point is use this document as you build your marketing plan and focus on the understanding that the more conversations you have with your target market, the more successful you will be… It really is that simple.

Our agency

If you need any help with any of the strategies discussed please do not hesitate to get in touch with me at joshbardsley@avalanche-enterprise.com  – All of our campaigns are guaranteed and we are certain we will be able to provide you with a substantial return on investment.

www.avalanche-enterprise.com

You can download this report here: http://avalanche-enterprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Avalanche-White-Paper-022019-v1.pdf