More than ever, buildings materials distributors are embracing digital marketing as a way to grow their business and standing out from their competition. But as more companies embrace social media and build optimized websites, it’s important to keep upping your digital marketing game.
These best practices for digital marketing can help you take your efforts to the next level so that you reach more customers, win more sales and build a strong foundation for the future.
Identify and Speak to Your Audience
Understanding your audience is the first step in any marketing strategy. If you do a good job here, all your other marketing efforts will be much easier. Are you selling to architects or contractors? Homeowners or companies? Do different product lines have different target markets?
Your first step is to identify your customers. Look at your current contact lists, talk to your salespeople, send out a customer survey, or analyze your web or social media traffic. From here, segment your audience either by customer type or product line (or whatever makes sense for your business) and build buyer personas so that it is easy for you and your team to know how to speak directly to your audience.
Remember, every marketing campaign should have a clearly identified audience. You will use different words, different materials and different content based on the audience: Architects are interested in different information than building managers, etc. If you know who your audience is, you’re more likely to find a message that sells.
Create a Comprehensive Content Strategy (and Stick to It)
Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolkit. It provides valuable information to customers, can support your search engine marketing efforts and can be leveraged for your social media campaign.
As with any part of your business, you want to make sure you’re spending your time and resources wisely. For content, that means creating a comprehensive content strategy — and then sticking to it.
To create your strategy, you first need to identify the types of content you want to create. Typically, you will want to create content for each stage of your sales funnel:
- Top of funnel: Content that is targeted at building awareness (e.g. social media).
- Middle of funnel: Content that is targeted at helping leads evaluate their options (e.g. case studies, product brochures).
- Bottom of funnel: Content that is targeted at making the sale (e.g. free samples, technical specifications, customer testimonials).
Examples of Smokeguard’s full-funnel content strategy: educational videos, case studies and technical reports which provide key information to customers at every stage of their journey.
You may well already have content for all three levels of the funnel. As you begin creating your content strategy, evaluate what you already have and identify any gaps.
A major part of your content strategy will involve building a content calendar. This will focus on your top of funnel content (as most of your middle-and-bottom of funnel content will be more evergreen).
Your content calendar will identify the different types of content you and your team will be producing and create a schedule to space it out.
Using a content calendar will help you save time in the long-term, get more organized, and make sure you’re regularly updating your social media and blog. As always, any tool is only ever as good as the person using it, so remember to stick with your content calendar in order to see results.
Experiment With New Types of Content
It’s time to think of content as MORE than just your blog. While your blog is still a valuable marketing tool, we know that other media are increasingly driving traffic. If you’re not already, think about how you can engage your customers with new forms of content.
For example, take a look at how distributors Spahn and Rose use video content from one of their suppliers to highlight a product or how Brand Vaughan gives customers a sneak peek of their new warehouse.
Not sure what type of videos to create? One easy starting point is to analyze your competitors’ content strategy for ideas. Study what kind of video content your competitors are using and what seems to be performing well (likes, comments, shares).
Common types of videos include: product reviews or demonstrations, meet the team videos, event videos, how-to videos and customer reviews.
And video isn’t the only option: What about a building materials podcast? Or a handy infographic that highlights the benefits of a product line you carry? There are many creative ways to engage your customers, and the more you can experiment with different content types, the more you’ll be able to determine what content works best to engage your audience.
Show Up on Social Media
It’s not enough to create social media accounts: You need to build your presence on social networks and engage with followers.
To enhance your social media presence, make sure you do the following:
- Complete your social media profile: Use an engaging image, list your location and contact details, provide an engaging description of who you are and what you do.
- Promote your social media accounts: At a minimum, have a link to your social channels at the bottom of your website and in email messages.
- Share content regularly: This is where your content calendar will come in handy!
As you grow your digital marketing efforts, you should explore multiple social media channels. Remember, different social channels can be used for different purposes — Instagram is inherently visual, while LinkedIn is more likely to connect you with professionals, such as contractors or building managers. Platforms like Pinterest and Houzz can offer additional ways to reach out to customers searching for buildings materials.
Invest in Search Engine Optimization
For many, when you search Google for “smoke curtains,” Smoke Guard is the top result. This is a result of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is a large field that includes many aspects including how well your website runs, how well you’ve identified and targeted keywords, and how authoritative search engines decide your website is.
While there are many steps you can take on your own to improve your search engine ranking, sometimes you may need to make an investment. This may include purchasing tools such as SEMRush or Moz, rebuilding your website so it’s faster and works well on cell phones and tablets as well as desktops, or hiring an SEO agency to boost your results.
Run Targeted Ad Campaigns
Many online spaces are becoming increasingly “pay to play” which can mean organic only strategies that used to work (such as social media) may no longer be bringing in the same results. If you’ve experienced this, it may be time to explore paid ads.
There are multiple ways to run a digital ad campaign. These include:
- Paid search: Paying a search engine to show your ad at the top of search results based on keywords and other criteria.
- Social media advertising: Leveraging platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to display ads to carefully targeted users.
- Sponsored content: Paying to have your article or video appear on a major website to promote your business.
- Banner/ Display ads: Paying to have an image or banner appear on other websites.
Track, Analyze, Refine
Just as every marketing strategy should start with knowing your audience, all marketing efforts should be carefully tracked and measured so that you can ask:
- What’s working and what’s not?
- What’s great value for money?
- What can be improved?
You should be regularly checking your analytics — on your website, on your social media profiles and on any ads you run — so that you can identify your successes and then optimize your next steps.
If you want your business to grow and succeed, it’s worth investing some time and money into your digital marketing… and making sure you do it right. Let us know what digital marketing strategies found work best and what questions you want us to answer next.