I’ve been saying it for a while: If you want to see more results in the building products market, you need to create ways to save customers time.
Last week I talked about messaging, and the idea that building products brands need to deploy messaging that saves customers time, or risk damaging the buyer-seller relationship.
It’s relevant because of the labor shortage in construction. Builders and contractors have fewer skilled workers but more work. Anything building products brands can do to save customers time is going to build sales.
Creating more responsive messaging helps, but no two customers are alike when it comes to company size, specialties, location, or their place in the buyer journey. That means messaging has to be personal. Successful brands make it happen with one of the best marketing tactics: marketing technology.
What is Marketing Technology?
Current martech trends focus on tailoring brand messaging strategies so they’re virtually 1:1 with customers, and serving up real-time analytics on buyer behaviors. Then use the information to inform future strategies to drive sales. It’s a two-way street where you learn what works and what doesn’t, then regroup and refine.
In that sense martech is vital for building products brands because it can help them cover a lot of ground:
- It puts brands in the right place at the right time. Marketing automation is one of the martech tools that tells marketers which outreach efforts make sense, and which ones don’t. It also makes it easier for customers to find their brands. For example, which media placements drive more marketing qualified leads? Are emails getting opened by the right contacts? Using analytics to inform future plans helps ensure dollars are spent to match messaging with audiences.
- Brands become more relevant to their customers’ problems. Because martech tools are personal, they link customers to questions, interests, situations, and complaints. That saves time because it lets brands tailor messages to what they know each customer wants to know.
- Customers get answers, fast. Think of the time savings in being able to automate communications so they’re fully accessible on mobile devices and targeted to each customer. Marketing automation lets you personalize, schedule and distribute the resources and messages your customers asked for, with the speed they expect.
- Salespeople get better results. When salespeople use martech to keep track of each customer’s interests and needs, brands become more adept at characterizing qualified leads and creating harmony between marketing and sales departments. This turns the conventional sales model upside down. And it’s great news for buyers who don’t have time for the whole sales pitch.
Marketing technology not only streamlines marketing execution but allows for constant updates. A big part of it is using the real-time analytics martech dredges up, a topic we’ll cover in depth next week.
For more on building out a marketing plan that strikes up richer 1:1 conversations with target customers, get in touch with us.