Customers that specify building products don’t have time for outreach efforts not useful to them. Marketers need to think differently about whether conventional levels of measurement are “good” enough to build market share.
As I’ve described in the past, the construction sector is dealing with labor issues and construction companies and builders are having a hard time finding enough skilled labor to complete all the projects they want to take on. Building products companies working to win over these customers need to do more to be relevant when and where customers seek them out.
Some examples of measurement benchmarks that lead marketers astray: Think about email marketing. Service provider Constant Contact says the overall average email open rate, at close to 18%, is the number to hit, as is getting at least 8% of the recipients to click through. For landing page conversions, platform provider Unbounce says a 12% conversion rate is acceptable for lead generation pages, and that 90% of marketers won’t achieve this.
Then there’s paid search, which generates an average click-through rate of around 2%, according to HubSpot. Online display ad conversions go much lower: Marketing resource Smart Insights says it takes 10,000 impressions to receive five clicks.
While these measurement benchmarks might be viewed as “satisfactory,” I believe that’s a flawed mindset with a time-crunched customer who will, one way or another, still find the information they need to specify building products.
How to change the analytics
Building products brands that remain satisfied with 12% conversions or 2% click-throughs are inherently accepting that the majority of their targeted customers will maintain their current vendors and usage habits. Marketing leaders need to be asking tough questions about what their customers need. While brands with new products have additional considerations to unpack — that’s a topic we’ll cover in depth next week — marketers need to do a better job of figuring out how to reach and engage these buyers and ask more challenging questions:
- What are your buyers’ needs?
- What exactly are the details of the customer’s buying journey?
- How are these customers searching for information, from the time of day, to the type of device they’re using?
Thinking through these issues gets building products companies to focus on opportunities to reach the crowd they’ve missed. The process isn’t easy, and you may need a partner to illuminate broader insights along the way. If so, get in touch. We can contribute perspectives and design the plan that puts you in the right places at the right times, in the right ways. Expect different marketing benchmarks.