You’re a building product manufacturer, and you have a digital presence in the form of your commercial website. Online visits, returns, and page views are trending up. Architects, engineers, and contractors (AECs) are downloading your content and specifying your products. You’ve added the tools that encourage your professional user community to register and share project information – if not, then see how you can improve your digital marketing for commercial building products. Overall, you’re doing well, right?
So, what’s next? Are your sales and marketing efforts engaging these new leads? Are you optimizing your lead funnel for more conversions and ultimately more sales? If not, then read on.
Lead Processing
Your website can be the prime place to capture leads. When an AEC professional user is interested enough in your products to register or to complete a from, you’ve identified a captive audience that you need to properly engage. You must make sure that these leads make it into your customer relationship and marketing automation tools. You need to create a process that empowers marketing and sales with the best tools to take action on these leads.
But be careful; AECs have told us that they don’t like being sold to. You have to understand what message works best and when to deliver it. To maximize these opportunities, you should know the stage of their current project (e.g. planning, design, construction, post-construction).
Understanding Project Stage
The easiest way to gather information about the stage of a commercial project is to ask the design professionals who are working on it. If you’ve provided them with the ability to create online submittals, projects, and/or sustainability rating reports, then they might be more willing to discuss their current projects with you.
Even if they aren’t, there are other ways to surmise the project stage. Let’s make this easy:
- If the AEC is downloading specs and SketchUps, they are likely in the planning stage.
- If they download CAD and Revit files, they are likely in design.
- If they download installation instructions, they are likely in construction.
- If they download warranties, they are likely in post-construction.
While this isn’t perfect or comprehensive, it gets you close.
Marketing and Sales Empowerment
By understanding your AEC users’ job titles, company types, and project stages, you can better tailor marketing and sales messages to them.
Early project stages are best approached with lunch-and-learns. Later-stage projects require a firmer message about specifications. During construction, you can offer general contractors and subcontractors equivalent substituted products. Lastly, post-construction, you might engage the owner/operators with a message on becoming the basis-of-design for their next project.
Conclusion
By capturing key lead data and defining the stage of their commercial projects, you can transform the way you engage commercial prospects. But to do so, you must understand the digital journey of your professional users.
Although your AEC users don’t want to be sold to, delivering the right message at the right time can maximize your marketing and sales conversions at every phase of the building cycle.