It’s no secret that social media as part of your BPM marketing strategy is no longer a luxury — it’s a requirement. But within the building product manufacturing space, it can be challenging to know where to start when it comes to promoting your products on social media. Let’s explore some of the best social media platforms and tactics for effectively promoting your building products.
Which Social Media Platforms Are Right for Building Materials?
With such a wide variety of social media platforms available, each with its own corresponding and sometimes overlapping audience bases, how can you know which to use to promote your building materials?
LinkedIn is an important channel for BPMs to take up space in, as it is filled with decision-makers in B2B industries. In fact, 4 out of 5 users on LinkedIn “drive business decisions” — meaning you’re more likely to get your products in front of the eyes that matter most.
This social media platform is also immensely targeted, allowing BPMs on LinkedIn to get your materials seen by not only a large audience, but a qualified audience set by your standards.
Many may think of Facebook as a primarily B2C space as it pertains to business advertising, but its general user base still dwarfs LinkedIn’s at 2.8 billion users around the world. With that many users and the ability to highly target advertisements, it’s just good sense to promote on Facebook. Keep in mind, though, that its wider user base will require a slightly different tack, so be sure to adjust your ads for Facebook specifically.
Instagram is often viewed as a personal user-dominated space, but 71% of businesses use Instagram, and 33% of those are B2B. It only makes sense that BPMs, who promote highly visual products, would utilize a highly visual medium such as Instagram.
While LinkedIn has highly business-targeted opportunities, Instagram generates 20x more engagement than LinkedIn, making it great for raising brand awareness and serving visually stimulating ads.
Ask
It’s essential that building product manufacturers meet their audience where they are. If you’re unsure which social media platforms your target audience values most, ask them. Conduct market research into your ideal customers to understand what platforms will make sense for them, and utilize existing customers by surveying their social media preferences.
Social Media Techniques for Promoting Your Building Products
Once you’ve decided which social platforms to prioritize, it’s time to create a strategy for promoting your building materials.
Organic content
Producing and publishing organic content is an essential way to raise brand awareness in a cost-effective way. Organic content can include photos, videos, graphics, testimonials, blogs, and more. Authenticity is important to any audience, so real photos of your building materials in use will always perform better than stock imagery.
User-generated content
User-generated content, meaning content created and published originally by customers rather than businesses, has a 4.5% higher conversion rate than brand-generated content. To capitalize on this, encourage your customers to share their success with your products on their social media, which you can then share to your business accounts.
Paid ads
While organic and user-generated content drive brand awareness, paid social ads can drive new leads and conversions. Your target audience is slightly different from LinkedIn to Facebook to Instagram, so be sure to tweak your ads slightly to perform best for each audience segment and channel.
Your instinct might jump straight into paid ads, since they’re predominantly used to drive leads. However, it’s important to create a balanced strategy, as it can take dozens of touchpoints before a prospect decides to explore your business, and they can be easily frustrated by being flooded with ads.
Transform How You Promote Your Building Products
Building up a social media strategy to promote your building materials takes time to develop and perfect. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it process — be sure to continuously evaluate your performance across every platform and adjust your strategies accordingly. To learn more about the best strategies and solutions for selling building materials, book a demo with Concora today.