Last week we hosted our very first digital marketing workshop for marketers within the construction industry. It was a huge success and we had delegates from all areas of the construction industry such as BAM, Longcross, RIBA, Make Architects, Morgan Sindall, Sika, Rehau and many others. It was great to meet everyone and we’re sure many went home with lots to think about.
The workshop was divided into 3 presentations. Nick spoke about the digital landscape and how to go about forming a digital marketing strategy, Ayaan then presented on social media marketing and how it can be used to increase brand awareness and generate leads for your construction business. Finally, Pritesh discussed the importance of measuring your marketing activities and how to go about optimising your website to increase conversions.
Questions
Delegates asked a number of questions but the majority revolved around how to benchmark current online marketing activities, how to develop a content strategy for different customer types, what the optimal blogging frequency was, how much time to spend on social media, what exactly you should be measuring and how to find the keywords people are using to find your website.
We have written some blog posts and articles covering some of the questions and issues raised in the workshop.
Importance of benchmarking – you need to know where you are now before making decisions for the future. How is your website performing? Is it converting leads? Can people find you in Google without typing in your company name, how many of your landing pages are indexed and what are your competitors doing? Carrying out a benchmarking audit can reveal what marketing activities are currently working for you and which are not.
Productivity and time management – this is a hiring issue and all boils down to trust. Social media is just another communication channel, like email, so you should be able to trust your employees to use it for those purposes and not to simply waste time. To make sure everyone knows what they should and should not be doing, develop a social media marketing strategy that illustrates clear goals and objectives. Thereafter set up a social media policy so all employees know their boundaries and assign appropriate roles and responsibilities.
Measure what matters – marketers need to stop reporting ‘nice to knows‘ such as visitors and instead report the ‘must knows‘ such as bounce rate and lead conversion rate.It’s vital to create goals for your website in analytics. What do you want people to do on your site? Should they fill out your contact form, download a brochure or specification guide, sign up to your blog or newsletter? You need to know this first so you can measure conversions. This will tell you how your website is performing. Implementing thank you pages and confirmation pages are the best way to measure these goals. How to track and measure all your online marketing activities is explained in our MDI article – ‘measuring marketing performance.’
Coming soon to Manchester
If you were not able to attend this event, do not worry we are planning on hosting a similar workshop in Manchester later in the year. If you are interested, keep an eye on this website which we will update once a location and date has been confirmed. We will also spread the news through various other online channels. If you would like to register your interest beforehand just give us a call on 01908 671 707.
If you have any questions please leave us a comment below. In the meantime, here are a few pictures of the event.
