Posts Categorized: Building Product Manufacturers

What if your key audience on Twitter use it the most after 7pm? Who’s at work at 7pm?

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So you have identified the need for your company to be on Twitter and will be at an advantage over competitors if you jump onto Twitter before they do. Let’s assume you have done your homework and identified that there is a large audience, one which you want to communicate with, already on Twitter and seem to be quite active. Let’s also assume that you have taken the necessary steps to give the control of the corporate Twitter account to the right person within the business. We’re not talking about personal accounts or profiles here, we’re talking about company accounts and profiles.

Here’s the big one.

What if your key audience is most active on Twitter, and most likely to be responsive to your communication, after 7pm!Read More

What makes a good construction products landing page?

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When it comes to designing websites you have to understand and make note of how people interact and travel through your website (The user journey). Not all of your website visitors will enter via your homepage and therefore the messages on homepage such as what you do, your positioning statement. your most popular products etc have been completely missed. The page a visitor lands on first is therefore the landing page. A well optimised website will encourage visitors to land on pages which are relevant to their search terms and avoid the need to have to enter via the homepage and then make the visitor work hard to find the relevant content.

If you think about, this means every page on your website is essentially a landing page. But are you treating it as one?Read More

Benchmarking Website Performance

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As a follow on from the popular post ‘5 questions to ask before redesigning your construction company website‘, over the coming weeks and months I’ll be sharing the phases and processes that we take our clients through to deliver their engaging and measurable online experiences.

Looking at benchmarking and auditing to implementation; building the website to driving new traffic and finally, keeping loyal visitors happy and turning them into brand advocates and product referrers.

We’ll explore the challenges facing today’s marketers. Delivering a website that not only qualifies new leads quickly, but builds confidence and credibility encouraging prospects to buy or specify your products over the competition’s.

This post on ‘Benchmarking Website Performance’ is part 1 of our series of posts that highlights how we get the very best results from the web-build projects we undertake.Read More

What is BES 6001, do your building products meet the grade and more importantly are you telling your customers?

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BES 6001 is part of the governments drive to ensure a building product manufacturers’ sustainability claims are proven and that their materials have been resourced responsibly.

The standard describes a framework for the organisational governance, supply chain management and environmental and social aspects that must be addressed in order to ensure the responsible sourcing of construction products.

In reality certification for BES 6001 ensures a manufacturers credibility is safe guarded thus providing the reassurance specifiers, contractors and building owners rely on when meeting the governments requirements for sustainable development.Read More

Guest Post: BIM. Rubbish In, Rubbish Out!

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We’ve covered BIM in a couple of blog posts over the last few months, no doubt it is still and will be a big talking point for a long time to come. As a digital marketing agency we are still learning about the subject ourselves. So, for this particular post we asked the legendary social networker who many of your will know through Twitter, Derek Mynott, Director of Driver Project Services to give his thoughts on BIM particularly from a Quantity Surveyor point of view.

Derek, it’s over to you.

BIM…..rubbish in…..rubbish out!Read More

What type of Architect are you marketing to? Part 3 of 3

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Over the previous two days I’ve introduced you to two types of Architects you could be marketing to. Firstly there is John, the traditionalist, whose preferred communication method is phone and print. Then yesterday you met Geoff, the transitionalist, who uses a ‘mash-up’ of communication channels to obtain information about your company and products and is slowly moving towards a fully paperless office and managing to get online a little more than he did 5 years ago. How will you market to these personas? Do you even know what type of Architects you are marketing to?

Let’s meet our final character.

The Transformationalist: Joanne

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What type of Architect are you marketing to? Part 2 of 3

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Yesterday you met John, the 56 year old Architect. He is the traditionalist who loves to read material and his preferred choice of communication channels is print. John is your ideal Architect who hopes you don’t spend more money on mobile apps, online advertising to promote a new product, SEO to get the right product in front of him, microsites for him to visit, blogging with product content and social media to inform of an upcoming event. It just doesn’t appeal to him and nor does it add any value to him. In other words ‘don’t try to get him online’ if you are looking to strengthen your relationship and inform him of company info or product related information.

Let’s meet our second character.

The Transitionalist: Geoff

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What type of Architect are you marketing to? Part 1 of 3

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It’s a good question huh? Do you really know what type of Architect or Specifier you are marketing to and how they consume information? I recently read a fantastic blog post written by a marketing and business consultant a few weeks back. He works with printed catalogue mail order companies to help them increase sales and profits in a slow dying sector (dying to online by the way), but most importantly, understanding the changing landscape into how specifiers specify and what type of information they require. This then got me thinking about the types of Architects building product marketers are marketing to. So in this case, how Architects and Specifiers source, consume information and refer business your way. How effective is your marketing strategy at targeting the right Architect in the right way? Are you marketing by channel or type of customer? Is the business adapting to the various types of customers you may have?Read More

Infographic: Results of the national BIM survey 2012

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To introduce our latest infographic, we have asked Martin Brown, an improvement advocate and consultant for the built environment at Fairsnape, to give us a bit of an overview on BIM and how he sees it working within the built environment. Many of our readers might already know of Martin, but for those who don’t, he is a co-founder of be2camp, tweets as @fairsnape and blogs at fairsnape.wordpress.com. Martin is also a Constructing Excellence Collaborative Working Champion and regular contributor to the Guardian Sustainability Business, Built Environment Hub.

What is BIM?

There are many definitions of BIM, but unfortunately many are wrapped in technical, project management or design terminology. We can understand and describe BIM as “the total and virtual modelling of all aspects of a project prior to construction, during construction and in use.” A BIM would typically model all data relating to, for eg, design scenarios, costings, build ability and clash detection, scheduling and procurement, sustainability impact, life cycle and facilities management factors as well as in use predictions. Championed by the Government, milestones are set for achieving increasingly mature levels of BIM. The first being level 2 by 2016.

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Case study: How a UK flooring company is using Pinterest

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Over the last few weeks I have heard (and read) alot about Pinterest which is making headlines for a variety of reasons. Pinterest can be described as a social bulletin board and image-sharing site that allows users to ‘pin’ images and videos onto their own, or other people’s, pinboards. Considering that it is still an invite only platform, it has seen tremendous growth over the last two months.

According to research company Shareaholic, Pinterest already has over 4.9 million users and drove more referral traffic in the last two months than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined and generates over 15 billion page views a month.

The big question many of you are asking is whether this platform has any business use, especially for product manufacturers within the construction industry. My initial answer to this would be that it has great potential. Since our industry is very visual, especially when marketing to architects, who want to see the aesthetics of your products and see them in situ. What better way of doing this than sharing lots of images of how it has been used in recent building projects? There are also other business reasons to use this image based network, some of which I have listed below:

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