More than ever, marketers must track and cultivate leads to increase sales.
Recently BtoB Magazine wrote an article entitled, “Lead Generation Demands Grow,” that discussed the recent increase in tracking leads, measuring responses and utilizing analytics. This is my take on how this new demand has changed marketing’s role.
While marketing’s role has always been to create interest and provide leads for the sales department, today’s economy paired with new technology and tracking mechanisms, make it more important than ever to be able to show where leads come from. Building product CMOs must utilize their shrinking resources to ensure they can generate leads.
Strong Content Drives Engagement
- Building product marketers should create their own content to encourage prospect engagement through education and entertainment.
- CMOs must ensure any content published is high quality and provides tangible benefits to their customers throughout the channel – bad content will reflect poorly on the company.
- Use good content to create and track leads and make sure none of them fall out of the pipeline – every lead is important.
- Not only will good content make you valuable to your prospects, but they are more likely to share it with others.
Automate Your Existing Processes
- Automation can help track and cultivate leads. Utilize tracking capabilities, lead scoring models and social sharing options to monitor your leads.
- Building product companies can often capture leads by creating online forms, utilizing promotions where prospects must provide their information for a chance to win or through social media.
Utilize New Technology to Generate Leads
- Think beyond the traditional means of communicating with your customers. Look at implementing a social media strategy that includes capturing and working leads.
- While many building product companies are just starting to explore social media, it can be a great fit for reaching your targets. Explore what your competitors are doing and determine how social media can work with your overall strategy.
Give Prospects and Customers What they Want
- Ensure your processes have a personal touch. You know your customers – make sure you talk to them in their language and customize content where possible.
- Focus on inbound channels, rather than cold calling activity. Give your time and attention to warmer leads and those prospects who have shown interest in your product.
Foster Leads into Customers
- Building product CMOs know better than anyone that sales and marketing must work together hand in hand. Marketing creates leads, but it’s up to their sales department to cultivate these leads and turn prospects into customers.
Sources
Additional Articles
- How Building Product Marketers Can Target the Renter’s Market
- Turns Out Building-Product Sales Really Are A Laughing Matter
- Debt and Other Economic Factors Affecting the Building Product Industry
- How Building Product Marketers can Define their Customers in 6 Steps
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Curious, how you guys see BIM playing a role in the lead generation for for Building Products?
By itself, BIM and the associated software doesn’t directly drive leads. However, BIM provides greater collaboration, and thus interaction between most stages of the supply chain, so more opportunities to dialogue about specs and experiences (driving/reinforcing preference).
It also allows for improved marketing by allowing the exposition and touring of structures well before ground is ever broken, making presentations more relevant and websites more engaging.
Each BIM software product has default building products spec’d into it—ABC windows, XYZ fasteners, etc.—that will make it more difficult (i.e., time-consuming and troublesome) to select different products than those already entered as the default. That puts more power in the hands of architects/designers/engineers to more effectively select products that were once clumped as “or equivalent” on 2D designs.
Elton