The broad and varied requirements of a construction product manufacturer can be challenging.
This post will help you create a team to deliver on the wide range of marketing support required, from BBA’s certificates to content marketing campaigns.
Although you may agree that it would be helpful, this post doesn’t involve requesting more people in the marketing department.
It’s about making the most of the skills and resource you have around you to create a marketing team that combines the knowledge of product, technical and sales.
And adding in resource where you need it to define and deliver the marketing activity.
It also allows for manufacturers that don’t yet have a dedicated marketing team.
It’s about reviewing all actions that fall – in one way or another – into ‘marketing’.
The marketing requirements for a construction product manufacturer are much greater than just delivering brochures, events and sales tools.
This document reviews the responsibility of the tasks undertaken by a construction marketing team. For example, it may be the technical team that works to achieve a BBA certificate…
Who proof reads and signs off the certificate?
Who arranges print and manages stock levels?
Who ensures the correct BBA certificate is uploaded to the website without impacting site structure and SEO?
This spreadsheet covers as many of the typical tasks carried out by the marketing function of a construction product manufacturer as we can think of.
Obviously we’d like it to be as concise as possible so if there are any areas we’ve missed do let us know and we’ll update our document.
Here it is, download it at will… Pauley Creative Marketing Support Structure Spreadsheet (for info, its a zip file, so you’ll have to unzip it once downloaded)
This ‘simple spreadsheet to organise your marketing activities’ also combines elements of project management responsibility as used in a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix too, just to make HR feel like you really know what you’re doing!
The difference with this document is that it works specifically for the structure of a construction product manufacturer.
So how does this tool work?
Phase One – identify which of the areas belong to which job function
(At this stage don’t worry about the who – that’s for Phase Two)
… these are typically covered by the following:
- Technical
- Sales
- Product
- Marketing
- Admin
- IT
For example:
The two examples above (product specific accreditations and CPD) are areas that provide a good example of where other elements of the business will be required, such as technical, sales or IT.
Complete phase one for the complete workbook. Don’t think too hard about it at this stage. It will probably look something like this section…
So now you have a department or job function highlighted for all of the tasks you need to do, you can go onto Phase Two.
Phase Two – define who will carry out the activity
You know where the job functions are; now you have to identify who currently does things.
It’s important to remember that the responsibility may not always be internal team members as the example below shows.
Put question marks where you do not have cover and add in any agency or external support where you already have this in place.
In this example we have marketing lead for all but ideally break it down to who exactly performs the function. Job title is best as this keeps the document current even through staff changes, but name or initials could work too; it doesn’t really matter as long as you can easily identify the individual responsible.
Phase Three – Gap Analysis
Now you can analyse your gaps and look at where you need support.
It could be for the strategic and planning elements of marketing. Support could be for PR and content. In my experience it will almost certainly be at measurement stage or, it could be for larger project based tasks.
These larger tasks are not covered in the overall tasks required of a construction product manufacturer.
The list would be far longer than it already is, the important point is that all tasks, regardless of size should be easy to put into the right section and define responsibility.
Ecobuild, for example, would go into events; a new website into the current web responsibility; a content campaign is likely to fit into the structure of technical content and direct marketing combined.
So what next?
Use your analysis above to look at what you do and where you need support. Then you need to work out how to get that support.
Here are some questions from a previous blog post ‘What is Digital Marketing and how do I choose the right agency’.
Image taken from blog post
So when you’re ready you can begin – with a little help from our simple spreadsheet to organise your marketing activities.
Download it here… Pauley Creative Marketing Support Structure Spreadsheet
We hope you enjoyed the process; if nothing else having completed Phase Two you’ll feel really great about the huge amount of activity that takes place in the world of a construction product marketer.
To build on this, check out our next post for choosing the right marketing partners.
