Posts By: Stuart Dinnie

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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Measuring Brand Awareness for Construction Product Manufacturers

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Using Google Analytics to measure the performance of your website can reveal so many useful insights and give you some really good actionable outcomes. At Pauley Creative, prior to doing any form of online marketing we carry out an extensive website technical audit which includes a full Google Analytics audit & analysis so that we can recommend actions, activities and projects based on data, and data which actually means something and can be benchmarked and measured against. It’s all well and good saying “Visits to our website increased by 130%” but what if I told you that 90% of those visitors stayed on your website between 1 second and 10 seconds? Not so successful now huh?

This is where Advanced Segments in Google Analytics can really help you understand and breakdown those larger numbers into more smaller, more meaningful numbers. Firstly, Google Analytics already comes with some pre-defined advanced segments for you to choose from. These are great but they are basic segments such as ‘search traffic’ which will display all the stats only for those who came to your website from a search engine or ‘mobile visits’ or ‘non-bounce visits’. However, Google Analytics does allow you to create your own segments based on the type of website you have and the information you want to extract from the analytics software.Read More

The SEO benefits of using Pinterest

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Last week I wrote about the growth of Pinterest and how it can be used by businesses in the construction industry. The article proved to be very popular so I decided to approach it from another angle and specifically look at the SEO benefits. If you decide to create an account and start using Pinterest, it’s also a good idea to add Pinterest buttons to your website (yes, ANOTHER button). Since social signals are becoming increasingly important for ranking positions, encouraging your audience to pin and share your images/videos can only help increase your online visibility. To add these buttons to your site visit: http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/

1. Driving traffic

The main reason Pinterest has been making headlines over the last few weeks is because of the vast amounts of traffic it’s driving. Pinterest can bring new visitors to your site that might not have come across you or your products and services before. At the moment, I don’t think much of that traffic is targeted or quality traffic but this might change as Pinterest comes out of beta and more people from your target audience group sign up. Below you can see that within about a week, Pinterest is already in the top 5 traffic referring sources to our site.

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What is greenwash and why will it affect your construction business?

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Post updated in November 2015.

Since this post was first written in 2012, CAPS [the Committee of Advertising Practice] have published new information on ‘Green claims in Advertising‘ which is well worth getting familiar with.

The UK market place is now flooded with products and services shouting about their ‘green’ credentials. There are now over 73% more ‘green’ marketed products in the UK market place today, than at the end of 2009.Read More

Ideas, hints and tips for your Ecobuild 2012 marketing plan

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We have taken the Ecobuild award criteria and expanded on some of the points to give you an insight into how we’ll be evaluating use of integrated digital marketing at the show.

Strength and breadth of digital marketing used in the approach to the show

  • How many social/digital channels are being used to promote your presence at the event?
  • Is the messaging consistent and regular?
  • Does your website support your Ecobuild campaign eg. do you have a separate landing page or area that you’re directing specific Ecobuild traffic to?

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How to make the most of your digital marketing at Ecobuild 2012

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Finalised your marketing for Ecobuild yet? Have you considered how you’ll maximise your presence at the show, collect qualified business leads, and measure your activities afterwards? We’re aware of just how frantic and fretful the approach to a big show can be, and often planning marketing activities at the show takes a back burner.

Below are a few straightforward ways you can make better use of your digital marketing toolkit at Ecobuild. If you would also like to enter our ‘best use of digital marketing award‘ then tweet @PauleyCreative with the hashtag #digibuild. For more information on the award criteria please see our award blog post.

Don’t worry we’re not going to bamboozle you with weird or wonderful technologies – hopefully these are all mediums you’ll be familiar with, if not engaging in already; we’re simply hoping to make your digital marketing tactics work harder for your business objectives.

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MDi TV Episode 13 – A brief introduction to Pinterest

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Welcome to this week’s episode of MDi TV. Ayaan gives a quick overview of Pinterest and describes how this social platform can be used by businesses within the construction industry. Earlier this week we also published a blog post with a case study on how McKay flooring are already using Pinterest, and this episode takes a closer look at their profile once again.

Hope you enjoy the episode and if you have any further questions (or would like an invite to join Pinterest) then please tweet us @PauleyCreative.

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Award: best use of digital marketing by exhibitors at Ecobuild

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This year we’re running a competition to celebrate the best examples of digital marketing at Ecobuild 2012.

Exhibitors will be judged based on their use of digital marketing in the run up to the show, activities and promotion at the show and their overall integration with PR and other forms of marketing.

Award criteria

This award will recognise innovation, integration and digital marketing successes at Ecobuild. The Pauley Creative team are judging entries based on the following criteria:

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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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How a tile specialist is using social media to share advice and build customer relationships

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This is the fourth blog post in our interview series that investigates how different companies within the UK construction sector are using social media for their business. Karen joins me from Reed Harris, a specialist tile importer, to discuss how Twitter and blogging have helped them connect with architects, interior designers and other construction professionals from all over the UK. I personally met Karen on Twitter when she joined over a year ago and then had the pleasure of meeting her face to face at Ecobuild last year.

I am also a big fan of her blog which is full of useful design information and inspiration. If you would like to know more about their fabulous tiles then download the Reed Harris tile guide which gives an overview of the methods and materials used in their successful projects.

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