The digital shift has had a big effect on the way news and information is published and consumed in the construction industry. PR professionals and marketers need to understand how this impacts the way they communicate with their audiences and the media. Social media has increased the number of available communication channels and facilitated real time conversations between companies and customers. It has given construction companies and individuals the opportunity to become publishers.Read More
Posts By: Stuart Dinnie
How product manufacturers can make their email marketing more social
Email marketing remains one of the main communication mediums in the construction industry. Building product manufacturers use it to update their customers and prospects on new products, to promote exclusive discounts and discuss industry news. There are articles floating about saying that social media will ‘kill’ email but these forget the most important point; you need an email address to have a social media account in the first place! Email is not going away but the way it is used for marketing needs to adapt and align with the changing buying behaviour of specifiers and architects.
Social media should be seen as a partner and not as a threat to email marketing. Together they can strengthen your brand message, provide new communication channels and increase your exposure to existing and potential customers. Both email and social media aim to keep your construction products top of mind for architects and specifiers by communicating with them in a relevant and timely manner that is both testable and measurable. Social media is the new tool but does not work alone. It is part of your overall marketing mix, of which email plays a large role.
MDi TV Episode 2 – What are landing pages and what makes a good landing page?
This week’s Whiteboard Wednesday episode of MDi TV focuses on Landing Pages for websites and campaigns. Pritesh explains what elements make up a good landing page in order to convert as much traffic into leads or opportunities. Remember, if you want us to cover any topics or you have any questions then please do let us know. Enjoy!Read More
MDi TV Episode 1 – Optimising for Non-Brand Search Terms
Welcome to the first episode of our Whiteboard Wednesday videos series on the My Digital Insider TV channel. Our aim is to provide construction marketers with short videos focusing on individual areas of the digital marketing tool box such as search optimisation, social media, website design, email marketing, campaign planning, web analytics and measurement reporting and much much more. We will also aim to cover some industry events which may be coming up and try conduct some interviews at these events with key people within the industry.
More importantly, if you have any questions regarding anything to do with digital marketing which you would like us to answer in an episode of Whiteboard Wednesday then please feel free to drop us a line by email or tweet us @PauleyCreative and we’ll aim to provide you with the right information and guidance to ensure your online marketing campaigns achieve maximum performance.
Content writing tips for your construction products website
Writing for the web is a notably different skill to writing for print publications. It’s often a technique that is overlooked, but as your website becomes increasingly important as a business tool, it’s something that you should address if you’re keen to maintain a strong online presence and make certain you’re talking to the right audience.
To begin with you must make sure that your website is tailored to that proverbial ‘perfect potential client’ – and then that the content is correctly organised for ease of reading. Web users are spending significantly less time searching for, and viewing your website these days. It’s becoming increasingly important that you keep content easy to find, that you cover your calls to action in a clear yet striking way, and that your expertise is clear to see from just a glance at one or two pages. Knowing who you are writing for is crucial. A buyer would want short snappy copy highlighting product features and benefits, whereas an engineer may want more lengthy, detailed information and might expect to see an insightful, regularly updated blog.
Once you’ve reviewed your navigation and overall targeting, it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty.
What type of content marketer are you?
Producing, publishing and managing content used to be associated with other industries but is now an essential part of business. Any building product manufacturer that has a website and wants to increase their online visibility needs to take content marketing seriously. One of the main reasons architects and specifiers go online is to look for product information. The internet is full of useful content so there’s alot of competition from those construction companies who have already embarked on a content marketing strategy. Quality content in combination with SEO is what will get your website to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) for keywords associated with your products and services. Once prospects have found your site, you need to convert them into leads. Getting them to subscribe to your newsletter or enter their details to download your whitepaper is good for data capture which you can later follow up with an email lead nurturing campaign.
For all the steps outlined above you need to have quality content with which you can prove your expertise to your audience. Out-teaching your competition is how you will sustain a competitive advantage. Some companies employ content managers or copywriters who will write articles, blogposts, newsletters, whitepapers and other forms of content whilst other companies assign these tasks to current employees. Either way, effective content marketing requires a variety of skills and below is a list of 10 that I think are involved:
Ecobuild 2012… are you ready?
If we had access to the NHS statistics on blood pressure and stress within the construction industry, there would certainly be an Everest-sized spike in the chart for January and February every year, as the industry frantically tries to prepare for the biggest event in the calendar.
Unfortunately, what so few realise is that by the time you’re packing turkey curry into your lunchbox ready for your first day back in the New Year – you’ve missed the Ecobuild bus!Read More
Experienced PR Manager joins the Pauley Creative team
We are very happy to announce the arrival of the latest member of our talented construction marketing team. Helen Lawson joins us from Liz Male Consulting where she handled the public relations and communications for clients in the construction and sustainability sectors. She is a CIPR associate and has a wealth of both client and agency side experience. At Pauley Creative Helen manages all creative communications and public relations, both internally and for our awesome clients.
PR is an important part of the construction marketing mix, and one that is often misunderstood. Helen will be sharing some of her knowledge and expertise on this blog, which I am sure will be very valuable to our readers and subscribers. Her first blog post titled “Ecobuild 2012: Are you ready?” will be published tomorrow. We’re very excited and can’t wait to read it!
If you would like to know more about Helen, her new role and what she gets up to in her spare time please visit our ‘who we are’ page. It includes links to her various social media accounts where you can get in touch with her.
Calculating your website’s ‘share of search’ and prioritising your SEO
A common request we get from prospects/clients is “I want my building product website to be ranked on page 1 or at the top of Google for these search terms” and pulls out a piece of paper with 20 or so search phrases scribbled on it. My reply would always be “How do you know they are the search terms or keywords your prospects use?”
To help clients understand the impact of search engines on website performance, search traffic generation and implementing a search engine optimisation strategy we need to understand where they are now by benchmarking. I wrote in a previous post about the importance of benchmarking to help identify where improvements can be made and where additional efforts are required through controlled experiments (small changes but made often).
The benchmarking process involves gathering data from various analytical sources to help identify:
- What are my top 20 non-branded search terms? (non-branded = excluding company name and this is where your SEO should be focused)
- Where is my website currently ranking in Google for those non-branded search terms?
- How many visits have been generated to the website from those non-branded 20 search terms over a 6 month period?
- Approximately how many ‘exact’ searches are made in Google for those top non-branded 20 search terms over a 6 month period?
- What is my % share?
- Which search terms should I prioritise and optimise? (Note: This is the outcome, actions!)Read More
What is link building and how can I build more links to my website?
Construction marketers know that content is king, but also that it does not work alone. Search Engine Optimisation and building quality inbound links is vital for the spread of good content. Building links from other quality and authoritative websites to your website helps to increase the authority and importance of your website and thus has a great impact on your search engine rankings. Quality always reigns over quantity so a website with 50,000 poor quality links will rank lower and degrade the quality of the site than a website with 100 good quality links. Search engine rankings are affected by the quality of the content on your website as well as how many links it has from authoritative sites. Having links from sites that Google trusts, tells it that your website contains some useful and important content. However building these quality links is not a quick and easy process. It can be time consuming and can take some effort researching for quality sites to link from but the results are worth it because according to search engines, the more quality links you have to your website, the more visible your website will be within search engines resulting in more traffic to your website for you to then convert into leads.