Posts By: Stuart Dinnie

Which building product manufacturers have the strongest brands?

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Following on from our recent blog post ‘building strong brands: essential for construction companies’, discussing what a brand is, what makes a strong brand and why branding is important even in the construction industry, some research has been published re-confirming this need for brand building.

Survey says….

We came across this article in Building Products Magazine today, who published some interesting findings from a survey conducted by Arch-Vision (research hasn’t been published on their website yet). It revealed that UK architects list Trespa and Kingspan as the two strongest building material product brands. The research is conducted quarterly and includes the opinions of over 1200 architects across Europe. They were asked to mention two brands they thought were the strongest in building materials such as concrete, bricks, aluminium systems, roofing material, construction floors amongst others. In the UK, the top 5 companies mentioned were Kingspan (40%), Trespa (15%), VELUX (8%), Schüco (7%) and Otis (6%).

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Measure what matters with Google Analytics

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In this digital world we are overwhelmed with large amounts of data, some of it useful and some not so much. The big problem with data is that many people do not know what to look for. Insights can only be developed when data is properly analysed against business goals and objectives. Why are you wasting time looking at reports if you have nothing to compare them to or benchmark them against? How will you know if you are succeeding? Reporting just website views or page clicks doesn’t tell you anything about how it’s helping to grow the business and increase profits. Marketers need to work harder at reporting outcomes not just observations.Read More

Internet World 2011 – Summary of the Social Media Seminars

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Yesterday I took a trip to Internet World at Earl’s Court in London. It’s a leading digital marketing and social media event with hundreds of companies exhibiting their latest products and software solutions. Thousands of visitors attend the 3 day event to learn about the latest developments in social media strategy, ecommerce, online marketing, content management and analytics, amongst many others.There were some speakers from the big names in the industry such as Google, Facebook, Ogilvy and E-bay but you had to pay to attend most of those.

I chose to go for the cheap route and queue up for the free seminars that were available in the different seminar theatres. The main ones I was interested in was ‘The Future of Social Media‘, ‘Digital & Mobile Marketing‘ and ‘Content Management‘. There were a wide range of topics and sometimes it was difficult to chose which ones to go to. However, the fact that you had to queue for about 20 minutes to get into every seminar meant that the day passed pretty quickly without being able to attend as many sessions as I would have liked. Read More

Don’t just focus solely on rankings, focus on quality and conversions

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When developing an SEO (search engine opimisation) strategy it is quite easy to focus all of your efforts solely on improving rankings alone. “I want to be #1 or #2 and that is it!”

Marketers want their websites to rank either #1 or #2 for relevant search terms to their business and oust their competition from the dizzy heights of being listed number one in Google, but with an improvement in rankings also comes additional traffic.

Why do you want to add more traffic to the top of the funnel when your website can’t convert the hundred or so visitors it currently attracts?

If your current website is failing to convert any of its traffic into some sort of measurable result (i.e. download, subscription, registration, request) then your website needs fixing first before you add any more traffic top the top of the funnel. Identify poor performing pages with high exit rates and bounce rates, test and refine the content and the design. Always ensure your pages have clear calls to action pointing visitors towards completing those goals. Read More

Importance of benchmarking before adding social media to your mix

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So you have decided that you are going to add social media to your marketing mix. You have decided that you are going to launch a corporate blog, start a company Twitter profile, create and join a few LinkedIn groups and then have a lovely looking Facebook page with all your corporate info on. Heck, you might even re-design your website whilst your at it right?

But have you benchmarked your existing online and offline marketing activities before you jump onto the social media bandwagon? Do you know how your current marketing activities are performing in order to identify success later on? In fact, what will your success look like in 12 months time?

Benchmarking is crucial

Conducting a benchmarking audit is crucial for any marketing department before starting on long term commitments like social media marketing. Knowing how your website is performing and its conversion rates, knowing which brochures are most downloaded or requested, knowing how many times your company has been mentioned online, finding out how many pages in your website are indexed and where they rank in Google and knowing how visitors use your website are all ‘must knows’ in order to be able to measure any improvement over time. Read More

Analysing the impact of our Social Media E-book

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UPDATE (02/06/11): We are now approaching nearly 400 downloads since the launch of the ebook. Thank you to everyone who has downloaded the ebook.

It’s been over a week since we launched our Guide to Social Media Marketing for Construction Marketers ebook and thought it would be good to show the results we achieved from publishing this ebook. The total number of downloads stands at a whopping 217!!!! Thank you to everyone who has downloaded and shared the ebook with others.

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Top 100 influential tweeters in the UK built environment & construction industry

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So the long anticipated wait for the tCn top 100 influential tweeters in the built environment has been published on Construction News today. We are very chuffed to be ranked 30th in the list, and be one of the only agencies who ‘made the cut’. A big well done and congratulations to everyone. Happy tweeting!

You can view the list here: http://www.peerindex.net/tcntweets/group/tcntop100

 

Don’t blame the technology: Social media marketing requires a solid strategy

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Some construction professionals still view social media as a waste of time and cannot see the benefits it can have to their business. Sure, social media takes up a significant amount of time and effort but what marketing doesn’t? How much time do you spend in meetings discussing how to raise your brand awareness, how to plan and execute the next product launch, where to place your next ad and how much of your budget will be allocated to all these different activities? Hours? Days? Even weeks?!

Social media is simply another channel that can help communicate, listen, engage, react and educate your target audience. Time is only wasted on social media if you have not developed a solid social media strategy and set clear objectives. If you are scared your employees will waste time online instead of using it to productively grow your online community and build up your reputation – then do not blame the technology, blame the internal education and culture. Inspired and motivated employees will gladly take up the job to use social media to promote and strengthen your brand online. This quote from Mitch Joel explains the point I am making:

“We’re always quick to blame the technology and not the people. I always argue that those who are not wasting their time on YouTube (because a company has blocked it) have probably figured out something else to do to waste their time (hint: they’re not happy and energized to be doing their jobs … it’s not YouTube).”

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