3 Manufacturing Marketing Strategies That Drive Sales

by Mackenzie | Sep 15, 2020 | Inbound Marketing, Manufacturer Marketing

3 Manufacturing Marketing Strategies That Drive Sales

Quality manufacturing marketing strategies can be a struggle to find and implement. For many manufacturing companies, marketing is only recently necessary. In decades past, you probably relied primarily on word-of-mouth referrals, and for the most part, you still do today. The problem is that fewer of your ideal buyers are relying solely on word-of-mouth referrals.

Maybe you’ve recognized that you need to grow your position and presence in your market. Maybe you’ve noticed that competitors have a more prominent digital presence than you.

Whatever the reason, there are a range of manufacturing marketing strategies you can use to draw in more of the right leads and shorten the sales cycle. If you’re looking for ways to grow your manufacturing company, these three manufacturing marketing strategies are proven to help you close more of the right deals, faster. Let’s take a look.

3 Manufacturing Marketing Strategies That Drive Sales

Align Sales and Marketing Teams
Account-Based Marketing
Inbound Marketing for Manufacturers

01. Align Sales and Marketing Teams

Marketing isn’t a new concept for most manufacturers, but it does tend to be a tricky one. Many of the manufacturers we’ve worked with here at Evenbound either:

Don’t have a marketing team. They have a few sales people who take the lead on some marketing initiatives, like developing mailers, brochures, or updating the website, but they don’t have a dedicated team of marketers supporting the manufacturing company.

Have a marketing team that functions separately from the rest of the company. Marketing has its own department that doesn’t often interact with sales reps, product engineers, and more.

Both of these strategies are understandable — in the past they’ve worked well. But neither strategy is winning you sales today.

Today, any consumer, including the buyers and purchasers your manufacturing company so often sells to, is inundated with marketing and sales messaging. That means it’s more important than ever for you to absolutely nail any marketing message that’s going out into the world.

Sales and marketing alignment is the first step to setting your manufacturing company up for marketing that drives sales.

Since we have so much content out there already, I won’t go too far into it. When you’re on board, check out some of these other blogs we’ve got up on the site:

I will mention a few key points though.

Sales and Marketing Alignment: Why it Works for Manufacturers

Sales and marketing alignment isn’t some huge, scary thing. It’s just getting your marketing and sales team in the same room, so they can share their separate experiences and expertise with the other team.

When your sales and marketing teams are in the same room they can decide together:

Who to market to
What a good lead looks like
The best methods to draw those great leads in
How to work together to nurture and close those ideal leads

With both teams on the same page, your marketing and sales teams will spend less time working leads and prospects that aren't a good fit for your manufacturing company, and more time closing the deals you actually want. Click To Tweet

Sales and marketing alignment is a manufacturing marketing strategy guaranteed to boost sales.

When you have a dedicated marketing team who understands what leads are the most attractive to your sales team, they can implement manufacturing marketing tactics and strategies that work to pull that ideal lead in.

02. Account-Based Marketing

When it comes to manufacturer marketing, it’s not uncommon to market to a small pool of companies. We often find our industrial manufacturing clients know exactly who they want to sell to. Especially if you’re selling a niche product for a specific market, you likely already know the key industry players.

That’s why Account-Based Marketing is such a useful manufacturing marketing strategy.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a hyper-specific marketing strategy that focuses on targeting marketing efforts to key accounts, rather than marketing to a large group of potential prospects or to a more general industry. Check out this handy ABM diagram from the team at Intercom for a visual:

When you use account-based marketing as a manufacturing marketing strategy, you do the work of identifying key companies and accounts that you know would be a great fit for your product or service.

Then, your marketing team gets to work developing highly-targeted marketing content that’s addressed to the five or six stakeholders at that company. These are the people who are most likely to make the decision to go with your product over a competitor’s.

Why is Account-Based Marketing An Ideal Manufacturing Marketing Strategy?

While ABM doesn’t work for everyone, it’s a great manufacturing marketing strategy, especially for heavy industrial manufacturers who know exactly where they want their products placed. The benefit for companies like this is that you’re putting all of your marketing efforts into accounts that you know can deliver significant returns. When you close, ROI is known and significant.

The benefit of ABM for manufacturers is that you’re only spending time and resources on the accounts you know can convert and deliver ROI for your company.

03. Inbound Marketing for Manufacturers

The third manufacturing marketing strategy here won’t come as much of a surprise if you’re familiar with the Evenbound team.

We’re all about inbound marketing, especially for manufacturers. Why?

Inbound marketing is a smart, cost-effective, and proven manufacturing marketing strategy.

If you’re implementing the other two manufacturing marketing strategies mentioned earlier, inbound marketing is only more effective.

When your sales and marketing teams are aligned, and you have a clear picture of who exactly you want to market to, inbound marketing is a powerful tool for manufacturers.

How Does Inbound Marketing Pair with ABM & Sales and Marketing Alignment?

Inbound marketing works to draw in the right, qualified leads to your website. By developing and putting out content that your ideal buyers are searching for, you pull them into your site in a way that’s helpful, rather than disruptive. Let’s take a look at how HubSpot visualizes inbound marketing:

For more information about HubSpot’s Flywheel, check out our blog: Understanding the HubSpot Flywheel.

When you become a part of your lead’s researching phase, you can then nurture that lead with more content and marketing and sales contact that helps them through their buyer’s journey.

Then, when that lead is ready to make a purchasing decision, you’re top of mind. If you’ve been nurturing that lead, answering their questions, and providing the resources they need to make the right decision for their company, they’ll choose to buy from you.

Does Inbound Marketing Actually Work for Manufacturers?

So that was a lot of information, but not a lot of data. Let’s look at some numbers to see if inbound marketing actually does work for manufacturers.

This graph shows the number of sessions of a company that sells a very niche industrial manufacturing product.

Results-session-increase-from-inbound-marketing

As the Evenbound team began to publish content and optimize the client’s website for search engines, you can see that their sessions — or the number of people coming to their website — began to rise. From October to March, that traffic more than doubled.

Since we’re optimizing their site for keywords that are relevant to that manufacturing client’s ideal buyer, that increase in sessions represents a significant increase in the number of qualified leads making it to that client’s site.

With more qualified leads coming to them, that client can now nurture those leads with email marketing, retargeting, and personalized sales interactions, to close more of the right deals, faster.

I get it, that’s just one example. If you’re not sure these manufacturing marketing strategies really work, take a look at our previous work. We have a range of case studies that showcase exactly what we’ve done to deliver quality results for manufacturers. All of our case studies are ungated and free for you to look at whenever is convenient for you.

I recommend this one as a starting point: Implementing HubSpot Sales to Shorten One Industrial Service Provider’s Sales Cycle

But you can also check out this one and many others on Our Work page.

And if you have any questions about implementing marketing strategies like Account-Based Marketing or Inbound Marketing to drive sales for your manufacturing company, just give us a shout. We are pros at marketing industrial manufacturers, and we’d be more than happy to help you too.

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Evenbound Becomes A Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner

by Mackenzie | Sep 10, 2020 | Evenbound, Hubspot

Evenbound Becomes A Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner

Grand Rapids, Mich. — Today, Evenbound announced that it has reached the Platinum level of HubSpot’s Solutions Partner Program. HubSpot, a leading growth platform, works hand-in-hand with partner experts to grow their businesses through marketing and sales software, services, and support. This upgrade to Evenbound’s Solutions Partner status comes in spite of a shaky market amid a global pandemic.

“Our growth journey has been exciting and this step is just another indicator that we’re on the right path. Climbing to Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner is particularly notable while in the middle of a global pandemic. It’s challenging out there, but we’re finding a way. That’s what great teams do, they find a way.”

John Heritage – President, Evenbound

The Solutions Partner Program is a global community that believes putting customers first is the key to growth, and enables its members to offer a wide breadth of more sophisticated solutions across the entire customer experience.

“Since I began working with the Evenbound team two years ago, I’ve been consistently impressed by their deep understanding of results-driven strategy & execution, commitment to industry & product mastery, and perhaps most importantly, their customer-first approach to everything they do. I couldn’t be prouder to celebrate this milestone and look forward to seeing them continue to grow their agency and partnership for years to come.”

Suzana Mihajlica – HubSpot Senior Channel Consultant

A full-service digital marketing and growth agency, Evenbound works with a variety of clients in B2B and B2C industries to deliver qualified traffic and leads that support long-term growth. HubSpot is a significant component of the agency’s service, and they support clients on the platform with customized onboarding, personalized marketing training and sales enablement solutions. Notable milestones and achievements include:

25 clients supported on the HubSpot platform.

Winner of HubSpot’s 2020-Q1 Grow Better Sales Impact Award.

Increased workforce headcount by 35% during Covid-19 pandemic.

About Evenbound

Evenbound is a full-service digital marketing and growth agency and a HubSpot Platinum Partner Agency. They use a variety of proven digital marketing tactics like content marketing, email marketing, inbound marketing, paid search advertising, and more to deliver their clients the qualified traffic and leads they need for serious growth. The Evenbound office is located at 41 Washington Ave, Suite #390 in Grand Haven, MI.

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Google Ads Benchmarks By Industry

by Mackenzie | Sep 8, 2020 | Google Updates, Pay Per Click

Google Ads Benchmarks By Industry

If you’re new to Google Ads, and even if you’re old-hat, it can feel like a guessing game.

Is this a good click through rate? Am I spending too much? Am I spending enough? What even is a good conversion rate?

As Google Ads fanatics ourselves, we get it.

It’s frustrating trying to estimate what a good Google Ad campaign looks like, especially if you’re new to ads, or if you’re working in an industry where it’s hard to find good data.

If you’re tired of guesstimating what a good outbound marketing ad campaign looks like, the PPC experts here at Evenbound are here to help. We’ve gone ahead and compiled data from our quality Google Ad campaigns, and segmented it by industry so you can take a look at live Google Ads data from a real digital marketing company that works with clients in your industry every day.

We’ve compiled Google Ads benchmarks for the following four industries:

Manufacturing & Industrial
Real Estate & Home Building
SMBs – Small to Mid Sized Businesses
Construction

All four of these industries have their own quirks when it comes to Google Ads. This data should help you figure out how your ad campaigns are measuring up to other quality campaigns in your industry.

Are you spending enough?

How much should you be paying for a conversion?

Let’s find out.

Average Monthly Google Ad Spend by Industry

Before you can accurately assess your success against these benchmarks, it’s important to understand how your spend plays into your results. Underfunding Google Ad campaigns can cut your results short, as your campaigns run out too early to produce real results.

On the other hand, overspending on a poorly targeted Google Ad campaign can be just as problematic. You’re spending a lot of money to see very limited results.

So, how much should you be spending? Here’s a look at our Google Ads benchmarks for average monthly spend by industry.

As you can see, Manufacturing & Industrial clients spend the most on Google Ads, with a total average of $7,689 per month. This makes sense, as most manufacturing companies are selling products at a high price point. Their returns are much larger, so it’s reasonable to put a bit more behind their ad campaigns.

Real Estate & Home Builders are next with a $4,237 average monthly spend. Real estate is notoriously competitive, so again, it makes sense that their spend is slightly higher than SMBs and Construction Companies, which follow up with $4,082 and $3,891 per month, respectively.

Average Google Ad Cost-Per-Click by Industry

Now that you have a better idea of how much to spend overall, let’s look at cost per click. How much are you paying for each person who clicks on an ad? Here are the benchmarks:

Real Estate & Home Builders are seeing the highest cost per click rate here at $5.85. Given the industry’s competition, this makes sense. Construction Companies, many of whom target similar audiences as the real estate industry, also have a higher cost per click at $4.82.

SMBs are slightly lower with an average CPC of $4.04.

The surprising industry here is Manufacturing & Industrial. At just $2.96, their average CPC is much lower than the other three industries.

Average Google Ads Conversion Rate by Industry

Conversion rate (CVR) is the average number of conversions per ad interaction, shown as a percentage. Of all of the people who see and interact with your ads, what percentage of them convert on that ad? Here’s a look at the CVR benchmarks by industry.

Construction Companies blew us away with an amazing 5.13% conversion rate.

Real Estate & Home Builders were next with 3.57%.

SMBs had an average conversion rate of 2.52%.

And Manufacturing & Industrial had an average CVR of 1.84%.

Average Google Ads Click-Through-Rate by Industry

Click-through-rate (CTR) tells us how many people are clicking through your ad, compared to how many people see the ad. Here’s the lineup:

All four industries are relatively close here.

Manufacturing & Industrial sees the highest click-through-rate at 2.58%.

SMBs are next with 2.35%, followed by Real Estate at 2.23% and Construction at 2.20%.

These industry benchmarks are particularly useful here. There is so much out there about what your CTR should be, and plenty of experts say you should strive for 3% regardless of industry. The data shows that 3% isn’t always practical.

Different consumers in different industries behave and interact with ads differently. That’s why it’s so important to use realistic, industry-specific benchmarks to measure the success of your ad campaigns.

Average Google Ads Cost-Per-Conversion by Industry

Cost-per-conversion is a favorite benchmark for many PPC experts. Basically, how much are you paying to get someone to convert on your ad?

It can be a good indicator of ROI, but again, it’s important to understand cost-per-conversion benchmarks by industry, because every industry’s average sale price is so different. Let’s take a closer look at that:

EB Google Ads Benchmark Cost per Conversion

Construction Companies lead the pack here with an average cost per conversion of $211.01.

To an e-commerce business, that might sound astronomical. It’s important to consider what that cost really means for your industry though. A construction company’s average project likely costs a few thousand dollars and upwards. If their Google Ads leads convert, and hire the company to build a commercial building in downtown Grand Rapids, that’s easily hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not into the millions. And they spent just over $200 to make that happen.

The same goes for Real Estate & Home Builders. Their average cost per conversion is $193.75. At a glance that might look like a lot of money. But if you think of it in the context of building a brand new home, $200 is just a tiny percentage of the money they’ll make from the lead who converted on that sale.

We can apply the same logic to Manufacturing & Industrial, with a cost/conversion of $168.10, and to SMBs, with their significantly lower cost/conversion of just $84.22.

How do you stack up against your industry’s Google Ads benchmarks?

We’ve broken down each benchmark individually, so you can see how each industry stacks up against others. It’s important to remember that you should really only be measuring your Google Ads campaigns against other similar campaigns in your industry. It’s easy to see from this data that the average real estate consumer interacts with Google Ads very differently than a manufacturing consumer might.

With that in mind, here’s a full look at all of the data for each industry:

How do your ads stack up against these Google Ads benchmarks?

If your Google Ads campaigns just don’t compare, there are plenty of workarounds and ways to get your data up to par.

Not sure where to start? Feel free to give the Evenbound team a call. Our paid ads team is happy to take a look at your campaigns and provide the advice you need to maximize your results.

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5 Real Estate Lead Generation Tips You Can Use Today

by Mackenzie | Sep 1, 2020 | Real Estate Development Marketing, Residential Real Estate

5 Real Estate Lead Generation Tips You Can Use Today

Any real estate developer, home builder, or realtor knows that leads aren’t the problem. It’s qualified leads that are hard to get. Leads who are the right fit for your real estate development or community. Leads who are in your area, motivated and ready to list or buy. There are all kinds of leads out there on the web, but the qualified ones are hard to come by.

If you’re working on boosting your real estate company’s qualified lead generation, there are tons and tons of tactics and strategies out there. I’m going to focus on just 5 real estate lead generation tips that are relatively easy to implement and follow-up on. Check ’em out:

01. Give Social Media Advertising a Chance
02. Start A Blog
03. Turn Your Most Popular Resources into Content Offers
04. Invest in Video and Virtual Tours
05. Get Good at Conversational Marketing

01. Give Social Media Advertising a Chance

The real estate industry is notably competitive when it comes to paid advertising. But, that shouldn’t scare you away from using a remarkably effective tool that can deliver leads right to your inbox.

With more than 77% of realtors already actively using social media for real estate in some form (according to the National Association of Realtors), it’s pretty clear that realtors and real estate developers already understand the value of social media. You know that you can promote your listings or your development on Facebook and Instagram — people love a good home tour (we’ll get to that later).

Investing in social media advertising is just the next step up. Facebook is smart, and it’s well documented that the platform uses tactics to limit the reach of what it considers to be “promotional” unpaid posts.

If it sounds business-y, and you’re not paying for it, it’s not going to reach most of your audience.

Social media advertising is the solution here.

When implemented properly, you can see the same high level of engagement you enjoy on organic posts on your Facebook and Instagram ads, in a more targeted way. The benefit here is that you can track and measure each of those engagements, and you can reach a broader pool of qualified potential leads based on demographics you choose.

If you’re concerned about your organic social media platform’s reach, and you have a goal of drawing in more qualified real estate leads, it’s worth giving social media advertising a shot.

It’s a bit cheaper compared to Google Ads, and if you develop ads that are really visual — using a video or professional photos of your real estate development or listing — you’re likely to see a good return.

Interested to try your hand at social media advertising?

Check out this blog on Building a Real Estate Advertising Strategy That Sells Homes.

02. Start a Blog

A blog is one of the easiest ways to boost real estate lead generation. Why? Because it’s difficult to generate leads if you don’t have traffic on your website.

Blogging pulls in the right kind of traffic to your real estate website. From there, you can use other lead generation tips and tactics to convert them into leads.

But, you can’t convert anyone if they’re not on your site to start with. And blogging is how you get eyeballs on your pages.

Here are a few reasons why blogging is an easy way for real estate developers and realtors to boost lead generation:

You’re already an expert. You know what information your ideal clients are looking for, and you have answers to the questions they’re asking.
Starting a blog is free. It’ll take your time, sure, but that’s all it costs if you’re just looking to get started.
A great blog will catch your ideal clients during their research phase. By answering the questions you know your ideal client is searching, you’re pulling them into your website when you know they’re a qualified lead.

CTA-Brutally-Honest-Website-Checklist-[button-02]

What’s one thing you know about your ideal real estate client?

They do research.

Before anyone buys a home or even decides to move, they’re going to look up the neighborhood, check out the average market value of homes in the area, and figure out what they need to do to buy a home, sell their old home, and move out.

If your blog answers those questions well, you're providing all of those ideal potential clients with the information they need, exactly when they need it. Click To Tweet

When they read your blog for more information on that ideal neighborhood, or how to list their home the right way, they’re going to turn to you when they’re ready to finally make the jump.

Blogging delivers inbound real estate lead generation at its finest. The trick is writing in a way that answers your clients’ questions and catches the attention of search engines. If you can balance those priorities well, you’ll start seeing your website’s real estate lead generation potential soar.

Not sure where to start? Here are a couple of resources:

03. Turn Your Most Popular Resources into Content Offers

If your real estate website has traffic steadily flowing in, content offers are the best way to convert those visitors into leads.

You can do this easily with resources you already have, like community brochures, floorplans, pricing sheets, and any other documents you know your ideal client will have an interest in.

Think about what qualified leads ask about most often. Is it pricing? Is it your floor plan options? Is there a particular document that sales has great success with when it comes to converting leads?

Whatever it is, take that resource and turn it into a content offer by gating the content.

When I say “gating” I mean restricting access to that piece of content until someone has completed a contact form.

So, before a visitor on your website can download your site plans, you request their email address and any other very important information, like their name.

Check out this example:

When the visitor completes that form, they’re able to access the content offer, and you’ve got a lead complete with contact information.

Now, you can take that information you’ve gathered, and follow up with that lead directly, or add them to an email list where they’ll receive more relevant information.

Either way, once you’ve got traffic on your website, content offers can help you improve real estate lead generation by giving those visitors a reason to offer up their contact information and convert to leads.

04. Invest in Video and Virtual Tours

There is nothing more shareable than a home tour video.

People love to look inside other people’s homes.

Especially in today’s climate, when clients are looking for homes remotely, a video or virtual tour of your listing can start drawing in real estate leads in an instant.

Here are three different ways you can use video or virtual tours to boost real estate lead generation today.

04.1 Videos for Social Media

Like I said, there’s nothing more shareable than a home tour. When you post a video of your real estate development or a virtual tour of your listing to your Facebook or Instagram account, it can spread well beyond your organic reach.

Let’s say one of your followers shares the video because she thinks its cool. One of her followers sees it and says, “oh, that’d be perfect for so-and-so!”, and she shares it with her good friend so-and-so.

Even if that friend doesn’t love that specific home, your one video post was shared two consecutive times (at least), exponentially widening your agency or development’s reach. And now that friend who is actively looking for homes in your area knows your real estate company’s name and can talk to you about other properties that might suit her better.

Outside of home tours, video testimonials, like this one Couch Mountain used, and even drone footage that’s edited well and set to good music can go a long way to get your real estate development or agency’s name out there.

The key is video. Consumers respond well to and engage with video content — from low-quality phone videos to well-produced footage. If you can incorporate video footage in any way, it’s a great way to spread awareness and improve real estate lead generation.

04.2 Video Content Offers

Maybe you have a short clip of a video tour you’re sharing around Facebook. It’s gotten a lot of traction, and people are coming into your real estate website to learn more.

You can turn the rest of the video tour or the interactive virtual tour into a content offer by gating it.

Instead of leaving the virtual tour of your entire real estate development open to the public, you can tease it with a short video of your property. When people are interested enough to want to see the whole site, they can trade their email and contact information for access to the complete virtual tour.

The benefit?

You’ve got a qualified lead and their contact information, and they’re able to take a closer look at your property.

Leveraging video and virtual tours as content offers is a great, easy way to improve your real estate company’s digital lead generation. It’s a simple website edit that you could do today. Once in place, as long as you have traffic flowing to your site, you could start to see leads coming in immediately.

04.3 Develop Informational, Evergreen Videos You Can Use Over and Over

The last two real estate lead generation tips on video focused on home tours and virtual tours. Another smart way for real estate developers and realtors to utilize video is in an informational format.

Maybe that’s a quick “How to List Your Home” video.
Maybe it’s a “Welcome to the Neighborhood” video.
Or maybe it’s a longer-form Q&A Instagram Live session where you take questions from your followers about anything related to your new real estate development.

Check out this informational video example from a real estate investor. It walks viewers through their unique purchasing process:

Informational videos like this are evergreen. They’re easily used over and over again to pull in real estate leads that are qualified and interested in what you have to say.

Let’s take the long-form Insta-Live Q&A session as an example.

You complete the Instagram Live, and you had a few hundred attendees.

That’s it for now, but there is certainly more to come as we move forward with this rebrand, and as we continue to grow. Be sure to keep an eye out for additional updates from us! And, before you go, we’d like to say thank you.

Cut it up into single question-and-answer videos. Post them on your social media pages, or use them for your social media advertising campaign. You could get tons of small video clips out of that one live session — one for each question you answered in the live session.

Turn key questions from the Q&A into blog posts. In addition to answering the question again in writing, you can embed the video in the blog post to increase shareability and engagement.

Turn it into a content offer. Edit and repackage the footage from that Q&A session into a webinar or video offer that welcomes new leads into your real estate development. Call it “Everything You Need to Know About Life at [Your Development’s Name] A Video Guide”, and offer it on your website in exchange for a lead’s contact information.

No matter which of these options sounds great to you, there’s no denying that the average consumer loves a good video.

Whether you opt for video tours, virtual tours, or short how-to videos, incorporating video into your real estate development or realtor agency’s regular marketing content is an easy way to boost lead generation.

05. Get Good at Conversational Marketing

For any real estate professional, whether you’re a realtor or a developer looking to sell lots in your community, conversational marketing is your ticket to quality lead generation.

Your ideal buyers are looking for a home. No matter how experienced they are, they’ll have questions about any potential new home. The better and faster you answer those questions, the more leads you’ll get. One great way to implement conversational marketing is through chatbots on your website.

How Do Chatbots Work?

There is a range of different types of chatbots that come from different providers, but the general gist of all chatbots is the same. They make it easy for a potential buyer to contact you or ask a question, the minute they think of it.

A chatbot is that little messenger icon you see in the bottom right or left of your screen when you head to a new website.

Most chatbots say something like, “Hey, got a question?”.

When you respond, the chatbot can supply you with a range of additional information depending on what your question is.

Chatbots for Real Estate Developers

Chatbots don’t have to be difficult. In fact, they can be really simple. For your real estate development, you probably know what most people are looking for when they head to your site — site plans or floorplans.

On your pricing or floorplans page, you could have a chatbot pop up that says, “Hey, do you want to take a PDF of these site plans home with you?”

The person responds yes, gives their name and contact information, and the chatbot auto-delivers the content they’re looking for, directly to their inbox, in a matter of minutes.

Chatbots for Realtors

The same goes for a chatbot on your home page. For realtors, a home page chatbot could say something as simple as, “Hey! Are you looking to buy or sell?”

When the visitor interacts with the chatbot, it can walk them through a few preset qualifying questions that help you determine whether that person is a good fit for your real estate agency.

If it seems like they’re still in the early stages of research, you can send them away with a quick guide to the area.
If they seem like a qualified lead who’s ready to list or buy, the chatbot can gather their questions and contact information, and send that directly to the realtor who can handle that lead.

via GIPHY

BOOM! Lead generated.

Chatbots are a great option for any website, but particularly for the real estate industry. From home builders to realtors to developers, they give your potential leads access to you now.

If it’s feasible, you can even set your chatbots to auto-forward to your sales team during the workday, so they can personally respond when a lead reaches out.

It’s all about offering your leads the content and answers they need when they need them. If you’re able to do that, you’ll crush it, both in generating leads and closing them.

The secret to real estate lead generation is prioritizing it digitally. If you want more leads, now is the time to invest in your digital presence.

The real estate industry continues to trend towards digital engagement. From websites like Zillow and RedFin to the increased popularity of homeowners making moves across states, more and more consumers are using digital resources to find and sell their homes.

If you can position your real estate development or real estate agency well online, you’ll be able to capture the lion’s share of those digital leads.

We hope these real estate lead generation tips help you start pulling in more digital leads, fast! If you’re looking to sell more homes, we can help. We’ve worked with home builders and real estate developers for years to draw in more qualified leads, and turn them into sales. We’d be happy to help you too.

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Construction Companies: 4 Ways to Align Sales and Marketing

by Mackenzie | Aug 25, 2020 | Helpful Tips, Inbound Marketing

Construction Companies: 4 Ways to Align Sales and Marketing

There is a ton of information on the internet about sales and marketing alignment. A lot of it talks about opening up lines of communication. While that’s true, it’s not particularly actionable or specific.

We’ve written quite a bit about sales and marketing alignment. What it is, what it can do for you, and how to use HubSpot to make it happen. What we haven’t talked much about are specific, actionable steps our clients can take to get sales and marketing on the same page.

With this blog, I’m sharing 4 ways construction companies can align sales and marketing teams for overall business growth.

If you’re not a construction company, don’t worry, I still have resources for you:

How HubSpot Helps Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Marketing and Sales Alignment Strategies that Cut Time and Boost Growth

Getting Started with HubSpot Series: Sales and Marketing Alignment

But if you are a construction pro looking for ways to boost that bottom line, here are 4 specific, actionable ways to align sales and marketing for overall company growth:

01. Leverage Sales Reps’ Direct Customer Experience

Let me guess:

Your marketing team feels like they’re delivering the sales team leads that sales just doesn’t follow up on. Your sales team complains that marketing just isn’t sending them any good leads.

via GIPHY

Yeah, it’s that common.

The solution? Leverage your sales reps’ experience working directly with customers on the job to better define your ideal leads and buyer personas.

Here’s how that works.

Your sales team has inside information the marketing team needs.

In the construction industry especially, it’s easy for sales reps to become distanced from the rest of the team. They’re often out in the field talking and working directly with customers, with little reason to head back to the office.

But, your sales team has valuable information your marketing team can put to work for you and the sales team. They have first-hand experience working with your ideal customers — they know what they do, what their pain points are, what pushes them to close a deal, and what might stop them from closing.

Sales should share key buyer demographics, challenges, and pain points with Marketing.

Here’s an example of a problem that can happen when marketing doesn’t use the sales team’s insider knowledge.

The marketing team writes a buyer persona for a male general contractor in his 50s.

They say he’s the key decision-maker for your ideal type of large commercial building project. Marketing develops content with this buyer persona in mind and writes their monthly newsletter to him.

But the sales rep who works with that type of project knows that the key point of contact is usually the general contractor’s head of administration, who is a woman in her 40s.

Even though the general contractor might make the final decision, sales knows that to be able to make a bid on the project, they need to first talk to that person in administration. She’s the person who reads marketing’s emails, and is researching for the content marketing publishes on the blog.

This is a key problem for your marketing strategy. Marketing is writing to the wrong person, which means their content is unlikely to connect or resonate with the person sales needs to talk to.

This is a pretty real example showcasing the importance of getting information from the sales team. The information sales gathers out in the field is exceptionally valuable to your marketing team. It’s all the data they need to put together specific, relevant buyer personas, and content to reach those buyer personas. But, if your sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned, it’s likely that this information doesn’t make it far beyond your sales team.

If you’re working to align your construction company’s sales and marketing teams, leveraging your sales team’s direct customer experience is a great place to start.

It gives both teams the information they need to collectively define what a qualified lead looks like, so marketing can start putting together campaigns that draw in those leads. When that happens, sales gets more of the leads they know they can close, and your marketing team knows they’re delivering leads that sales will follow up with.

It’s an essential step in sales and marketing alignment for growth, and it’s a key tactic for construction industries in particular. Your buyer personas are unique, and sales has valuable input that can guide the development of those personas, and the marketing content that generates the leads your construction company wants.

02. Leverage Marketing’s Ability to Develop Lead-Nurturing Content

Solution #1 was geared at leveraging the sales team’s knowledge to help marketing. Solution #2 leverages marketing’s unique skills to help the sales team. Here’s how.

Your marketing team’s job is to nurture leads to the point that they’re ready to send over to sales. They’re great at drawing in large volumes of leads, weeding them out, and converting the qualified ones into warm prospects who are ready to make a sale.

Your sales team doesn’t rely so much on content as they do personal relationships. As I mentioned earlier, in the construction industry, most sales reps do their best work in the field. But, they likely have a few stucks.

Maybe a warm prospect goes cold for no reason. Or the sales team finds that they’re consistently bidding on a specific type of project, and losing out in the final round.

You can leverage your marketing team’s expertise at creating and delivering lead-nurturing content to address these sales concerns.

A great way to align your sales and marketing teams is to bring in marketing expertise to create sales enablement content that can help sales nurture prospects through those key points of the funnel where they consistently fall out.

How to align sales and marketing to develop successful sales enablement tools.

Get your marketing and sales teams in one room.

Have sales lay out the problems they consistently face. Whether it’s a specific type of buyer falling out of the sales funnel or the most common pain point that stops a prospect from converting to a sale, have sales explain the problem to the marketing team.

Then, let both teams brainstorm what types of content would help solve this pain point.

Maybe it’s a quote calculator that lets prospects estimate how much their project might cost before they ask for a bid. Maybe it’s a nurturing email workflow that re-engages cold prospects, inviting them back into the sales funnel.

Inviting marketing into the conversation is a key way to address these pain points in the sales process. Every sales team faces problems like this.

Your marketing team is well-versed in reaching out and engaging with cold leads. They can apply that same expertise to developing the sales enablement content your sales team can use to provide the right message, to the right prospect, at exactly the right time.

When you use your marketing team to help your sales team develop nurturing content, you're aligning your marketing and sales teams in a way that helps you win more projects. Click To Tweet

03. Set Common Goals

In any industry, it’s easy for sales and marketing to feel at odds. In many construction companies, marketing and sales can feel like they’re competing against each other to find and convert the best leads.

The best way to get everyone on the same team? Set common goals.

I’ve talked about what SMART goals are and how to set them before, so I won’t get into the nitty-gritty.

I will say that setting common, overarching goals that both sales and marketing contribute to and are responsible for is a key way to effectively align your sales and marketing teams.

Photo courtesy of KazooHR

This goes back to leveraging the strengths of both teams, too.

For example, if sales is having trouble closing on a specific type of project, or if there’s a new product they’re not having any luck selling, marketing can create a campaign that promotes the project or product to those ideal buyers that sales has identified.

The key here is that both marketing and sales need to have the same goals — whether that’s an overall revenue goal, or a SMART goal that breaks down how many leads marketing needs to bring in, and how many of those leads sales needs to close on.

04. Establish Regular Sales + Marketing Check-Ins

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times.

via GIPHY

And yes, I will only ever use this gif in the communication section of every blog.

Jokes and SpongeBob aside, communication is the surprising key to effective sales and marketing alignment.

It’s easy to overlook something so simple, but we see it constantly with our construction clients.

Your sales team is out in the field.

They’re checking out job sites, talking to prospects, making product recommendations, and trying to pull in those jobs that will deliver the largest returns.

Your marketing team is in the office.

They’re trying to think of creative ways to get your brand out ahead of the competition. They’re regularly creating emails and brochures, developing ad campaigns, and interacting with visitors and leads through your website’s chatbots.

Between the two roles, it’s easy for each to lose sight of the larger goal.

To keep the focus on drawing in and closing more of the right leads, getting both teams in the same room is essential. Click To Tweet

When sales is out in the field, and marketing is back at the office, there aren’t a ton of opportunities for them to connect.

Key ways to keep sales and marketing teams aligned.

Set up a standing meeting. Even if you start with one single meeting once a month, it gives both teams the chance to connect.

If possible, try to work up to a few short meetings a month, and then plan one strategy meeting a month. In the shorter meetings try and hit a few small things like:

Which leads sales closed on, and which weren’t great fits

What results marketing campaigns are delivering

Where sales is seeing the best leads come from

Which platforms marketing is seeing the most engagement with new leads

You don’t have to cover all of these points in every meeting, but just taking 15 minutes in a week for sales or marketing to give an update to the other team will go a long way in developing a true growth strategy for your construction company.

If you can’t get sales reps into the office once a week, Zoom, Google Meets, and even an old-school conference call can get the job done.

So long as there’s a time scheduled for sales and marketing to connect, you’ll be doing a lot of the work that can help your construction company align sales and marketing for more streamlined campaigns that pull in and convert more of the right leads and jobs.

Sales and marketing alignment isn’t always easy. Especially for construction companies with remote sales teams and minimal marketing support, it can be tough to find the starting point.

If you have questions about aligning your construction company’s sales and marketing teams, send us a message. We’re here to help you develop a growth strategy that pulls in and converts more of the right leads.