construction industry

Simple and Affordable Ways to Make Your Construction Website More Effective

30th October 2015 By Ian Winterton Leave a Comment

Digital marketing consultant Pritesh Patel discusses the common mistakes construction companies make on their websites – and shares his tips and tricks on how to increase your traffic and generate better leads

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If you think your company website should be a shop window into your business, think again. That’s the view of website expert Pritesh Patel, who says this outdated myth needs to be buried for good.

“You hear the phrase ‘it’s a shop window into our business’,” says Pritesh. “But how many window shoppers do you want? Surely you want actual people coming in and buying things.”

In his role as a digital marketing consultant, with a focus on building product manufacturers, Pritesh regularly audits his clients’ websites, so he has a trained eye for the sort of errors that hold a business back on the internet.

“Firstly, it’s the mindset of treating your website as a corporate brochure,” says Pritesh. “Companies say, we’ve got a catalogue of products. Let’s just make a website version of our catalogue. That really is outdated thinking and things have moved on so much since then. There’s so much more you can do.

“Another common error is not thinking about where your website fits into your sales process. You need to develop a mindset where you’re looking at your website as something that is going to generate leads and help your business grow.”

Pritesh identifies another potentially fatal flaw as not reacting fast enough to enquiries. “If you look at your own behavior on the web, when you’re looking for a product or service, you’ll probably send multiple enquiries to multiple suppliers. Often who you go with comes down to who reacts fastest,” he says.

“I’ve come across some companies who park enquiries from the web to one side and others who respond in an hour. It’s a competitive space and reaction time is crucial.”

Other regular issues include not doing enough with your data and treating optimisation, which means employing tactics to catapult you up the search rankings, as an afterthought. “Websites collect data on usage and behaviour and track where enquiries are coming from. You should use this data to keep yourself informed about what’s working and what’s not. It helps you avoid wastage, where you’re spending money on things that don’t generate leads,” says Pritesh.

“It’s also rare that I find a construction website that’s well optimised and has a clear direction in terms of the searches it’s trying to target. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is often an afterthought after a site is launched, but it should be considered much earlier in the process.”

So what should you do to give yourself a better chance of outgunning your competitors online? Here are Pritesh’s tips and tricks for improving your visibility and generating more leads from your website.

1. Work out your website’s purpose

Ask yourself what your website’s there for and what you want people to do when they get there. When I work with clients, we have a brainstorm and I say ‘when I come to your site, what do you want me to do?’ And they say: ‘request a sample, give us a call, sign up to a registration area, or sign up to a calculator, etc.’ We quickly get a list of five key things we want people to do. Once you’ve got that list, you’ve got your key goals and you can start measuring how well your website is doing in achieving them.

2. Do some simple on-page SEO

That means updating your headers, titles and meta tags, adding links to other pages in your website and making sure any project case studies are written with a web – rather than a print – focus. In terms of case studies, companies often put the project title as their case study title. They’ll write ‘Oxford Brookes University’ for example, which from an SEO perspective means you’re optimising that page for the university, which might be students or people looking for its address or phone number. What you should be doing is aiming the title at someone looking for that particular case study, such as specialists in the education sector. So if you were supplying aluminium facades to the university, title it ‘Aluminium facades supplied for universities’. Then anyone searching for aluminium facades for universities should be pointed towards your page. Marketers try to get all creative – but you’ve just got to think about what people are searching for.

3. Calls to action

These are the things you want people to do on your website. They should encourage visitors to request a sample, book a course, request a call back, or whatever your specific goals are. So go to your case studies or blogs and make sure you’re always answering the question ‘what do you want me to do next?’ with a clear call to action.

4. Need for speed

Google rewards faster-loading websites with a better ranking, which will make you more visible. Typically, a lack of knowledge about how to upload images, for example, slows down your site. So simple things like spending a day resizing all your images so they’re web friendly will improve your page load times and have a positive impact on your rankings.

5. Banish the bounce

Look at your Google analytics data, lots of which is available for free (https://www.google.co.uk/analytics/) and look at which pages have high bounce rates. That means the percentage of people who go to a page and leave without doing absolutely anything. Typical reasons why pages have high bounce rates are content quality is poor, it doesn’t match what people have searched for, your presentation isn’t very good, or pages aren’t loading fast enough because of a big image, so they end up leaving. Use analytics to narrow down the three pages that perform worst. Start working on those pages and run through all the reasons why it’s not performing. Once you’ve worked out why, do some work to improve it. What you’re always trying to do is entice that one click when people come to your website.

6. Traffic management

Another effective thing you can do with analytics is look at your traffic. So you go to analytics and see how many people have visited your website. Then you can focus on what percentage of those visitors have done something you wanted them to do, like the number of registrations you’ve had. From there, you can track that back to which channels were behind this, like Google searches, Twitter, Facebook, green building forums or the Screwfix community. You might find that sites you didn’t even know about are giving you good leads. By measuring these actions you can better focus your marketing on the channels where you’re seeing the best results.

7. Generate content ideas the easy way

A great trick is to look at your keyword reports on analytics – you can search help on the analytics website to see how to do this – and filter them for all searches that start with ‘how, who, where, what, why and can’. These are all things people have searched for to find your site – and probably nine out of 10 of those will be things you won’t have answered. So it gives you quick, simple blog titles or ideas for videos or infographics or whatever you want to create. You can also track what people are searching for on your site, which will also give you great ideas for useful content.

8. Innovation on a budget

Tools, such as calculators, work really well on construction websites. Most businesses will have a technical department that is capable of providing a simple tool like this for your website. You could offer something like a calculator to calculate how many boards someone needs for a decking project. By doing so, you help the customer get the ball rolling, but you also capture valuable project details. By starting the process online, you can then use that to qualify your leads better.

Pritesh has seen the proof that better-focused, more user-friendly websites win more business and provide the ammunition for businesses to grow. “Having a more effective website, where the positioning’s right, the content’s right, you have the right calls to action, usability is excellent and it works on mobile, just helps generate a constant stream of much better leads,” he says. “What I see through analytics is that when your information is clear and easy to find, people keep coming back. If they can’t find what they want, they never come back – and go to your competitors.”

If you’d like to find out more about Pritesh and his digital marketing business, have a look at his website priteshpatel.me

How Can Building Firms Get More From Twitter?

17th August 2015 By Ian Winterton Leave a Comment

With the right Twitter strategy, you could be providing better customer service and hooking up with new clients in a matter of weeks. Su Butcher from Just Practising gives us her tips on how to get the most out of the platform

It’s not easy to get your head around hashtags and tweets. When something seems so impenetrable, it’s easy to feel it’s irrelevant to your construction business. But Su Butcher, from social media consultancy Just Practising, is here to challenge those misconceptions. If you’re ignoring Twitter, you might be missing out on an easy way to support your clients better – and find new ones.

Su advises construction companies on how to use the Internet to achieve all sorts of business ends. And she’s seen companies of all shapes and sizes get rapid and lasting benefits from using Twitter.

“The construction industry is built on relationships between individuals,” said Su. “And Twitter is also about relationships between individuals. Everyone in construction works with people they know and gets introduced to people they know. And they recommend people they know. It’s a very networked industry.

“Many construction companies and individuals use LinkedIn to connect and talk to people they know, but it’s quite a closed network.

“Twitter, on the other hand, is much more open. It’s also important, because it’s such a large network. The last time they published statistics, there were 15 million active Twitter users in the UK.

“It’s a very useful tool for professionals to meet new people, to learn and carry out networking conversations more effectively.”

Who’s Your Audience?

Before you decide whether Twitter’s right for your building business, you need to work out who your audience is, where they are and which platforms they’re using.

“One thing I do with clients who want to know what type of social media to use is recommend they do an audit,” said Su. “This can tell you where your audience is and what they’re doing there, so you can decide what platforms to use.

“It’s also important to look at these platforms as part of an overall strategy for using the Internet – as everything is connected together.

“For example, people get hung up on Twitter only having 140 characters, but it doesn’t. You only need to include a link and you could connect to anything on the Internet. It has no boundaries.”

So what are the secrets of using Twitter effectively for construction companies?

For individuals

The first way of using Twitter is as an individual, rather than having a company or branded Twitter account. An example of an individual who uses it really well is Ming Cheng (@ArchitectMing). He’s an architect who works for a large practice in London and is involved in product specification. He uses Twitter to talk directly to product manufacturers. If he has a quick question about a product, he asks it on Twitter. It’s very convenient for him to do that, because he can just leave it with them and wait for a reply. He doesn’t have to sit there on the phone waiting for a response. Essentially, he’s offering product companies an opportunity to have a conversation. Some companies respond to this well – and some don’t. But when you’re on Twitter, you really need to be prepared to have the conversation. If someone asks you something and you don’t reply, they can get a bit miffed. And if you ignore people, they might go and talk to your competitor instead!

For companies to publish

Whilst individuals are the key building blocks of Twitter, there is a role for a company account. An example is publishing useful content; writing useful stuff should be part of your social media strategy. You should be making things that your target audience will be interested in talking about and sharing. An example of a client who does this well is SIG Design and Technology (@SIGDesignTech). A core part of their strategy is blogging about roofing to an audience that doesn’t know too much about the technical side of the subject. So they use Twitter to share blog posts and invite conversations about them. It also acts, from a brand point of view, as a place where people can ask questions. They’ve had a lot of success using Twitter to support their blog.

As a company hub

You can also use a company account as a hub for individuals on Twitter. A good example of a company that’s doing this is Celotex Insulation (@Celotex). Celotex use their branded account as a central hub for all things happening around the country on Twitter. It includes several of their staff, their technical people, their sales people and all marketing activities. If you look at the tweets and replies, you see they provide technical advice directly via their Twitter account. Equally, if you have a group of people trying to achieve something, such as promote an event, Twitter is marvellous for sharing information about it. You can tweet from the account leading up to the event, during it and after it, and if people have questions, they can come and ask you directly. The branded Twitter account acts as a beginning point for people to talk to you and your organisation.

Having worked with a broad spectrum of businesses, from one-man band architects, to SMEs and now much larger firms, Su has a great template for building an engaged following. It’s a blueprint that can generate new leads and deliver on business goals in a matter of weeks. Here’s her seven-point plan for getting the most out of Twitter.

Begin with your goals

If you’re going to have a social media plan, you need to decide where you want to go. Ask yourself what success looks like, and then try to measure it in something tangible. You can set intermediate goals, for example to have more followers. When people follow you, it suggests they like what you’re doing. But also think about what you really want people to do as a result of engaging with you on Twitter. This depends on what your business objectives are. Ask yourself what success looks like generally and this will help you decide whether Twitter is best place to be doing it – and where else you should be doing it.

Carry out an audit

Find out whether the audience you have and people you want to reach are using Twitter or not. Also work out whom in your organisation should be using it. Is it the marketing person or should it really be someone else? Small companies often think we’ll just give the secretary some PR and she can tweet it, but it doesn’t achieve very much because they may not be the right person to have the right conversations.

Time to connect

When you know who’s going to be using it, you need to start building your network. Everyone has a network of contacts, so start off by finding and connecting with those people.

Listen

The next step is to start listening to what your network is saying on Twitter. One of the really useful ways to do this is to use search. People often make the mistake of thinking they need to be on Twitter all the time in case someone says something you need to hear, but by using the right search tools you can get round all of that.

Have conversations

Once you’ve found out what people are talking about, start having conversations and joining in. You’ll feel more confident if you begin by having conversations with people you already know in the real world. But because Twitter is public, what happens is those people may then introduce you to new people. And in no time, the conversations will lead to new relationships.

Be useful

This is probably the most important part of the process. You can be useful in so many ways. For example, you can introduce people with common interests, or who are able to help each other. Or you can be useful through making and publishing useful content. By being useful, you will attract people with similar interests.

Measure and review

Every month, ask yourself whether you’re achieving the goals you’ve set yourself. Twitter has its own analytics system, which is free to use and you can also measure Twitter traffic to your website. The things that are working, you do more of. Those that aren’t working, you stop doing.

You can find more useful resources for Twitter on Su’s website. She also runs in-house training groups for groups of 3 or more people.