IT
pages or instruction guides) can be repurposed to suit social media.
The bad news - you can’t just post, walk away, and expect the leads to come flooding in. As previously mentioned, social media is a two-way street. Use your company account to reply to relevant posts, show support to your customers on their project galleries, and answer questions in Facebook Groups. Provide helpful, valuable advice and you’ll be the company they turn to when they’re in need. Most importantly - company social media pages should be controlled by an approved administrator, and your staff, posting on behalf of the company on their own accounts, should stick to any guidelines you have in place.
3. Content marketing
You really can’t promote your site anywhere without creating some kind of content first. Some actionable examples:
costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing and generates 54% more leads than paid marketing.
My top 3 inbound marketing techniques for merchants that don’t need to cost a fortune are:
1. Search engine optimization (SEO) SEO literally means optimising your website (and other online channels) to help you rank higher in search engine results for relevant keywords or phrases. So, how does it work? Search engines regard all mentions of your website online as a vote. These votes can be positive or negative, and unfortunately the goalposts are constantly moving. Techniques are broad, and there are always new best practices, but the basics involve optimising your website's meta descriptions, headers, and titles to suit the words and phrases your customers are searching for. SEO is also influenced by off-page signals, like backlinks from other websites to your own, social media engagement (likes, shares and comments) and online reviews and ratings.
Bad reviews = negative votes. Google sees
this as being a sign you’re less equipped to deal with your customers needs, and puts your competitors ahead of you.
Links back to your website from your suppliers, or trade press = positive vote. Google sees that your website is relevant to the industry and pushes you up the rankings. It’s not quite a “dark art” but whoever is managing your SEO must be up to date with the “do’s and do not’s” – as Google doesn’t take kindly to those who take advantage of the algorithms.
2. Social media marketing
Social media platforms do what they say on the tin – they’re social, a two-way street, and all about building relationships with your customers. Although the goal of social media for business is usually to drive traffic back to your website, approach it in this way and you’ll get the cold shoulder.
Pick the platforms where your audience spend their time (for merchants, I’d recommend Facebook Groups and Instagram, and build yourself a personal brand on LinkedIn), choose a regular posting schedule that you can stick to, and always use your agreed company voice and branding to become a recognisable face in the industry. Consistency is key here. Posting once or twice a month when you’ve got a promotion on just won’t cut it. Three times a week should be your minimum – scheduling tools are your friend.
The good news is that much of your existing content (blogs, news pages, even product
April 2023
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
¡ Behind-the-scenes: Show the day- to-day workings of your business. Give your customers a sense of your company personality and humanise your business to build a stronger connection with them ¡ Create a series of blog posts providing expert advice and tips, or product vs product comparisons. ¡ Create a “customer gallery” which showcases how your customers use your products.
Build a bank of educational, valuable or entertaining content, and you’ll always have something to post on the days you’re faced with writers block.
Conclusion
Costs and resources required to meet your customers online are relative to the size and scope of your business, but even a single-site merchant will need to invest a couple of hours’ worth of labour a week if working with an agency.
If you’re planning on carrying out the role internally then 15 to 30 hours a week is a reasonable expectation (excluding any training and courses).
With external marketing agencies quoting between £700 - £1,300 per month (according to
expertmarket.com) many smaller companies may be discouraged from making the decision to outsource.
But the truth is there are hundreds of talented, and qualified, freelancers available that do not have the overheads to fund, nor the corporate customer base to influence their prices. And with search volumes for building supplies and merchants rising every quarter, can you afford to be left in the stone age? BMJ
27
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88
