10-Minute Tactics: Making Building Products Stickier

The Smarter Building Materials Marketing podcast helps industry professionals find better ways to grow leads, sales and outperform the competition. It’s designed to give insights on how to create a results-driven digital marketing strategy for companies of any size.

This is our very first 10-Minute Tactics episode. Each 10 Minute Tactics will be a 10-minute or less episode where Zach and Beth give you actionable insights to be more effective in your marketing, sales and business.

This week, Zach and Beth talk about construction service solutions — specifically, how manufacturers can not only provide a product, but product services around that product in order to make them stickier, harder to replicate, harder to remove from your partners’ chain and, most importantly, more valuable.

Often, this is a strategy that manufacturers may already implement when it comes to homeowners. For instance, you can usually sell more materials if you connect a homeowner with an installer because that connection resolves a pain point for homeowners.

However, homeowners are not the only end consumer that has a labor installation pain point. One of the low-hanging opportunities for manufacturers is being not only a part of the solution but the solution itself. Customers will choose to buy from a manufacturer that gives them the product they need, guarantees it will work in the space/project and gives you the installation so you don’t have to find labor.

This doesn’t have to be as difficult as you’re probably thinking. Start by asking yourself: “How does my audience specify, choose, buy and find my product?” Either watch your audience do it or, even better, do it yourself as if you don’t know your company.

Every time you have to make a click or a part of the process takes longer than it should, you have an opportunity for margin.

How can your solution get your customer to the end result a little bit more quickly? In other words, how can you reduce time, reduce friction and make things faster?

Zach’s favorite example is Spotify: “Spotify essentially killed pirated content because it got you what you wanted more quickly even though they were making money on the ads.”

While this is not a traditional construction service type of offering, it’s a way of viewing your website as part of the construction service solution. You don’t have to roll out your own installer network. Look for quick changes you can make today to empower your online presence to be a bigger competitive advantage.

Be careful not to engage in a race to the bottom, however. You don't need to chase your competitors when it comes to construction service solutions. Look at your current services or products and find ways to differentiate.

Sometimes they are quick wins, but sometimes they are big lifts. However, big lifts give big wins. “These are the types of game changers that will give you the staying power as our industry continues to see absolutely enormous change over the next three to five years,” says Beth.

As Zach sums up, the end goal is to reduce and remove friction at any spot possible: “Because our most finite resource is time and this is regardless of the building product space or not, the companies that can give people time back make things easier, are typically the ones that win. Easier to buy, easier to sell, right?”

To learn more about construction service solutions, listen to our episode with Steve Yates, and be sure to listen to the full 10-Minute Tactics.

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