Want your contractors to be expert users and eager sponsors of your products?
Make sure your website is equipping them.
As a building materials manufacturer, you likely have a wide variety of marketing and sales assets that can educate and persuade local pros. However, organizing it all, and getting it into the right hands at the right time, are big hurdles to overcome.
That’s where RevBase, a tool recently acquired by Bullseye Locations, comes in. RevBase is a premium marketing asset management solution that can help you organize, track, and distribute helpful collateral to your contractors. Using this kind of online solution is one smart way to digitally serve contractors with your best brand messaging — and quickly boost your company’s local impact and influence.
Here, we’ll explain 3 ways your website can be an outstanding resource that actually encourages your contractors to use, sell, and promote your brand’s products.
1. Equip Local Pros with Sales Materials
At some point, when dealing with consumers, your contractors will need to speak up about why they like and use certain products. You can step into that process.
According to SiriusDecisions, the opportunity cost of unused or underused marketing content is about $2.3 million for enterprise companies. Don’t fall into the same trap. Give your contractors collateral that explains your product’s benefits and superiority to the competition, and contractors will be primed to talk up your brand when face-to-face with consumers.
They won’t be left hanging, unable to articulate why your products should be used instead of others on the shelf. Instead, they’ll be able to persuade clients and get more local jobs done with your brand front-and-center.
One building materials manufacturer that does this well is Fox Blocks, maker of insulated concrete form (ICF) blocks for wall systems. Their Resources page offers several categories of content that local pros can download.
The Marketing drop-down menus contain flyers for various applications, from basements to swimming pools. There are also brochures covering commercial and residential installations.
How important is it for contractors to have materials like this? Very. It helps instill confidence in customers that your brand has established standards for a project just like their own. It also cements a building material manufacturer’s name and image in consumers’ minds, making it more likely they’ll return to your products for future needs.
Note: Your brand can start providing relevant marketing materials to contractors with RevBase — now a part of Bullseye Locations. It’s a smart way to organize your marketing collateral and allow trusted staff and business partners to access it anytime, from anywhere.
2. Share Training Documents
Your local contractor partners aren’t your hired sales reps. For that reason, it’s okay if an installer doesn’t say all the “right things” to every homeowner about your brand.
The one thing local pros must be experts in, however, is installing your products. To help ensure that, it’s wise to support them by providing training docs.
By giving detailed installation and maintenance instructions to your contractors, you’ll ensure they have all the knowledge needed to get the job done right with your products. Make sure you also provide a full functional understanding of use cases for the materials your company makes, so there are no surprises or slow-downs as contractors plan out their approaches to projects.
This is another area where Fox Blocks shines. Their Resources page has a section just for installation guides and structural engineering standards for reference. Also listed are technical data sheets, estimating guides, and checklists that contractors will find useful.
Because of this, there’s never a worry that a contractor on the job will go without crucial installation or safety information. Everything they’ll need from your company is right there on the website, easily downloadable in the field through mobile devices, or in the office through a desktop or laptop computer.
As a building materials manufacturer, this is the level of access your contractors should have for training docs and other essential installation-related info.
Have it in one central place, where contractors have unhindered 24/7 access. It will enable them to do their best work, to the satisfaction of their clients. The outcome: your brand’s products will be placed in the best light possible.
Another benefit? Contractor loyalty to your brand. In LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report, 94% of employees noted they would stay longer at a company that invested in their career. By providing training materials through your website, you’ll build a similar kind of goodwill with the local pros who handle your materials.
3. Provide Product Spec Sheets
Every construction material has to be properly specified for the job. Whether it’s a matter of dimensions, weight, or some other physical attribute of a component that an installer has to use, the correct data must be on hand.
The problem? When contractors approach you with questions, you may not have the corporate resources to respond in a timely manner, which can threaten an otherwise solid project timeline.
According to data collected by Autodesk, 30.9% of construction industry professionals say that the top reason for miscommunication is a lack of responsiveness to questions and requests. This is a huge problem that can be mitigated by more building materials manufacturers simply by providing key data for contractors through the company website.
Ideally, you should have spec sheets in a central location on your site, where pros can find exactly what they need with ease. They’ll be able to execute the project knowing just how your products are supposed to look, function, and perform in the end.
Fox Blocks, again, gets this right. On the Resources page, a drop-down menu reveals CSI (Construction Specification Institute) wall product specs, as well as wall layout guides, reinforcement instructions, technical performance data, and important energy and environmental performance info.
With all this rich product data on hand, the chances that a contractor will get the build wrong due to incorrect assumptions about the product are minimized. Pros will know exactly the size, location, and ideal working conditions for various parts.
They’ll have all this info at their fingertips, making it more likely they’ll finish the project on time.
If you want stronger business relationships with contractors in the field, this is how easy it should be for them to access product spec data. In addition, for larger-scale, structural applications, you should provide both prescriptive and performance specs so the overall project and all component parts function the way they should.
Giving local pros this invaluable guidance through your website will empower them and lead to better project outcomes. Then, when the mission is complete, end customers will be happy…and your brand will shine the way it’s supposed to.
Use Marketing Asset Management to Make Your Website a Contractor Goldmine
When a contractor approaches a building materials manufacturer, they need the facts. They need them in a timely manner in order to complete client jobs to a high degree of professionalism and quality.
Is your website doing the job? Are you organizing and distributing up-to-date brand and product data to local pros via marketing docs, spec sheets, and training materials? If not, you can easily correct that by employing a solid digital platform like RevBase.
New from Bullseye Locations, RevBase is perfect for sharing, distributing, tracking, and organizing key documents that need to get to the right personnel. It will help you keep track of an overwhelming amount of files and data, ensuring that whoever needs to see them can access them at the right time.
In particular, this is an invaluable service you can perform for contractors. By securely sharing marketing materials like brochures and sell sheets — along with instructional manuals, product specs, and performance data — you’ll ensure the success of more projects that feature your building materials.
That, in turn, means great things for your brand reach, sales, and overall digital return on investment.
Ready for RevBase to transform your website into a one-stop-shop for all the data your contractors will need? Get in touch with RevBase today.