Creating a Road Map to Marketing ROI for Building Products Manufacturers

I’ve had the opportunity to work with many marketers in the building products sector.  A common topic of conversation related to their marketing is how they can better understand the effectiveness of their marketing investments.  In most cases, the best way to get a handle on marketing’s effectiveness at generating leads and sales is measured by sales data such as leads and conversions and connecting this activity back to costs.  This is exactly where the challenge typically exists in most organizations.  Marketing and sales are not working together to allow the deep insights necessary to understand marketing effectiveness.

Marketers that desire to better understand marketing effectiveness exist across many types of organizations.  However, building products manufacturers face unique challenges as they must get a grasp on how a variety of constituents are interacting with their brands and products.  For example, when an architect specifies a product in his or her design process, that specification data can precede the project being developed by months, if not years.  Connecting the specification data to a sale presents unique challenges.

On the other end of the spectrum, when a contractor works from the specification, there exists an opportunity to change the product selection, although this happens at a relatively low frequency and will vary depending on the type of product and project.  Gaining an understanding of products used in a project relative to the original specification requires access to specification data and building project data.

Many marketers acknowledge these unique challenges in the architectural and design community, however there are systems and databases in place that can allow for building product manufacturers to measure and analyze marketing effectiveness over time.  So, why are most of the BPM marketers not measuring effectiveness?  It has not been made a priority within their organizations.

Like in many cases, things start from the top and work their way down.  Senior management needs to make marketing analytics and ROI a priority and charge their sales and marketing groups to work together to solve this problem.  The marketing and sales teams must then be held accountable for budgets and ROI.

Here is my road map to getting started towards developing more measurement and insight towards marketing effectiveness for building product manufacturers (although this applies to many B2B organizations).

1. Start at the top – Presidents, CEO’s, CFO’s, CMO’s, COO’s, GM’s, you know who you are.  This group first needs to make it a priority to understand marketing effectiveness.
2. Invest – again, this starts at the top but when a priority is set, investments can be made in the resources necessary to measure effectiveness.
3. Collaborate – Okay, business leaders have given the marching orders to figure out the ROI on your marketing and handed you a check to develop the systems.  Its time to play nice and share the sand box.  Marketing and sales need to come together to make this happen.  If the two groups don’t work together, the process won’t work.  Make a pact and get started.
4. Identify your key metrics – this can include any combination of the following or others that you find appropriate:  third party project reports such as Dodge, specifications written, specification downloads from your website or third party spec sites, request for information (online forms, and phone leads), orders, sales, and associated cost per each of these metrics where the marketing cost is divided by each of the key metrics.
5. Find the human resources (e.g., analyst types) that can create a process and system to capture the data that feeds key metrics.  This includes identification and implementation of the systems and technology to capture the data.
6. Implement in baby steps – this is an huge undertaking to go from having no analytics to putting a full dashboard in place.  Prioritize and implement in phases.  Start with the top of the marketing funnel and work your way downwards.  Bottom line is be realistic about how much you can accomplish and by when, then implement in chunks.  Get small wins and build on them.
7. Close the loop – marketing and sales must communicate to one another about how much is being invested and where.  Sales needs to communicate back in terms of what is working and what is not working.  Use this as your opportunity to improve and make your marketing better.

The time to start this process is now as budgets continue to be highly scrutinized and ROI must be demonstrated.  The more efficient you can be with your marketing dollars by optimizing spending towards more effective channels will create a more successful business outcome.  You’ll have an edge on the competition that does not have the deep insights and solid working relationship and communication between marketing and sales.

If you question the value of this type of activity then marketing analytics are not yet a priority in your organization.  I would argue they need to be.  For more rationale on why this is a priority, see my post that explains in very simple terms how to determine the value of knowing your marketing ROI.