This month we spoke to Kate Perrin, Marketing Director at Barbour ABI. Kate discusses the construction marketing field, and where innovations and automation can be better embraced to create hotter sales opportunities
This month we spoke to Kate Perrin, Marketing Director at Barbour ABI.
Kate has been with Barbour ABI for just over one year and oversees the marketing for the entire Barbour ABI family of brands, including AMA Research and Barbour Product Search. Here, Kate discusses the present state of construction marketing and how businesses can innovate and automate to help meet their overall sales and strategy goals.
Before I started at Barbour ABI, now well over 12 months ago, I had read a lot of articles online about how the construction industry was behind in terms of marketing approaches. Like any sweeping statement, I am sure there are examples of this in what is a very broad and varied industry, but I have also been privy to some genius campaigns, making use of some of the most cutting-edge digital tools out there. My background is as a SaaS (software as a service) B2B marketer. I am used to fast-paced, innovative environments, but I am dazzled by the sheer velocity and magnitude of the UK construction industry right now. The pandemic has of course accelerated the shift to digital marketing, and in many ways has forced for the laggards (one of my fave terms!) to adopt digital when once it may have relied on more traditional methods. So we now have some positive forces at work: encouraging building material manufacturers to ensure they are not just keeping up with their competitors, but that they are trailblazing techniques to successfully acquire customers and ensure that once they are specified they maintain engagement through to installation.
The key to this is a simple one, and the marketing team at Barbour ABI group companies will most certainly have heard this more than twice:
In other words, send relevant, personalised communications using a channel they value. As one of my colleagues so rightly put it “nuisance marketing is so 1990s!”.
I wish in a way that marketing automation was called something else, as, for some reason there are so many negative connotations associated with the term ‘automation’. Many people see it as a blunt instrument, something impersonal and untargeted. And, if you Google the definition of marketing automation you get something like this as a search result: “What marketing automation platforms allow you to do can be defined as a process where technology is used to automate several repetitive tasks that are undertaken on a regular basis.” (Wikipedia).
But, used in the right way, for me, terms like ‘repetitive’ and ‘regular’ couldn’t be further than the truth in describing the experiences for prospects and outcomes you can expect from using marketing automation. Of course, allowing you to perform automated processes in essence frees resource up from delivering the lower order marketing tasks, buying you back more time to think of and implement prospect journeys that are personalised ideally according to persona. And let’s face it, that’s where we should be spending our time – in creating journeys and experiences that capture the attention of our addressable market, hold their attention and urge them to act. These are processes that will allow you to generate better awareness, more leads and ultimately better quality leads that should convert at a much higher rate.
It sounds like a silver bullet, right? But, like any martech, marketing automation needs a strategy, defined goals and proper implementation – so you can embed these processes into your day to day marketing outreach.
Web 2.0 shifted the goalposts (that’s my only Euros nod!) massively for marketers. No longer are we able to tell our consumers how to feel about our brand or tell them about what to think about our products and expect to simply be believed. Social, review platforms and simply better sharing of information within industries (and across) has meant a few things:
There are loads of tools and platforms out there – HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, to name a few. We recognise how marketing automation could take your Barbour ABI construction leads to the next level. We also know that you want to fire your own sales and marketing expertise at the warmest of leads, to help improve your return on investment and get even more out of your Barbour ABI platform.
That’s why we have partnered with construction marketing automation experts Project Prospecta. Unlike generic platforms, the Project Prospecta service is construction specific and plugs seamlessly into your Barbour ABI account so you don’t need to worry about the data. And, as well as providing the automation tools ready to go they will also create the campaigns for you – segmented, personalised and beautifully crafted.
Learn more about Project Prospecta here.
Interesting in hearing more of what Kate and our marketing team have to say? Check out our recent webinar below on how to get even more from your content marketing.
In the webinar, Kate and the team discuss:
Watch the webinar here