5 Common Mistakes Building Product Companies Make Online

Why they’re important and how to fix them.

The building product market, across almost every product category, is fiercely competitive.

But a lot of companies are making very basic mistakes when it comes to online marketing (the most important channel for specifiers to discover your products).

With over 30,000 building product listings from around 1,500 UK building product companies on SpecifiedBy, we’ve reviewed, analysed, tweaked, discussed and viewed more than our fair share of the good and the bad from building product manufacturers.

With this insight, I thought it would be useful to share 5 of the most common, non-trivial, but easily avoidable mistakes we see building product companies make when it comes to marketing your brands and products online.

Company Descriptions

Quite surprisingly, an extremely high percentage of all building product manufacturers do a really poor job of simply describing what they do.

Over the top, wordy descriptions, filled with empty superlatives tend to take precedence over any clarity or brevity.

Quite often, the type of products a company makes is not even mentioned. I’ve literally read some slight variation of the following a hundred times:

“With over 30 years experience, [company-name] is a market leader in the construction industry, delivering innovation and unrivalled customer service.”

If you’re writing for a specifier or potential customer, which presumably you are 99% of the time, the above means absolutely nothing. This could be anyone, doing anything.

There’s a lot of research into value propositions and taglines to draw on for this, but I think the key is to keep it simple. Stick to the facts and simply tell people what you do. If you can also consider your key audience and use language that speaks to them, that's a bonus.

Below are some good examples that all make it very clear what sort of products they make, and also speak directly to a particular customer:

...specialise in the manufacture of washroom panel products with some of the shortest lead times in the cubicle industry.

Targets people who need washroom panel products and value a quick turnaround.

...manufacture loft systems to comply with Building Regulations and Health and Safety Regulations in the loft space.

Catches the attention of anyone who needs to achieve a loft space which complies with current regulations

...manufacturer of premium and high performance rigid insulation products and insulated systems for building fabric and building services applications.

Makes it clear they are at the top end of the market. Targeting customers who value quality.

Product Images

This is a big one.

Regardless of the technicalities of your products, and all the great benefits they bring, probably nothing has as big and as immediate an impact as the quality of images you use to communicate your products.

The quality of the image can be broken into two parts:

• The actual technical quality of the image (size, resolution etc.)
• The choice of image type and it’s suitability for the product (technical image, product photo, as-built photo etc.)

Despite what seems like a priority area to get right, a shockingly high proportion of manufacturers provide either tiny, grainy or pixelated images, or images that don’t provide any context / understanding of the product.

Big, clear, thoughtful and hi-res images are a must for almost all product categories. I don’t think you can over spend in this area.

Some manufacturers have great images, but because they are so paranoid about competitors stealing their images, they don’t use them.

I don’t wish to dismiss a genuine concern, but showing off your products in the best way possible, with the best images you have, is definitely worth the risk. 

Note: There are also tools available to help you track any inappropriate use of your images online.

SEO Issues

A couple of slightly more technical issues we see a lot are related to company websites which have an impact on your search rankings.

Firstly, I come across a lot of companies who have their domain set up on www.companyname.com but don’t have anything on companyname.com

This means if someone types just companyname.com into their browser, they are getting an error, which makes it look like your site is down.

It also becomes an issue if another website links to yours and they didn’t include the www. or, something I find myself doing quite often, someone copies the domain from your email address and pastes it into the browser to quickly look at your website (the email address obviously doesn’t include the www).

It doesn’t matter which one is your preference, but one version should permanently (301) redirect to the other. Having both www.companyname.com and companyname.com active without a redirect is also an issue.

If you want more information about how to fix these issues, Google provide a couple of useful articles:

Set your preferred domain - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en

301 redirects - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

The second SEO related issue I see quite a lot, is not having meta descriptions set up on your website.

Meta descriptions are the short descriptions you find on Google results pages which give potential visitors a bit more information about the web page they are about to visit.

These are really important for ensuing that people actually click through to visit your website when you appear in search results.

These should really be set up to be unique for each page on your site, but at the very least, exist, especially for your home page, which should be your company description.

If you don’t include these, Google will decide on what text to pull from your website and display here, which may not be the best representation of your brand or product.

More detail on meta descriptions here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

Naming Conventions

When it comes to naming products, files and even colours, many building product companies have lost sight of the end user (specifiers) and that your focus should be on helping them to make a decision to select your product.

With product names, we are constantly advising companies to change them, or at least append them with more information. Names like ‘CKZ-4000’ might have a meaning to you internally, but it doesn’t help anyone else, and when it comes to search, it's a disaster.

If there’s a reason why you have to stick with obscure names or product codes, consider something like ‘CKZ-4000 Insulation Board’ to add a bit of context. This will help people to quickly grasp what the product is, but also find it if they search for 'insulation boards'.

File names are very similar. We host over 185,000 files on SpecifiedBy and have had to build an automatic way to rename files in a consistent manner because they are often so bad. 

Again, a lot of random letters and numbers, giving very little clue about what your potential customer is about to open.

Perhaps more importantly though, think about the opportunity to have a brand presence on this potential customers computer if they save a file named something like 'company-name_new-build-case-study_london_2016'.

The final naming issue is colours.

We all like to get a little creative sometimes, but it's possible to go too far. 'Champagne Raincloud' is not a colour, and worse than that, it gives absolutely no clue as to which colour group it might be in!

One Product Per Page

The final issue we see a lot is companies cramming all of their products and information onto a single page on their website. This makes it much more difficult for specifiers to extract the information they need.

There are a lot of benefits to giving each product it's own space.

• You can be more specific about the features and benefits of that particular product and expand the amount of information you provide.
• You provide clarity to your web visitor by reducing the clutter of information they are not interested.
• It makes navigation on your website much more straightforward, and you can easily share a link with people if they need more information about a specific product.
• Similarly to that, you can promote each individual product separately as required.
• And finally, from a search engine perspective, each product page allows you to target different keywords, leading to more organic traffic.

The internet is a big place. Take advantage of this and the opportunity to do justice to each of your products with their own page.

Conclusion

Whilst there is a lot to consider when it comes to online marketing, and there are always going to be areas you would like to improve if you had more time or more resources, these are some very basic areas that a lot of companies are overlooking.

Take advantage of this and get ahead of your competitors by spending a couple of hours checking and fixing these 5 things. 

Good luck :)

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If you have any questions about any of these issues, or any general feedback, I’d be happy to help, just leave a comment below.

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PS - If you liked this article, you may be interested in our new research report into specifier search and decision making behaviour - the 'Specifier Insights Report 2017'

Full details here - www.specifierinsights.com