Marketing to Engineers: 10 Rules to Break in Building Materials Sales

People tend to stick to their ways, and this stands true when it comes to marketing in the construction industry. Many building product manufacturers follow traditional rules when coming up with marketing strategies, but often fall short in finding new opportunities. If you are struggling to create new opportunities, perhaps you are overestimating “these are the rules” habits. Dodge Data & Analytics survey data reveals that many building product manufacturers are holding fast to their traditional rules, and missing chances to increase building materials sales. This e-Book explores 10 rules that you should be breaking to improve your marketing efforts and increase your building materials sales.

Dodge Data & Analytics surveyed almost 250 architects and engineers and over 100 building product manufacturers to better understand how engineers research, select and install building products, and to determine how building product manufacturers’ preconceptions compared to the results. Engineers were asked about their product research and selection habits in the following four areas:

• Predetermined product choices
• Product research and awareness
• Product selection, specification and installation
• Impact of social media

For comparison, we contrasted these results with answers from building product manufacturers on how they thought engineers would respond to the survey. Considering the disparities between manufacturers’ preconceptions and engineers’ actual responses, we have compiled a list of ten traditional rules that you should break, and we explain how to therefore find opportunities, including:

• The biggest brands are not necessarily the most likely to be selected by engineers – our research shows that 71% of engineers and manufacturers think that colleagues’ opinions matter the most in product selection
  • Employ account-based marketing tactics to reach influencers and their colleagues
• Many building product manufacturers overestimate the impact of social media and email on building materials sales
  • Engineers rely on detailed product information, so provide them an easy path to find it

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