Benchmark your Construction Marketing Activity
As a consultant and trainer, one of the questions I am most asked is, “What should my marketing spend be?” Back in the last decade Competitive Advantage ran a survey, in conjunction with CIMCIG, to answer this question. So, with probably 10 years since the last one, we were really pleased to learn that NBS and Glenigan were surveying marketing amongst product manufacturers.
166 UK based manufacturers and suppliers completed the survey between September and November 2021. This represented a cross section of organisation sizes, turnovers and activities. The report has now been published and is available to download. Here are some of the findings from the Construction Manufacturers Marketing Report 2022.
Historically, few construction product manufacturers have large marketing departments. The survey finds that 29% have just one person in their team, the next most likely number is four or five (17%) and only 12% have nine or more.
The report shows bands of marketing budgets, with 76% having spends of less than £250,000. It tries to find a correlation with turnover suggesting that industry averages are between 2% and 5% of turnover. It also finds that 52% of marketing budgets have remained static in recent years with just 29% of respondents reporting an increased spend.
Today’s team has a range of tools available (allowing the smaller team to be more productive). Social media tools are the ones most used, followed by email marketing systems. Two thirds also use a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Managing product information is primarily undertaken with PDF documents (63%) and spreadsheets (51%), something which may need to change as the National Regulator for Construction Products comes into effect and companies adopt the Code for Construction Product Information.
53% of marketing spend is via digital marketing channels. But traditional printed brochures are still important with 49% of respondents saying they use them regularly.
Perhaps not surprisingly, every respondent said their organisation used Websites and Social Media as communication tools. Least likely to be used is Direct Marketing which is never used by 30% of respondents.
The Construction Marketing Awards make demonstrating the return on investment of category entries a key performance measure, so it is interesting to see the report’s feedback on measures. It listed 10 measures, of which website traffic is the most widely used measure of ROE (90%). Other widely used measures are lead generation (75%), literature & product viewing (72%) and downloads (70%). Marketing spend per customer, an important Key Account metric, is only used by 14%. Interestingly, the ability to demonstrate a return on investment was seen as a barrier to successful marketing by 43% of respondents.
But the principal barrier, no doubt due to those small marketing teams, was limited in-house resource (55%) which the Competitive Advantage team can help you with. One aspect where we help a lot of manufacturers is with their CPD. Here the report finds that 43% of companies consider it a very important channel and only 5% say it is not at all important.
As we all know, the pandemic has forced significant change in the way we do businesses and 38% of respondents expect the way their company approaches marketing in the future will change a lot and a further 51% think it will change a bit. This change is expected to take the form of a continuing switch to digital and trying new things with existing channels and content.
Looking forward, important positive influences on change will be Increased Digitisation (84%), Sustainability (82%) and Requirements for a Golden Thread of Information (72%). And the main negative influences will be Materials Shortages (75%), Brexit (58%) and Covid restrictions (75%).
In conclusion, respondents are positive about the future. Many think that marketing in the sector is stronger than it was five years ago and they see it becoming more important to their business.
