Some of the best sales people in the building product world are great teachers. They have a way of understanding the needs of their customers and can communicate solutions to real problems in an eloquent way. The act of taking someone from ground-zero and walking them step-by-step through a solution from beginning to end is an act of teaching.
The customer experience used to be done largely in person, when it comes to building product sales. A representative would put on a suit and tie, carry a large heaping pile of samples in to an architect’s office and make a great and informative presentation.
Arm your Sales Staff
I recently got a tour of a brick plant and one of the shocking things to me was there seemed to be more people, effort and expense going into creating the product samples than there was actually making the actual end product. The time and monetary investments are being made on the front-end of the sales process making the product samples look just right. That sample room is an arsenal of ammunition for the sales staff to use. Here is a new weapon for your sales staff – the 3d animation.
Bring a Machine Gun to a Knife Fight
Educate your sales team with 3d animations which demonstrate the what, how and why of your product in high definition detail. It is a very powerful sales training tool that can make sure that all the most important technical points and installation nuances are being addressed correctly.
Even the most boring and invisible aspects of a product can be illuminated and highlighted with a great 3d animation. Once the sales team is armed with this information, they can hit the ground running.
Take Customer Experience to the Next Level
The days of the boring powerpoint presentation are coming to an end. Your customers are completely desensitized to moving bullet lists and boring slides. Instead, if you show them full resolution, full motion 3d animated product tours and installation demonstrations, you will get their attention, you will educate them more thoroughly and they will be far more likely to remember the information you present to them.
Improve the customer experience with video demonstrations that do not just list features and benefits, they demonstrate them in real time.
Why is YouTube the Second Most Popular Search Engine?
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world because people love video. Video is engaging and is particularly effective when you are trying to demonstrate a highly technical concept. We will be at a point where customers are going to expect a much higher level of sophistication from product manufacturers and I think that time is drawing near.
Support the end-user and decrease problems in the field
A multimedia demonstration can help contractors and do-it-yourselfers understand the processes and procedures that need to be followed in order to correctly use your products. A step-by-step animation, often the same animation that you used to sell the product, can also serve to reduce warranty claims, callbacks, complaints and litigation.
An end-to-end solution
I have a map on my wall from Mark Mitchell (seethewhizard.com) it is a map of all the different paths a building product can take through the building product channel. At every touchpoint from architect, to general contractor, distributor – every point at which a building material moves from manufacture to installation can be improved and even transformed by a simple 2 minute video like the one shown above.
It’s There When you Cannot Be
Here is a quote from a customer who had a product animation done recently “I’m a product manager and I cover the entire US. Obviously I cannot accompany each salesman during their sales presentation but having a 2-1/2 minute video point out all the highlights of the system is huge help. Our customer’s time is very valuable and many times you only have a few minutes to pitch a product. The video gets directly to the point, pecks their interest and opens up the dialogue.”
What does visual marketing of construction products have to do with McDonald’s?
Well here comes the stretch.
Ever notice how the images they use of a Big Mac in commercials are always so perfect looking? What about on those big pictures they throw up on their menus at their restaurant locations? They know the power of visual communication. There is a company they hire who painstakingly pours over every detail of the sample sandwiches they make with the sole purpose of photographing them for marketing materials.
Maybe I watch too much documentary tv on the science channel, but I happened to catch the show about how they do that. It’s intense and it has to be expensive, but they do it. They know what they are doing.
When I look at catalogs and marketing materials on web sites for building products, the products usually look lame.
Here’s a cold formed metal framing part – It fireproofs the top of a wall – or so they tell me.
Anyway looking around the internet to see what I am competing with when I do a rendering of this product, here’s what I come up with:
I think we can do better – way better as an industry and learn from McDonald’s a little bit. So there hamburgers never actually look as good as the products they show in the commercials and on the menus – maybe that’s not such a big deal.
Maybe we can take a page from this playbook and send our products to beauty school a little bit.
Here’s my attempt at it, for what it’s worth – 3d subdivision surface model and rendering of Cemco Fastrak 1000
How to make a custom QR code that reports to google analytics in about 5 minutes.
So an associate of mine told me the other day that I need business cards. He’s right, even though I do most of my business online, there still is no substitute for a face to face meeting and a card exchange. Another friend said, “put a qr code on it”. I have seen google’s custom url builder and how you can use that to build a link that can have google analytics reporting built into it. So I figured :
“Why not include a QR Code on my business card that, when scanned, reports back to my google analytics giving source data for the traffic, and send people to my web site?”
Step One – The Destination URL
Navigate to the page you want to be the destination for your qr code. Go ahead and highlight the entire web address in the url bar and copy that address, the whole thing. Use control c on the pc, use command c on the mac or choose edit>copy. If you have a mobile version of your web site, use that link. If your site automatically detects mobile or if it is mobile dynamic, you’re good to go.
Step Two – Create a new custom URL
Use google’s custom URL builder to make a new url that will send the information to your google analytics account. Fill out the form. You don’t need to set anything up on your google analytics page at all, just filling out this form will report the data into your analytics results automatically. It’s that smart and simple. Here is how I filled it out. Once you fill in the data, just click generate URL, highlight the new link and copy that text. Here is the link to the Google Custom URL Builder
Step Three – Make your QR Code
There are a lot of free services to do this with, just google search “qr code generator” or just use this one here. Choose web site URL, paste in the custom URL you just copied and play with the options a little bit, then you can download the qr code as a png image – or choose one of the other options. I downloaded the png image.
Step Four – Add image to your business card
This is my current business card design, it’s a work in progress, but you can see the qr code on the card. It is a square design so you are looking at the front and the back of the card . . .
Step Five – Test Everything
Try out the QR Code and if it works, then login to your analytics account and in traffic sources > campaigns the visit should be recorded. If it doesn’t show up, give it a while before you go back and check through your work in the above steps.
360 Degree Interactive Rotation of 3d Rendered Images
A great visual tool for showcasing products in a visually appealing way is the use of 360 degree interactive objects. The ability for the viewer to grab your product and spin it around is one more great visual marketing tool that can help demonstrate a complex product or assembly in 4 dimensions. This technology can be made to run in any browser environment. For the most compatibility, using html5 is the best option. The examples below are in html5 and can run on most internet browsers, as well as on android and iPhones, Ipads, etc. without the need for a plugin.
Example 1 – Interactive Spin of a Product Rendering
Example 2 – Interactive Spin of an Entire Rendered Wall Assembly
Example 3 – A 3d Interactive Model Inside a PDF Data Sheet
Just about every product manufacturer uses pdf files for their submittals and for product data sheets
Adobe Acrobat is installed on most computers
3d Interactive models can be embedded right in a pdf
Just some food for thought, if you’d like to have the nicest product data sheets in your industry or showcase your products on your web site with more flair, let’s talk!
When you break down the act of bringing a building product to the marketplace, you end up with a pretty simple equation.
The What = what the product is that you are selling
The How = how the product works, what it does, how it is used
The Why = why would someone choose this product?
Formula for bringing a building product to market = What + How + Why
It’s where the technical stuff and the marketing fluff come together
The What & the How
These are the technical details regarding your product. What is it made of? What does it look like? What sizes, shapes and variations is it available in? This information takes shape in the form of suggested cad details, written guide specifications, datasheets, installation instructions and many other technical forms. These materials are created through many different means depending on the culture, size and organization of a company.
Large corporations generally have a whole technical staff working on these things in conjunction with engineers and product designers, all in-house. Smaller companies sometimes have one person who is an expert on all the technical aspects of the products and tends to be a one person army tackling technical drawings,cad and technical writing duties. Others outsource the creation of these technical services to a company like mine to do some or all of their technical materials. While I enjoy doing these cad and bim drawings and basic technical illustrations and brochures, what gets me excited is combining these utilitarian materials with creative spark and marketing flair.
In my experience, working for companies of all shapes, sizes and cultures, is that they all suffer from a division between the technical aspects of their products ( the what and how) and the marketing aspects of their offerings ( the why). The technical materials, drawings and supporting information is always dry, boring and creatively uninspired.
The Why
Marketing, the way I see it, is taking a step back from the nuts and bolts of your products and taking a larger picture view of how take this carefully engineered and designed widget from the warehouse to the marketplace. It is a 20,000 foot view of your business, using old media, new media, advertising, glossy brochures and strategic planning to accomplish your business goals.
Marketing, like technical services, is done very differently from company to company. I have worked for companies who don’t have a marketing person at all. Some have an entire marketing staff and others hire out to marketing firms that specialize in construction marketing.
In all cases the challenges needs and strategies are largely the same. These are the need for a clear marketing message and a long term marketing plan along with the need to provide technical information about how this product is actually used.
In all cases a magical thing happens when these 2 disciplines are combined into 1 clear strategy if you draw 2 circles one representing marketing and the other technical services you arrive at the sweet spot of building product marketing. This is the place that I call “technical marketing”
Here is a recipe to arrive at the technical marketing sweet spot:
1. Make your marketing materials more technical
2 Make your technical materials more markety (definitely not a word)
3. Take 1 and 2 and stir
4. Take the results and run it through a sifter until you have removed all unnecessary elements that do not support your message or give too much un-needed information.
What you will end up with is simple effective Technical Marketing that will speak to architect and contractors with resonance
An example of this in action :
Example – BlokFlash by Mortar Net
Technical plus Marketing = resonance
This usually successful product is use for concrete block walls to allow water to escape safely. It solves a clear problem in the marketplace. This 1 drawing below communicates the technical aspects of how the product is used in a technically accurate and visually appealing way that communicates the what, how and the why all at onc. It does this in a way that speaks to architects as well as contractors and tradesmen alike and is equally suited to use in advertisements, brochures and suggested details.
Example in the form of an animation showing the how, what and why of a product :
Have you had frustration in bridging this gap between marketing and technical services? Let me know what you think . .
Building Product Marketing Step One – Present Your Products with Pride
Architects are your customers and they are visual people. They create visual experiences and they have spent most of their lives drawing things and viewing drawings done by others. If your drawings were done in 1995, they are going to know it immediately and they will certainly not have a wow experience viewing your products. More importantly, they will get the feeling that you do not take pride in your products. Their enthusiasm for your products cannot exceed yours, so if you do not show them a polished image of your product, you won’t sell them very well.
Architects, like many other business professionals work on a linear, time based fee structure. When you get down to it, they are exchanging time for money. Since they are largely responsible for deciding what products will be used on a project, in some ways they are professional shoppers.
Distilled down into it’s simplest form, in the context of marketing building products you have a very visual person for whom time is of the essence shopping for your products. If the time required for the brain to make a positive visual impression is only a tenth of a second, why not make sure that when that architect sees your product, they see the most beautiful image possible?
Before you start reading, researching and developing a thousand new ways to market your building products, take a step back and make sure the actualy drawings and details you show architects are making a positive impression. If they are not impressive, all the marketing speak and glossy brochures are going to be wasted.
