As a building material manufacturer, you have many assets on hand to help you sell your products. One asset that can almost always use some optimization is your website.
Your site might have a nice design, with basic detail about your company and the products you make. Those elements alone won’t boost your sales, however.
A website that powers sales must have certain features that are known to take customers from point A to point B in the buying journey, all while making your products the obvious choice. While these elements aren’t hard to add to your website, not having them at all will do more harm than good to your sales.
Ready to fix the problem? Here are 3 of the biggest ways your site is killing your sales…and how to turn that around quickly:
1. You Don’t Have a Dealer Locator
Your website’s locator is the page your visitors land on when they want to learn where to locally buy your building products.
If you don’t have one, however, you’re missing out on a ton of sales.
Why? If you have no way for your website visitors to find a local dealer — or all you have is a text-based list of local retailers that customers need to manually search through — many of them will give up in frustration.
According to research collected by SuperOffice, 92% of customers say they would completely abandon a company after two or three bad website experiences, so you’ll want to avoid causing friction with an unhelpful or non-existent “where to buy” page.
Even if you do have a dealer locator, it might be lacking a few essentials that are keeping you from making more sales. To make sure this isn’t happening, ask yourself the following about your current locator solution:
- Does it bring in new leads for your business? If your locator isn’t actually generating leads by allowing customers to leave their contact info, you’re permanently losing touch with interested prospects.
- Does it have a clean, responsive design? We know bad design turns off customers, but the best design for a locator involves more than just a pretty picture — it’s about a functional layout that eliminates confusion, works on any device, and gets customers where they want to go in the shortest time possible.
- Does it “shorten the gap” for the customer? The best locators give customers all the details they need to choose the right local dealer, while letting them submit inquiries.
If you’re concerned your current solution lacks these qualities, consider going with a locator built by Bullseye.
Bullseye locator solutions are best-in-class portals for your customers to connect with dealers and local installers quickly, seamlessly, and painlessly. They work just as well on mobile as on desktop. They also integrate with Google Maps and Google Business Profiles for a functional clean design and exact, always-accurate info on opening hours and distances to brick-and-mortar dealer locations.
Best of all, Bullseye locators are built for lead generation. (More than half of businesses claim lead gen is their number-one priority, so your locator shouldn’t miss this essential feature.) A locator built on Bullseye’s tech can allow submission of inquiries through a simple pop-up form, allowing you to follow up with leads and nurture them as they consider buying from your brand.
Make sure your locator has all of these features if you want to truly boost your website sales and overall ROI.
2. You Don’t Have a User-Friendly Digital Asset Library
Your sales assets, such as brochures, flyers, sell sheets, and other key documents, should be serving their purpose in selling your products at all times.
Make sure those materials are available to your “professional” customers such as contractors and dealers, as well as end consumers, at all times and without delay.
Enter digital asset management. A quality digital asset management system will enable you to organize, update, track, and disseminate sales and marketing collateral with greater ease and efficiency than ever before. If you’re a large enterprise with multiple corporate offices, it’s even more important to have the web infrastructure to handle document requests and make it easy for web users to access certain materials.
Get this right, and you’ll improve your brand’s relationships with customers. You’ll even help them “sell themselves” on your products.
SuperForm is one building material manufacturer that executes this strategy well. The maker of insulated walls and building frames has a Brochures page that allows customers to download the info that’s most relevant to them and their projects.
With this beautifully-simple layout, customers waste no time figuring out just what they need to know: namely, how SuperForm’s products will fit their project needs.
Another company doing digital asset management well is GAF, a leading manufacturer of roofing products. Their Document Library page helpfully organizes key sales, marketing, and product data assets for any interested web users to download on demand.
Simply clicking on a category of documents opens up a list that allows customers to find exactly what they need.
This is digital asset management in action. It’s simple enough in theory, but it can smooth the glide path towards sales when done well, or cost you sales if you don’t execute on it at all.
Fortunately, there is an easy fix. RevBase, a new SaaS platform recently acquired by Bullseye Locations, is a platform that integrates with your website to organize, track, and distribute sales enablement documents and product information with ease.
It permanently solves the problem of having to dig through file systems to get the right assets to your sales staff, dealers, or local pros. With RevBase, you’ll have a digital asset portal that’s fully customizable on your end and as accessible as you want to make it for different classes of web users.
Use a solution like RevBase to serve dealers and local pros who need to understand your brand better, as well as customers who want to learn as much as they can about your products. You’ll likely see more sales as a result.
3. You Don’t Have Strategic Calls-to-Action
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are the buttons and text links that tell a web user what to do, such as “Request More Info,” “Download Your PDF,” or “Buy Now.” Even though they’re expressed in a few simple words, they’re an extremely important and often-overlooked website element that can hurt your sales if not implemented well.
According to Unbounce, 90% of visitors who read headlines on your site will also read your CTA copy. That means if users stick around long enough to know what a page is about, their eyes will eventually reach the buttons or links that inform them of the next step. You need to make those words count!
What makes great calls-to-action for a building materials manufacturer’s website? For one, they must be clear and unambiguous. The wording should feel personalized and, if possible, get the user excited for whatever’s around the corner.
As an example, if you’re asking for a user’s contact info and the call-to-action button simply says “Submit Info,” that can feel impersonal and disconnected from the customer journey. However, if the button says “Get My Free Brochure,” it speaks more to the value they’re about to receive. For that reason, it might earn a lot more clicks.
Another key point about calls-to-action: they must be strategically placed throughout your website. CTAs should be on almost every page, showing the user the next logical step in the journey, whether that’s to request a brochure or a quote, receive a sample in the mail, or find a dealer.
This way, the customer has no guesswork to do. You’re taking them directly from point A to point B…all the way to the point of sale.
For More Building Material Sales: Ensure Your Website Isn’t Missing These Key Elements
Your website needs to go beyond looking “good enough” and identifying your brand. If you truly want to realize a return on your website investment, you should ensure it has all the right stuff to drive as many sales as possible.
How do you get there?
For one, you can implement an intelligent dealer locator that generates leads with a solution like Bullseye. Throughout your website, you can implement smart calls-to-action that speak directly to users’ needs and lead them seamlessly to the next step in the sales cycle.
You can also have a smart digital asset management system that gets persuasive sales materials and product info into customers’ hands, with a tool like RevBase.
Now a part of Bullseye Locations, RevBase enables a building material manufacturer to categorize and distribute key assets and documents with greater ease than ever before — making info about your products and their benefits instantly available to customers and channel partners, like local dealers and contractors, who are actively seeking it out.
Combine all three elements in your website for sales-boosting superpowers.
Ready to get more sales online? Learn what a better dealer locator and digital asset management system will do for your business by getting in touch with Bullseye today.
