Revenue Acceleration Series

Remaining alert but patient with the specification process and engaging your sales resources at the right moment

Part Three

By Richard HoffmannChief Operating OfficerSteelyard

© Steelyard www.steelyardaccess.com

Six Strategies to Gain Awareness in the Professional Design Community

Part Three: Six Strategies to Gain Awareness in the Professional Design Community

Following these six strategies - utilizing the awareness-building media listed above - will give you a great start in building a strong and sustainable sales channel into the important professional architecture and design community.

Part Three: Six Strategies to Gain Awareness in the Professional Design Community

Understand your specific audience

Monitor your industry’s ”hot buttons”

Commit to a long-term strategy

Pick your spots

Track important awareness data

Monitor and Improve

Understand your specific audience

Those designers who specialize in the hospitality segment have different needs, interests and perhaps buying habits, than those that serve the healthcare and retail segments. Find out where your prospects read, congregate and buy and meet them there. (At Steelyard, we are certainly able to help you do this.)

Monitor your industry’s ”hot buttons”

Hot buttons are the things that keep your prospects up at night, including issues like the competitive landscape, new products, pricing issues, or technologies that have the potential to disrupt the industry. As examples, consider how Uber and AirBnB have become hot button issues for those in the transportation and hospitality industries.

Commit to a long-term strategy

Awareness building should be thought of as a “marathon”, not a “sprint”. By this, I mean that you should resist the urge to come out of the gate with a new strategy like social media – work it hard for a few weeks or months and then stop when it doesn’t produce the desired results.

The idea is to resist the urge to start out too quickly and burn out on a particular strategy. Instead, set up a reasonable awareness-building tactical plan that starts at a moderate pace and gradually increases over time.

As you gain more experience with certain media, you will find that you are able to generate more activity in less time.

Pick your spots

Please resist the temptation to try every possible media option right away. Instead pick 4-5 and gain proficiency before adding any new tactics. If you are new to the awareness-building process, a good starting point might be organic search, press releases, content marketing, trade shows, and the Steelyard Professional Commerce Sales Portal.

Track important awareness data

Establish a set of relevant measurement criteria that will chart your ongoing improvements in building awareness among professional designers. We recommend the following:

a. Website visitors, both to your home page as well as other important areas (offers, About Us, news, etc.). Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you accomplish this.

b. Views of your general product pages as well as product specification sheets.

Track important awareness data (cont.)

c. Search result impressions – how often designers are searching for your company or product name via non-paid organic search.

d. Total reach. This is the measurement of how many people your paid and non-paid promotions touch on a monthly basis. This number, compared against your potential prospect universe, will provide a good indicator of how well you are doing in your overall awareness initiatives.

As shown by this graphic, awareness is one of the major areas we measure in the new Steelyard Professional Commerce Marketplace.

Monitor and Improve

It’s not enough to capture and track the relevant performance data. You need to ask tough questions like: Is your content resonating with the professional design community or falling on deaf ears?

Are you doing a good job of attracting website visitors but having trouble keeping them on your site?

Are your social media updates being ignored or shared?

Not only do you need to measure the answers to these questions but you should take action on what you have learned to build constant improvement into the awareness stage of your sales channel efforts.

We’ll be covering a new series soon, be sure to check back and stay in touch. View the whitepaper on the upcoming series >>Here

Coming Soon…

About Steelyard

Visit Us

© Steelyard www.steelyardaccess.com

For more information about the Steelyard Professional Commerce Marketplace, please visit www.steelyardaccess.com/brands.html or contact us at info@Steelyard.com or 800-631-3111.

Steelyard is the premier online marketplace for professional commerce in the design industry. For our architecture and design professional members, we provide a secure and vetted community of manufacturers who know how to service the unique needs of designers, architects, builders, and facility managers. For our manufacturer brands, we provide access to a diverse and lucrative B2B market that specifies over $68 billion of products in North America annually (according to the American Society of Interior Designers 2015 Outlook report).