From our experiences marketing in the hardwood lumber industry, ensuring you cover the basics, and avoid common marketing mistakes can really make a difference!
Whether we are trying to reach hardwood landowners, loggers, green lumber suppliers or kiln dried lumber buyers, we know how important effective marketing messages are to the right target audience.
Here are a few basics we try to always incorporate into our marketing efforts.
Build from a specific buyer persona. Developing a specific customer buyer persona based on information gleaned from purchasing behavior and other key metrics can really help refine your messaging. Acquiring and analyzing detailed customer data helps businesses “better understand their customers’ demographics, desires, pain points and purchasing behavior,” notes Forbes. This understanding “can increase their chances of success in today’s competitive market.”
Customize and optimize online. It’s not feasible to adopt a “one-size-fits-all” strategy to your online marketing efforts. For one thing, your customers (current and prospective) can access your website through a variety of devices, so without optimizing for these differing devices, they “will struggle to use and enjoy” your website, notes WebFX. Ensuring that your site has responsive design means audiences can easily access your content with “mobile friendly features” and are therefore more open to your marketing message.
Choose the right social media presence. Chances are that your customer base actively uses social media for both personal and professional reasons. Be sure to research which social media platforms are most popular with your target audience, and what kind of marketing strategy will resonate most with them. Once these factors are addressed, be sure to actively engage with customers on those platforms regularly. Offer value-rich content, respond to questions and comment when appropriate. This will help supplement your other marketing efforts.
Have a clear call-to-action? In email marketing and other similar venues, businesses sometimes forget the most important element—guiding customers to what they should do next. Customers should always be clear about what’s expected of them, such as clicking on a highly visible button or image that serves as a call-to-action. Without such a reminder, they will probably glance at your marketing message and then move on to other things. So, be sure to highlight your call-to-action in every marketing message.
Stress the benefits. Regardless of who they are or how they make their purchasing decisions, customers always want to know, What’s in it for me? That’s why marketing campaigns that highlight product or service features, rather than its benefits, will fall short of the desired result.
To put it bluntly, customers “do not care about the features of your product or service,” notes Business News Daily, “they care about how it can solve their problems and improve their lives.” Craft your marketing message to highlight those benefits “and how it can address your target audience’s pain points.”
When we are trying to promote hardwood logs, specific hardwood lumber species such as walnut, white oak and red oak, or even railroad ties and pallet lumber, keeping these marketing basics in mind help improve our campaigns. Perhaps they will help you as well.
Tony C.
The Baillie Group