 Most building material manufacturers know that they need to have a website and they need to be on social media. They need to be sending emails. They need to be producing content. They need to be doing all these things online to help them grow their business. The problem is they don't understand how online and digital marketing all fits together to help them move the needle. Your website and your online marketing has the ability to be a 24-7 salesperson for you that is scalable, measurable, and the best part doesn't require HR. The problem is that you need to figure out how in the world you're going to get all these things to work it the way they should so you can actually see tangible impact from a sales standpoint. What I'm going to show you today are the four milestones within your digital marketing that if you execute them the right way and the way I'm about to show you will have direct impact on your sales in a positive way. Hi, I'm Zach Williams at Venvio where we help building material manufacturers outperform their competition by dominating their digital and online presence. The best way to think about the four milestones within your digital marketing is actually visualizing a funnel. The first milestone within the digital marketing funnel is traffic. It's not news that you need to continue to increase the amount of traffic that you're getting to your site but what most manufacturers don't focus on is driving the most high quality traffic to their site and the best way you can do this is to look at what you're doing as well as what your competitors are doing. You can look at what you're doing and seeing what's affected by looking at Google Analytics and seeing what traffic sources bring the most qualified traffic and try to continue to put more resources and more content into those avenues. The second thing I just mentioned is looking at your competitors. You look at your competitors by looking at tools like SCM Rush or SpyFu or there's a couple other ones out there that will tell you what traffic sources your competitors are using to get the most qualified traffic. From there you want to start investing in those avenues that are bringing the most qualified traffic to your competitors. So most manufacturers once they drive traffic to their site they think oh great let's convert them to a lead. This is actually too soon and I believe you're missing the most critical step in the funnel. The second milestone in the funnel is actually trust. Trust is all about creating value in the eyes of your potential customer. You want to develop rapport and goodwill with them so that when you are ready to ask them to become a customer they trust you. They see you as the expert. They see you as a valuable partner in their business. You do this you establish trust simply by helping them with their problems. Help develop rapport by helping them with the pain points that they deal with on a daily basis. After developing trust with your audience you can then begin to introduce opportunities for them to go to the next milestone which is Convert. The Convert milestone is all about taking a passive website visitor and moving them to become an active potential customer. The goal here is for you to give them so much value that they will give you their contact information in exchange for what you're offering. Things like case studies or videos or visualizers are great ways for someone to give you their contact information in exchange for something valuable. After you've established a relationship with that individual you've captured them as a lead there's someone who could potentially buy from you. You'll now enter into the last milestone which is the nurture phase. Most people get here and they say hey I've got this person's contact information let me reach out to them and see if they want to buy my product. Wrong this is the wrong approach. They have given you something so valuable to them. They've given you their contact information. They're trusting you with that and if you just go and reach out to them instead of continuing to drive value you've hurt that relationship and you've essentially damaged that funnel that we built to this point. What you actually want to do is continue to drive more value to the person. If you go about this the right way and you deliver valuable content and you continue to help them with their problems and when you do introduce opportunities for them to become a customer by reaching out to them they'll be much more likely than if you just go straight for the catch right away. Now that you understand the four milestones within the digital marketing funnel your next step is just to evaluate each milestone and see where you're performing well and what gaps exist. Why typically start when I try to evaluate the performance of these different milestones is just simply by looking at the analytics and the data. See where things are working see where they're not and find ways to start plugging those gaps so you can see more leads come in and ultimately more sales. So you might have great traffic but you don't have a nurture strategy well you need to get a nurture strategy or you might have a lack of traffic and a lack of conversion rate on your website well those are two areas that you need to start improving. If you start following these steps you're going to be well on your way to seeing return and actual sales growth from your digital marketing. Until next time I'm Zach Williams at Venvio where we help building material manufacturers outperform the competition by dominating their digital and online presence. Thanks.