 On today's episode, we want to break down for you a couple ideas that we have around how you can begin to think about your online presence, the services you offer around your products to make you more inseparable, harder to compete with. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing. We are starting something new here on the show. It's called our 10-minute tactics. We get questions all the time about how to do marketing more effectively, what trends are happening. How can you be a smarter marketer and get that there? Smarter Building Materials Marketing? See what you did then? Do you see? Yeah, see what you did there? And so we are launching something new where we are giving you all really specific, easy to execute ideas on a weekly basis. So it's a 10-minute or less episode to give you actual insights that you can be more effective in your marketing, your strategy, and your business. So we had a conversation recently with Steve Yates on the show. If you haven't listened to it, we absolutely encourage you to check it out. We talk to him about changes that are happening in the construction industry, and he said something really profound that resonated with me, and it's something that we're seeing with our clients and those industry, which is in the term he used was construction service solutions. And I think that this is an interesting idea, because when you hear that term, you tend to think, oh, well, that applies to a builder or a developer or something like that. But the trend that's happening across the industry is how can manufacturers not just provide a product, but provide services around their product that make them stickier, harder to replicate, harder to remove from the equation of working with their partners, and frankly, just more valuable to those in the channel. And so on today's episode, we want to break down for you a couple ideas that we have around how you can begin to think about your online presence, the services you offer around your products to make you more inseparable, harder to compete with. So diving in, Beth, I really want to hear from you. When you hear construction service solutions, what do you think about? Like, what are some of the things that you think manufacturers should be thinking about? Well, what's interesting is that this is actually a strategy manufacturers know to implement when it comes to targeting homeowners. So if you're thinking about the end consumer, it's probably something you've thought about before, you know that you're going to sell more materials if you instantly connect a homeowner with an installer, because that resolves a pain point for them. What we're seeing and recommending in this current space and as we go forward is homeowners aren't the only person with the labor installation pain point. So that's obviously one of those low hanging fruit opportunities where it's, who are you going to buy products from? Are you going to buy from the manufacturer who has a product and you buy the product and then you have to go find the labor yourself? Or are you buying from a manufacturer who gives you the products that you need guarantees that it's going to work in the space and gives you the installation and you don't have to be part of that process? I mean, it's just a no brainer looking at what are your customers biggest pain points and how can you be not only part of the solution, but the actual solution itself? I think that's an excellent way of thinking about it, Beth. I think the tactical way to maybe approach this, because you hear that and you go, oh, I've got to rule out all these tools and these systems and relationships to make sure I service people. I think a really easy way to start doing this is ask yourself the question of, how does my audience specify, choose by find my product? And either go through that process yourself online or whatever it is or literally watch your audience do that. And then every time they have to make a click or something takes longer than it should, there's your opportunity for margin. So for example, I go, and I think about this because we do a lot of digital work, I go to a website, I find a product, this is the right product for me, and it says find a dealer, and then I have to go to a different page, I have to plug in my zip code, and then I have to reach out to them, and then I have to do my own work, and then that's more work. So how can one solution not create more work, but actually get me to the end result a little bit more quickly? So how can you reduce time, reduce friction, right? Make things quicker. My best example of this is in, I mentioned this before in the show, is Spotify. Spotify essentially killed pirated content because it got you what you wanted more quickly, even though that they were making money on the ads. So how can you get your customers what they want more quickly? Because that will create a bias psychologically in there and they go, oh, well, like it's really easy just go to their site. I don't know if that's a true construction service, but I do think that that's a way to try to streamline and see your site as a part of the construction service solution. And is your online presence as a part of that as well, right? So it's not a true like, Hey, let's roll out our own, you know, installer network. But it's a way of thinking, how can I make quick changes today to empower my online presence to be a more a bigger competitive advantage? Okay, so you said competitive advantage, and that's exactly what I was thinking. There's a lot of competitor chasing that happens in our industry. We look and see what the competitor is doing. And then we feel compelled to do the same. What we're talking about here for construction service solutions is effectively the opposite. So if you follow Zach's process of, you know, go online or figure out all of the places that things take too long, or you can't find what you're looking for, it doesn't even have to be necessarily in the digital space. But this is what is your competition not doing? And then start doing that. So it actually is similar to the conversation we had with Scott Meyer a couple of weeks ago, he was the COO of that lumberyard, you remember that, Zach? And what he said was like, being a lumber dealer is so competitive. And it often you can get sucked into the tendency to be it's a race to the bottom. We sell lumber for $8, we sell lumber for $7, we sell lumber for $7, right? Like that's the place that you're hinging on is price. And so they actually took a step back and they were like, no, we're actually going to go into prefab as a differentiator. They were like, I, and so we're going to supply the materials, but then put the materials for together for you offsite. I'm oversimplifying, but effectively that's what they invested in as a differentiator. So that's what we're talking about here. And okay, I hear, I hear myself, right? These are big lifts, but big lifts give big wins. This isn't something you can do tomorrow. It's a 10 minute tactics episode that's maybe going to take more than 10 minutes to implement. These are the types of game changers that will give you the staying power as our industry continues to see absolutely enormous change over the next three to five years. That's great. So again, I think auditing and looking at where's the pain in the channel, how can you introduce a service or solution, whether it's making it quicker, whether it's doing a bigger lift like what Beth is talking about. But I can tell you like just even walking the floors of IBS, the buzz was how are manufacturers and those in the space trying to reduce and remove friction at any potential spot possible, right? Because the thing we don't have that are our most finite resources time and the companies and this is regardless of the building product space or not, the companies that can give people time back, make things easier are typically the ones that win, easier to buy, easier to sell, right? All right. Well, that's it for today's 10 minute tactic. We hope you enjoyed this. If you like this, send us a note and let us know if you like this direction as well as check us out at bambio.com slash podcast to subscribe and get more content. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth Lopty-Glove. Thanks everybody.