How to Keep Building Materials Contractors and Influencers Active

Say that you are introducing electrical switches in a market already saturated by popular brands on which customer bias is strong. What chance do you have with mere advertising? Your pre-established competitors are doing it too. But what allows your switches to be sold despite such rigid competition is the fact that you have influencers (i.e. electricians) who are well-educated on what your product does and is and are sufficiently loyal to influence end-customers at their work sites to buy your products.

End customers will always look to buy their electrical switches from the brands they know and will go for an unknown brand only if there is expert advice to do so. After a while, as your products get sold more, you will find that your brand is no more a complete unknown and even end customers/individuals are buying your products directly.

This story is not unique to just the electricals vertical, but all building material verticals such as paints, cements, bath ware, pipe and fittings, etc. use contractors and tradesmen to generate demand for their products.

The real problem appears when brands are unable to appropriately engage their influencers and keep them interested. Without adequate influence, demand for your products in the store or dealership remains low. Concurrent to your retail marketing efforts where your products are present in-store to be sold, taking measures to engage your influencers, keeping them active and loyal, educating them, and clarifying their doubts about a new launch or modifications is crucial to bringing demand into a store.

But, inactive influencers do not influence.

Why Do Influencers Become Inactive?

Influencers become inactive for a number of reasons but the result is always detrimental to a brand. Sales obviously go down and without a way to re-engage them and get them reinvested in your goals, you are in trouble. It may be that they aren’t able to find new projects or work or end-customers to influence, it may be that they are not aware of your latest offerings, maybe they had a bad experience with your product due to a lack of product knowledge, or maybe they have simply moved on to your competition.

The reason is almost always tied to you – your inability to engage or educate. You need to re-engage and also onboard new influencers whenever possible to replace permanently inactive ones. 

Strategies to Maintain an Active Influencer Network

Despite the risk of inactivity, there are strategies to keep influencers productive and to ensure that they remain interested in your offerings. We have certain strategies that our customers in the building materials industry, i.e. brands, use to maintain a strong influencer network.

Harness Collaboration at Every Stage

Consider this – Influencers inform your dealer about a new building complex in the locality. Your dealer passes on the details to you and your sales team contacts the lead, convincing the lead for a demo, after which the technical expert visits the lead with the sales rep/team and provides the demo. This potentially leads to successful onboarding and good business.

Imagine if all of these needed to be done manually, including the communication – from lead assignment to progress along the pipeline to demo to onboarding. Phone calls and delayed responses depending on who was available or not at a specific time. It would lead to unnecessary delays because of human errors and wrong judgement. This is because although all stakeholders get involved at some stage, they are not really able to work together towards the same goal. There is no structure or system to auto-assign tasks and drive the process forward.

With BeatRoute, leads are auto-assigned from the start to the relevant stakeholders (sales team, dealers, contractors/influencers) at every stage of the process until a lead becomes a customer. The co-working mechanism between the sales team and technical expert during demos is a prime example of collaboration towards common goals. 

Whether it is managing leads or creating demand, collaboration between your sales team, dealers, and influencers is critical.

Ensure Influencer Loyalty

Loyalty programs such as reward points for reaching milestones keeps your contractors/influencers motivated to do more. When they have clear visibility on the next milestone or the available points to be redeemed, they are naturally inspired to drive more business to your dealers via influencing. It is also smart to opt for a digital loyalty program as opposed to a traditional one and all the disadvantages it brings, such as keeping track of points and gift deliveries in an analogue setting.

Educating Influencers is Engaging Them

When building material brands provide influencers with an app to stay updated on new product launches, it ensures they promote your products more effectively. BeatRoute provides a WhatsApp/Viber connection to access the influencer app. Since apps like WhatsApp and Viber are widely and commonly used, accessing the influencer app through it eliminates any complexity and users can easily view updates, launches, or loyalty points.

Additionally, small meetings at dealers and full-blown community events not only educate a large number of influencers/contractors together on important brand updates, they also engage these influencers to either reactivate them or to onboard new ones. 

Gauge Event Performance with Participation Tracking

Participation tracking is what tells you if your community event was a success. Otherwise, there isn’t any quantifiable purpose to these events. The most important parameter is how many (and which) relevant influencers attended and how many were onboarded. This is a clear indicator of the performance of the event and the ROI can be defined by the business resulting from it.

Conclusion

In most cases, when we ask building materials brands about their influencer network, they reveal that although they have hundreds of thousands of influencers in their network, they can’t say for sure how many of them were actually active (i.e. generated business for the brand) in the past quarter. In cases where information is available, brands tell us about 20-30% of their influencer network generated sales in the aforementioned period. BeatRoute enables brands to keep their influencers active, engaged and educated.