The Role of Online Building Product Directories for Marketing

Many marketers often frown when it comes to spending money with online construction and products directories and resources.

Often it’s because of naivity and over managing ones own expectations. I often get asked if budget should be allocated to online product directories and the answer is always the same.

View the presentation below to find out.

Any questions or comments please feel free to leave them below in the comments area! Thank you.

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2 thoughts on “The Role of Online Building Product Directories for Marketing

  1. Darren Lester

    Hi Pritesh, nice presentation with some really important points.

    Your point about ‘not to expect a lot of referral traffic’ is an interesting one, because it should be true of a product directory, but for the vast majority, that would be letting them off the hook.

    Whilst they absolutely shouldn’t be striving to drive traffic to a manufacturers site, for the reasons you pointed out, it is all they are capable of doing. Their online services work in almost the exact same way as the old printed directories, which could do nothing more than the offline equivalent of sending traffic to a website.

    They use (misleading) traffic numbers as the main selling point, so it should be no surprise that this is what manufacturers expect of product directories and can only be judged on how much traffic they drive, as they don’t do anything else.

    The truth is, the traditional product directory model is dying fast and it’s time for them to evolve…but are they capable? Or do they even want to?

    We don’t consider SpecifiedBy to be a ‘directory’ and have invested a lot into building a platform that focusses on providing specifiers with a better experience, the ability to find all the information they need about many products in one place (as you said), the same cannot be said of traditional product directories.

    Reply
  2. Celia

    Great information and interesting insight! Do you happen to know what the average price is for a (manufacturer) product listing with an online directory?

    What percentage of their overall advertising budget do they (or should they) allocate towards online product directories?

    Reply

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