There’s a particular tension that exists in the building materials industry right now. On one side, the relentless drumbeat of “digital transformation” and “ecommerce imperative.” On the other, the hard-won wisdom of decades spent building businesses on relationships, handshakes, and knowing your customers by name.
This tension isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom colliding with change.
And the solution isn’t choosing one over the other. It’s the pilot program—a structured approach that lets you test digital waters without abandoning the ship you’ve spent years building.
The Fundamental Problem With “Big Bang” Marketing
Most building supply companies approach digital marketing the same way they approach construction projects: they want the complete blueprint upfront. Total costs. Exact timeline. Guaranteed outcomes. It’s a reasonable expectation when you’re pouring a foundation.
It’s a disastrous approach when you’re transforming how you reach customers.
I’ve watched companies invest $50,000 into a full-scale ecommerce platform before they understood whether their customers would actually use it. I’ve seen businesses commit to year-long agency contracts without knowing which channels would deliver results. The graveyard of failed digital initiatives is filled with companies that confused certainty with strategy.
The irony? The very businesses that built their success on “measure twice, cut once” abandon that principle the moment they enter digital marketing.
A pilot program reverses this dynamic. It’s the marketing equivalent of a site survey before breaking ground. You’re not committing to the entire building—you’re testing the soil, checking the load-bearing capacity, and ensuring your foundation will hold before you pour concrete.
What Makes a Marketing Pilot Actually Work
A pilot isn’t just “trying something small.” That’s experimenting without structure, and it leads to inconclusive results that neither prove nor disprove anything meaningful.
A true marketing pilot is a hypothesis-driven experiment with defined parameters, measurable outcomes, and the explicit goal of either scaling or stopping based on evidence.
Here’s what separates signal from noise:
1. Start With One Clear Objective
The most common failure point in marketing pilots isn’t execution—it’s ambiguity of purpose. Companies launch pilots while simultaneously trying to prove ROI, test multiple channels, validate messaging, and train their team. That’s not a pilot. That’s chaos with a budget.
Your pilot should answer one strategic question: Does [specific tactic] generate [specific outcome] for [specific audience] at an acceptable cost?
For a building supply company, that might be: “Will a Google Ads campaign targeting commercial contractors within 25 miles generate qualified quote requests at less than $75 per lead?”
Notice what that question does. It names the channel (Google Ads), the audience (commercial contractors, defined geographically), the desired action (quote requests), and the acceptable cost threshold. Everything else is secondary.
This clarity isn’t restrictive—it’s liberating. When you know exactly what you’re testing, you can make decisions quickly. When results come in, you know immediately whether you’re succeeding or failing. There’s no ambiguity requiring committee meetings to interpret.
2. Choose Your Battlefield Carefully
Not all products, services, or customer segments are equally suited for pilot programs. You want to test in an environment where success is achievable, measurable, and meaningful.
The best pilots target high-intent audiences with established demand. In practical terms for building supply companies, this means focusing on:
Your best existing customers. These are people who already trust you, understand your value, and buy regularly. If your digital channel can’t convert them, it won’t convert strangers. Start by making it easier for loyal customers to reorder, access account information, or request quotes online. If they adopt it enthusiastically, you’ve validated the concept. If they don’t, you’ve learned something crucial before investing in acquisition.
High-value product categories. Don’t test your entire 10,000 SKU catalog. Pick a category that represents significant revenue, has clear specifications, and doesn’t require extensive consultation. Decking materials, for example, or commercial door hardware. Products where customers know what they need and pricing is relatively standardized create better pilot conditions than custom fabrication or highly technical specifications requiring engineer approval.
Geographic concentration. If you have multiple locations, pilot in one market first. Choose a location with engaged management, reliable data systems, and a customer base representative of your broader market. You want enough volume to generate meaningful results, but contained enough to manage closely.
Testing in your strongest arena first isn’t playing it safe—it’s being strategic. You’re establishing a baseline of what’s possible under favorable conditions. Once you prove it works there, you can tackle harder challenges.
3. Define Success Before You Start
I’ve seen countless pilots that “sort of worked” but led nowhere because nobody agreed upfront on what success looked like. The sales team wanted 100 new customers. The CEO wanted profitable growth. The marketing director wanted engagement metrics. Everyone measured different things, and the pilot died in interpretation purgatory.
Before you launch anything, establish specific key performance indicators that directly connect to business outcomes. For building supply companies, this typically includes:
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): What does it cost to acquire a new customer through this channel? For most building supply businesses, $200-$500 is reasonable depending on customer lifetime value. If your average commercial customer spends $15,000 annually and stays for five years, a $500 acquisition cost is magnificent. If your average customer spends $500 once, it’s unsustainable.
Quote-to-Order Conversion Rate: How many quote requests actually turn into purchases? This reveals whether you’re attracting the right audience. If you’re generating 100 quote requests monthly but only converting 2%, you’re attracting tire-kickers, not buyers. A 15-20% conversion rate suggests real demand.
Average Order Value: Are your digital customers ordering the same volumes as your traditional customers? If your average in-person order is $1,200 but your average online order is $87, you’re not replacing or augmenting existing channels—you’re creating a new low-value segment that may not justify the investment.
Customer Lifetime Value: The ultimate measure. Is the customer who finds you through this marketing channel as valuable over time as the customer who found you through traditional means? This takes longer to measure but matters more than everything else.
Set these targets before the pilot begins. Put them in writing. Get leadership agreement. This isn’t bureaucracy—it’s clarity. When the pilot concludes, you’ll have binary decisions to make. Did we hit the targets? Yes or no. Scale or stop.
4. Timeline: Long Enough to Learn, Short Enough to Decide
Most marketing pilots fall into two extremes: they’re either too short to generate meaningful data, or they drag on so long that the market changes and you’re no longer testing the same hypothesis.
The right timeline for building supply marketing pilots is typically 90 days—long enough to move beyond initial novelty and establish patterns, short enough to maintain urgency and focus.
Here’s why three months works:
Month 1: Setup and Launch You’re building campaigns, testing messaging, working through technical integration issues, and generating your first results. The data here is largely directional. You’re learning what breaks, what confuses customers, and what obvious improvements need to happen. Expect performance to be below target. That’s normal.
Month 2: Optimization You’ve fixed the obvious problems. Traffic is flowing. You’re A/B testing landing pages, refining ad targeting, adjusting bid strategies, and improving conversion paths. Performance should be improving week over week. If it’s not, something is fundamentally wrong with your hypothesis.
Month 3: Validation The campaign is mature. Performance has stabilized. You’re seeing consistent patterns in customer behavior, conversion rates, and costs. This is real data showing what happens when the system runs smoothly. This is what you extrapolate to make scaling decisions.
At the end of 90 days, you should have enough information to make a confident decision: scale, stop, or modify and test again.
5. Budget: Enough to Matter, Not Enough to Hurt
The most common question I get about pilots is: “How much should we spend?”
The answer isn’t a number—it’s a principle: You need enough budget to generate statistically significant results, but not so much that failure creates organizational trauma.
For most building supply companies, a meaningful marketing pilot requires $5,000-$15,000 in media spend over 90 days. That’s enough to test Google Ads in a focused geographic area, run targeted LinkedIn campaigns to commercial contractors, or experiment with strategic content promotion.
Here’s the math: If you’re targeting a cost per lead of $75, a $10,000 budget should generate approximately 133 leads. If your quote-to-order conversion rate is 15%, that’s 20 new customers. If your average first order is $2,000, you’ve generated $40,000 in revenue from a $10,000 investment. That’s a 4:1 return, which easily justifies scaling.
But here’s the more important part: If it doesn’t work, you’ve spent $10,000 to learn something invaluable—that this approach, in this market, with this audience, doesn’t work. That knowledge prevents you from wasting $100,000 on a full-scale rollout.
That’s not an expense. That’s insurance.
The Scaling Decision: When Good Enough Becomes Great
Let’s assume your pilot worked. You hit your targets. Cost per acquisition is acceptable, conversion rates are solid, and customers acquired through the channel are buying at similar values to your traditional customers.
Now comes the harder question: How do you scale without destroying what made the pilot successful?
This is where most companies stumble. They assume that a successful pilot at $10,000 will simply multiply at $100,000. It won’t. Scaling introduces complexity, competition, and constraints that didn’t exist in the pilot.
The Three Phases of Sustainable Scaling
Phase 1: Controlled Expansion (Months 4-6)
Don’t immediately 10x your budget. Instead, double it. If you spent $10,000 monthly in the pilot, go to $20,000. This tests whether your results hold at moderate scale without exposing you to catastrophic failure if something breaks.
Watch these leading indicators carefully:
- Is cost per acquisition increasing as you expand reach?
- Are conversion rates declining as you move beyond your core audience?
- Is average order value holding steady or dropping?
- Are customer acquisition costs still justified by customer lifetime value?
If performance remains stable as you double spend, you’ve proven the pilot wasn’t a fluke. You’ve found something repeatable.
Phase 2: Multi-Channel Testing (Months 7-12)
Once one channel is performing consistently, it’s time to test complementary channels. If Google Ads worked for commercial contractors, what about LinkedIn for architects? If email marketing resonated with existing customers, what about a remarketing campaign for website visitors who didn’t convert?
The key is sequencing. Don’t launch three new channels simultaneously. Launch one, optimize it, then add another. This way, you know which channel drove which results. You’re building a portfolio of proven tactics, not a chaotic mix of unproven experiments.
Phase 3: Systematic Optimization (Month 12+)
By the end of your first year, you should have 2-3 channels performing reliably, a clear understanding of customer acquisition costs, and enough data to optimize based on customer segment, product category, and seasonal patterns.
This is where marketing transforms from cost center to growth engine. You’re no longer guessing. You’re making data-informed decisions about budget allocation, audience targeting, and channel mix. You know that every dollar you invest returns a predictable multiple.
The Common Failure Patterns (And How to Avoid Them)
Even well-designed pilots fail. Not because the concept is flawed, but because of predictable execution mistakes.
Failure Pattern #1: Testing Too Many Variables
A building supply company decides to test Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, and email marketing simultaneously, each with different messaging, different offers, and different landing pages. When results are mediocre across all channels, they conclude “digital marketing doesn’t work for us.”
The truth? They have no idea what works because they tested everything at once. They can’t isolate which variable drove which outcome.
The fix: Test one channel at a time. Once you’ve proven it works, add another.
Failure Pattern #2: Changing Strategy Mid-Flight
Week 3 of the pilot, results are below expectations. The CEO reads an article about TikTok marketing and wants to pivot immediately. The pilot is abandoned before it generates meaningful data.
The fix: Commit to the timeline. Make minor tactical adjustments (ad copy, targeting refinements), but don’t change the fundamental strategy unless something is catastrophically broken. Most pilots don’t hit their stride until month 2.
Failure Pattern #3: No Integration With Sales Process
Marketing generates 50 quality leads. Sales doesn’t have a process for following up on digital inquiries. Leads go cold. Marketing gets blamed for “bad leads.”
The fix: Before launching the pilot, ensure your sales team understands how leads will be delivered, what follow-up timeline is expected, and how success will be measured. Marketing and sales must be aligned, or the pilot will fail regardless of lead quality.
Failure Pattern #4: Ignoring Customer Feedback
You launch a quote request form that requires 15 fields of information. Customers abandon it. Instead of simplifying the form, you conclude “customers don’t want to request quotes online.”
The fix: Build feedback loops into your pilot. Survey customers who abandon the process. Ask successful customers what would have made it easier. Treat every failure as a data point revealing how to improve.
What Success Actually Looks Like
Here’s what I want you to understand: A successful pilot doesn’t mean instant profitability or immediate scale. It means validated learning that gives you confidence to invest more.
You’ve succeeded if you can answer these questions definitively:
- Does this channel reach our target audience?
- Do the customers we acquire behave like our best existing customers?
- Is the cost of acquisition sustainable given customer lifetime value?
- Can we handle the volume if we scale this 10x?
- Do we have the systems, processes, and people to support growth?
If the answer to all five is yes, you’re not running a pilot anymore. You’re building a growth engine.
And here’s the beautiful part: Once you’ve proven the model works in one market, with one product category, through one channel, you can replicate it. You can test the same playbook in a different location. You can apply the same methodology to a different product line. You can add complementary channels that follow the same framework.
That’s not luck. That’s strategy.
The Real ROI of Pilots: Knowledge
Let me share what might be the most important insight about marketing pilots: The value isn’t just in the leads you generate or the customers you acquire. It’s in what you learn about your market, your customers, and your business model.
A pilot that “fails” to hit revenue targets but reveals that your core audience is shifting from baby boomer contractors to millennial project managers is extraordinarily valuable. It tells you where to invest in the next three years.
A pilot that discovers your customers desperately need better product specification sheets delivered faster is worth more than a hundred new leads—it reveals a competitive advantage you can build.
A pilot that proves your team can execute digital initiatives without outside help creates organizational capability that compounds over years.
The companies that win aren’t the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They’re the ones that learn faster, adapt quicker, and scale what works while stopping what doesn’t.
Pilots give you permission to learn without betting the business.
Start Where You Are
If you’re reading this and thinking, “We should have done this years ago,” you’re right. But you can’t change the past. You can only act on what’s in front of you today.
The building supply companies that thrive in the next decade won’t be the ones with the most locations or the largest inventories. They’ll be the ones that figured out how to meet customers where they’re going, not where they’ve been.
Digital marketing isn’t about abandoning the relationships that built your business. It’s about extending those relationships into channels where your customers are already spending their time.
And the pilot program is your strategic bridge from skepticism to scale.
Start small. Test rigorously. Learn quickly. Scale what works.
That’s not just good marketing advice.
That’s how you build a business that lasts.
Z10 Consulting 