Now that we are firmly into 2025, it’s time for the building materials industry to be proactive in their approach to developing their business operations. This industry is witnessing a pivotal year in 2025, and evolving rapidly. Driven by such elements as digital transformation, shifting buyer expectations, and increasing sustainability demands, the traditional way of doing business is no longer cutting it.
Facing fierce competition and increasing technological advancements, the building materials industry is in a period being reshaped. Construction professionals must change how they source materials. In that vein, effective marketing within the industry has become a foundational step for growth. From AI tools to eco-conscious branding, companies who wish to stand out and become even more successful must rethink customer engagement in order to attract and retain customers.
In this blog, we’ll go over five marketing trends shaping the building materials industry in 2025, and how companies are putting these strategies into action.
What Are The Top Trends in the Building Materials Industry?
Trends can come and go, but the top ones to pay attention to for digital success in 2025 are:
- AI-powered personalization
- An increased focus on influencer and partnership marketing
- Employing user-generated content
- Optimizing email marketing
- Strengthening SEO and local search efforts.
These trends make sense, as they leverage technology and social media to connect with your target audience in an effective manner.
Think of using the top trends within your marketing plan as the LBD (little black dress). When used correctly, they will never go out of style and can always be dressed up or down, depending on what you need.
Why The Building Materials Industry Cannot Bypass the Top Trends
There has been a shift in recent years to a digital-first approach to customers’ shopping journeys. They now feel more than comfortable performing online research and reaching their own conclusions on their buying journey. In the areas of construction and design, B2B buyers increasingly rely on digital tools to research, compare, and purchase building materials. These decision-makers expect a seamless shopping experience.
Let’s examine a few issues facing the building materials industry and an explanation of how leveraging these trends can help.
1. AI-Powered-Personalization
Generic outreach is no longer effective. AI-powered tools can help you to create hyper-personalized content. AI can analyze customer data quickly and help you to tailor marketing messages. This leads to more personal shopping experiences, which in turn, leads to more relevant and engaging interactions. Using predictive analytics, marketers in the building materials industries can seek to understand their customers’ needs and preferences. From social media posts to marketing campaigns, you can use AI tools to customize everything for specific client needs.
2. Influencer and Partnership Marketing
In 2025, trusting the word of the viral TikTok user is going to help buyers make informed purchasing decisions, rather than by them speaking to a sales professional. Hearing about peer shoppers’ experiences via social media or influencers is an innovative approach to content marketing. Choose to collaborate with industry influencers to bring your shoppers high-value content. Strategic partners can amplify reach and credibility and influencers can become a trusted source to gain information and opinions.
3. Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)
Along with choosing to trust an influencer over the company itself, reviews and testimonials go a long way towards building trust with buyers. Encourage your happy and satisfied clients to share reviews, testimonials, real-life photos, or success stories on your site or on your social channels. These IRL (in real life) viewpoints help to build authenticity and trust while increasing organic marketing efforts.
4. Optimize Email Marketing
Email marketing can feel dated, but data-driven engagement is now the standard. Email marketing has always been a powerful tool to send personalized communications to clients. It offers a solid platform for building relationships, generating interest, and delivering important information. Incorporating AI and predictive analytics into your email to segment audiences (construction vs. design) and deliver more tailored messages based on a customer’s role, project type, region, and behavior.
5. Strengthen SEO
You may often wonder how to connect with your client base, especially if so much of it starts online. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may sound like a buzzword, but it is a crucial step to boost visibility in local markets. It connects your
company with potential clients in your target region. For businesses that sell specialized products or ship across multiple regions, creating interactive, visually rich digital flipbooks or catalogs can serve as portable resource libraries that you can share via email, social media, for consultations, or by embedding the link directly into your website.
Real-World Success Stories: How the Building Materials Industry Benefits from Top Marketing Trends
Now let’s take a look at two real-world examples of how companies within the building materials industry are utilizing top marketing trends to benefit their businesses and operational flows.
Real-World Example 1: CEMEX – Using Digital Tools to Transform Customer Experience
CEMEX Go is a standout example of digital-first marketing in the building materials space. As one of the world’s largest suppliers, CEMEX created this platform to give customers full control over the buying process – from placing orders to tracking deliveries and managing invoices – anytime, anywhere.
By streamlining these tasks through a mobile-friendly interface, CEMEX removes friction and delivers a seamless, self-serve experience – something today’s buyers expect. Personalized dashboards offer order histories, delivery timelines, and payment status, all tailored to the user.
What makes this a smart marketing move? CEMEX Go integrates with CRM and ERP systems to fuel data-driven engagement. It allows CEMEX to segment customers, automate follow-ups, and create predictive campaigns that build loyalty while enhancing operational efficiency.
Real-World Example 2: LP Building Solutions – Educating Buyers Through Smart Content
LP Building Solutions showcases how strategic content marketing can elevate a brand from product provider to industry expert. Their website offers virtual tours, interactive guides, and in-depth technical resources—each tailored to the needs of builders, architects, and developers.
By addressing real pain points and offering solutions through content, LP builds trust and loyalty. Their blog and resource center serve as ongoing education hubs, helping customers make informed decisions.
Bottom line: LP doesn’t just sell materials – they empower buyers through content, making their brand a go-to source for industry insights and support.
How to Utilize Top Trends to Better Shape Marketing Efforts
Let’s discuss a few ways that you can utilize these marketing trends that are shaping the building materials industry and driving sales.
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Adopt a digital-first approach across the buyers’ journey. If you already have a digital catalog, enhance it with DCatalog’s ever-growing stable of tools and features so customers can easily browse, compare, and purchase products. Make it visually interesting, interactive, and engaging as well as easily searchable.Connect the digital catalog to your chosen eCommerce platform and provide real-time inventory, pricing, and ordering via integrations with ERP and CRM systems.
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Explore sustainability as a value proposition. With an increasing focus on eco-friendly practices, more builders and developers are under pressure to meet green building standards. Position your products as the choice in sustainability to help you command higher value amongst your competitors. Highlight eco-friendly materials and practices in your marketing campaigns or use a storytelling approach to connect sustainability efforts with real-world impact (for example., carbon saved, water reduced, etc.).
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Personalize your outreach efforts by using your chosen CRM and other automation tools. Segment your audience by role or project type and set up automated email campaigns. Set the campaigns to be triggered by certain actions, such as when your customers view your digital catalog, download a page, or search a certain term or product. DCatalog’s platform allows you to automatically create PDF literature from a product data source. Easily share the digital catalog via a link or by embedding it on your website, so your customers can view your products. Boost your sales growth and enhance the customer experience.
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Replace static PDFs with interactive digital flipbooks that include videos, pop up images, GIFs, and slideshow carousels that elevate the visual experience. Providing visual tools helps customers visualize the product and how it will fit into their space. It cuts back on uncertainty and helps to build buyer confidence. This will help you to further educate your audience and become a trusted source of information.
Utilizing these marketing trends in a thoughtful, data-driven way will help the building materials industry expand market reach, improve their buyers’ experience, set them apart from the competition, and drive sustainable growth in sales for 2025 and beyond.
Conclusion
As a business who sells building materials in today’s competitive market, learning to use the latest industry trends can make all the difference when you need to stand out and attract customers.The trends mentioned here are provable efforts you can follow to shape your marketing strategy. Elevate your content even further by automatically converting your product data feeds into PDF catalogs. Use our ready-to-use templates to create polished, branded PDFs and catalogs in seconds.
Now is the time to update the trends and shape your future within the building materials industry. Reach out to one of our Publishing Executives today, or sign up for a free trial to experience our platform for yourself.