Construction Information Technology Blog

What is Online Bidding?

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I was doing some research related to some marketing we are planning for our online bid submission software for the construction industry and discovered that my assumptions about what bidding means is quite different from what many others are searching for in Google. It is an interesting challenge for marketers today to try to figure out what terms people search for that are relevant to your offerings.

The page one Google results:
“Online Bidding” – Predominantly online auction sites
“Online Bidding Sites” – More online auction sites
“Online Bidding Software” – Online auctions and one construction planroom application
“Online Bidding Software Construction” – Now we are closer but virtually all are estimating and planroom software

I had a novel idea. How about searching for exactly what we are introducing:
“Online Bid Submission Software” – all results relate to search engine optimization
“Construction Online Bid Submission Software” – more estimating and planroom applications

How about the more Canadian term of Tendering:
“Tendering” – mostly Canadian and UK government bid opportunity sites
"Construction Tendering” – more estimating software and a UK provider of bidding services for general procurement but not constructions services

The conclusion to the story is – a great deal of searching reveals the fact that there is almost nobody in the English speaking world who has the type of technology we have that spans the entire bidding process from invitation to bid through to bid reception. It speaks to our claim that we are innovators in the industry because the same thing was true for our planroom software when we started the company 10 years ago. Today there are numerous players in the planroom space. It appears we were right about our vision for managing construction bidding (tendering) documents online. Given the initial positive reaction to our online bid submission software it seems the only challenge we have left is to figure out how to connect with all the ‘Googlers’ in the construction universe.