Those unfamiliar with digital marketing, content marketing, and similar strategies understandably have some questions. In this blog post, we’re focusing on questions manufacturing businesses have about digital marketing. We’ve pulled questions from across the internet and from our own experience to answer the top questions about digital marketing in manufacturing.
Answering Your Top 3 Questions About Digital Marketing in Manufacturing
Is Digital Marketing Helpful for a Manufacturing Company?
Is Digital Marketing Helpful for a Manufacturing Company?There are many different versions of this question that we’ve heard from manufacturers (and other industries as well); can digital marketing actually increase my sales? How would digital marketing actually be effective for me? Let’s take a look.
Digital marketing is absolutely helpful for manufacturing companies. However, if you’ve previously, or are currently, getting most of your leads from methods like trade shows, word-of-mouth, traditional advertising, or cold calls, you may have some questions or reservations.How can digital marketing be helpful for a manufacturing company?What does digital marketing actually do to get you more leads and sales? And does this actually work?
The basic principles of digital marketing aren’t much different from connecting with clients at trade shows or through traditional advertising. Digital marketing uses targeted strategies to put your manufacturing company in front of potential leads when they are most interested and likely to connect with you. Let’s take a look at a few specific examples of this principle.
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Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
PPC ads allow you to put your business in front of customers when they enter specific search terms that you designate. For example, a potential client might look for a machining company by entering a search like “custom CNC machining in [City].” By advertising using these and similar search terms, and strategically targeting and setting bids on these ads, you can get the attention of those most likely to become leads, and only pay for clicks from relevant audiences.
Remarketing and retargeting ads
Targeted display advertising works similarly to PPC ads, except these ads are displayed based on a user’s previous search and viewing history. Remarketing and retargeting ads show your website or other content to users who have previously viewed your website or met other criteria. This helps to ensure your business stays at the top of their mind, and can introduce your business to others who have researched your competitors.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Some search terms are more specific, usually when users are searching for information about a problem or challenge they’re having. It can be difficult to position ads for these types of informational searches. However, search engine optimization (SEO) strategies can help you produce content that your potential lead will easily find as they look for solutions to their problems.
For example, if your business specializes in building factory presses with a high level of precision, you might create an optimized blog post explaining how your press creates precision-machined parts, and solves accuracy issues associated with other factory presses. By organizing your page properly, using the right keywords and phrases, including the right information, and employing other strategies, search engines will be able to understand what your content is about, and show it to users when they enter a relevant search. We’ll explain SEO in more detail later in the post.
Email marketing
Once a lead has made contact with you one time, email marketing is a great way to maintain the connection, showcase your expertise, and push them towards getting a quote or taking another action. Email marketing can also help you stay in contact with leads you’ve connected with through other means, like trade shows or after cold calling.
Digital Marketing Works for Manufacturers
Digital marketing can be extremely effective for manufacturers, when the strategy is properly deployed. Electro-Matic, an automation components supplier, saw their website leads go from 5 per month to 20-30 per week after utilizing our customized digital marketing strategy. Their organic conversion rates from leads to sales also increased by over 200%. Take a look at the case study to see how we did it.
Is Content Marketing Essential for B2B Businesses?
Is Content Marketing Essential for B2B Businesses?Content marketing is one aspect of digital marketing which specifically concerns the text, images, videos, or audio you produce. By creating quality content that speaks to the needs and interests of your audience, and by optimizing this content so users can find it when they make a relevant search, you can pull in more traffic, leads, customers and sales. Content marketing can be helpful in many situations, including manufacturing and other B2B businesses. Whether or not content marketing isessential depends on your strategy and your business.
Many people involved in manufacturing, from salespeople to engineers, leadership to marketing, and many more, have decades of experience and knowledge in their industry that can be enormously helpful to clients and customers who may be new to it. However, many of these professionals sometimes struggle to put their expertise into words that lay people can understand. Moreover, writing so search engines can categorize the content and display it properly adds an additional challenge. Finally, many professionals understandably struggle to make time for content creation in addition to their other duties. These challenges can make it difficult to get started and maintain a content marketing strategy. However, a content marketing strategy can have big payoffs. Again, let’s take a look at a few examples.
The buyer’s journey
Buyers of all types move through steps before making a purchase. Whether they’re making a small or large purchase, for themselves or on behalf of their company, buyers conduct research to understand their challenges, compare solutions, and assess risks. Your content marketing strategy can address the steps in this process, and move your leads through the buyer’s journey.
Addressing concerns
As your audience researches your business and your products, they may have additional concerns or questions that could drive them towards competitors. This is especially true if your business is introducing a new product, disrupting an existing process, or doing things differently than many competitors. You can use content marketing to address these concerns and show the unique benefits provided by your business.
Displaying expertise
As clients seek out manufacturers, some might prioritize a low price point, while others look for a high level of expertise and high-quality production. However, it can be difficult to tell which manufacturers are well-informed and produce high-quality products if they don’t clearly show it. A library of informative content can show that you are an experienced and knowledgeable authority in your industry.
Building Traffic and Leads with Content Marketing
Many manufacturing companies assume that their products or services are too narrowly-targeted to make sense for a content marketing strategy. However, the right content strategy can improve traffic and drives leads.
After applying a content marketing strategy and a targeted B2B blogging strategy, this client, targeting small and mid-sized retailers, saw average traffic to their blog triple in less than a year. With carefully-placed CTAs and a lead-nurturing strategy, they also leveraged this traffic into leads, while also improving the overall value of their site.
This equipment manufacturing client, targeting mid-sized and large food manufacturers, also saw their blog traffic rising steadily throughout the year after applying a targeted content marketing strategy. Their traffic tripled in this time frame, bringing in new leads and significantly improving rankings and traffic to their product and contact pages.
These are just a few examples of what a targeted content strategy can do. With the right content and the right strategy, your website can become a powerful part of your overall marketing strategy.
Will SEO Work for My Business?
Will SEO Work for My Business?Previously, we discussed search engine optimization (SEO) and how it impacts other digital marketing strategies. You’ve no doubt heard of SEO before, and you might be wondering how effective or important it is. Many business owners and staff in manufacturing and other industries wonder if SEO efforts are worth it, if they’re important, and if they’ll even work.
Essentially, SEO efforts are designed to make websites and their content easier for people to find when they enter a relevant search. If you have great content and provide great solutions to your customers, but your website or content isn’t organized in the way search engines are designed to look for, your pages will appear under your competitors’ when a user enters a relevant search, if they appear at all. This issue is fixable with a bit of SEO.
SEO is a critical part of content marketing, and an important part of digital marketing in general, but the amount of focus or attention it requires depends on your overall strategy. If PPC or remarketing ads are pulling in leads and sales, it may make more sense to focus your attention on those efforts, and make your ads as convincing and targeted as possible. However, if you’re not seeing the results you’d like from your ads, you think it’s likely that many people in your target audience are using an ad-blocker, or you want to grow your organic (unpaid) traffic to strengthen your website for the future, SEO will be important. Once again, let’s take a look at a few examples to show what SEO does and what this might look like.
Building up organic traffic
Organic traffic refers to the number of users who visit your site through a regular search, not through an advertisement. Building up this traffic through SEO can help users find your site, and makes your website more useful and valuable in general. Since this type of traffic is technically free, it’s a good investment. For example, if one of your webpages gets lots of organic clicks when users enter a valuable search term, that page is approximately as valuable as the ads other businesses continuously pay for to put their webpages at the top of that search.
Spotlighting existing content
If you already have content that leads or customers find valuable, SEO strategies can help other potential leads find it, and find your business in the process. For example, maybe you have a how-to guide for designing a part, or a guide about different types of steel and their ideal uses, or an instructional brochure explaining the differences between your products. However, it might be buried somewhere on your website, or contained in internal documents only. SEO strategies can help you benefit from this useful content, get more traffic from it, and use it to entice future leads.
Boosting sales pages
Many manufacturers work on larger projects with customization and specific quotes, but they also provide online sales of particular parts or components. SEO on sales pages can help customers find these pages. This not only builds up different types of revenue, but these smaller sales can then lead to larger sales later down the road.
Improving page visibility
The goal of SEO is to put your webpages in front of your audience. If your pages aren’t currently getting much traffic, SEO strategies can help them improve. For example, maybe you want to work with customers located in a particular area, like greater Chicago. You’ve built a page for these leads specifically, but you aren’t getting much traffic to the page. Localized SEO strategies can help target this audience, and move your page towards the top of a results page when a Chicago lead enters a relevant search.
Using SEO for B2B
This logistics software supplier, targeting large and mid-sized manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors, saw impressive improvements in their web traffic after applying insights gleaned from a content audit. Though their blog contained a wide range of helpful information for logistics experts, it wasn’t organized in a way that was easy to find organically. By reorganizing their content and optimizing for search engines, their content delivered more value.
Digital Marketing and Manufacturing
Increasingly, manufacturing clients are researching and searching for suppliers online. In many cases, online research is not the only search these potential clients will make, but it is an important factor. The right digital marketing strategy can help you grab the attention of these potential leads, build up your brand and industry authority to boost your profile at trade shows, and provide supplemental information and hooks for cold calling or cold emailing. The right digital marketing strategy will work with your existing strategies, and give you additional avenues to grow your business.
If you’re interested in digital marketing for manufacturing, and wondering what a digital marketing strategy might look like for your business, contact us.We’re happy to answer your questions, and give you personalized information about digital marketing.
