Digital Marketing for Manufacturing
Digital marketing for manufacturing companies is subtely, and sometimes radically, different to marketing in other sectors. It’s not uncommon for manufacturers to have an outdated digital marketing strategy and issues with its implementation. We’ve over 20 years experience with marketing manufacturing companies products and services from strategy and planning to all aspects of implementation.
Why should manufacturers have a digital marketing strategy?
The truth is that in today’s world if you’re not online, you’re losing out. Manufacturers included. Potential customers (business and consumer) use the internet on a daily basis and the power of search engines allows them to quickly locate the information that they are looking for.
In fact, 94% of B2B customers carry out online research before purchasing a product. Yet surprisingly, the manufacturing industry tends to lag behind others when it comes to having an effective online presence. Manufacturing companies spend around 3.2% of turnover on marketing activity compared with a cross-sector average of 11.3%.
With a good digital marketing strategy in place, you will be able to communicate with a more expansive (and targeted) audience and increase your existing customer base through effective lead generation. It’ll put you in a good position against your competitors within the manufacturing sector.
By investing in digital marketing, you can achieve a great ROI. 82% of manufacturing companies who did this reported a positive outcome in 2018.
Yes, we’re a digital marketing agency, but we will always recommend that offline marketing continues to run in parallel with any online activity. More traditional channels, such as trade magazines and trade show marketing, are still important tools in the manufacturing industry. But your focus should be increasingly online.
Let’s start with your website
Your company’s website is probably the most fundamental part of your entire marketing strategy. It is the core of your digital marketing activity and, if you get it right, your website can produce great results.
It’s not just about creating a website and leaving it to run itself. You need to make sure your site is well-designed, optimised for search engines, up-to-date with fresh and relevant content, has the right user journey and is mobile responsive. It is also vital to monitor the performance of your website, to assess where your website is doing well, and where it needs to work harder.
By setting conversion goals for your website, you will have more control over the performance of your website against your digital marketing strategy. For example, you can track when people place an order on your site, fill out an enquiry form, search for a stockist etc.
Each of these conversions will give you a clear vision of where each user is in their purchase decision journey. Your website analytics will also arm you with the information you need to refine the content and user experience on your website.
However, digital marketing isn’t just about new lead generation. It’s equally important to keep your existing customers happy. Digital marketing can increase sales from existing customers by up to 15%. As a manufacturing business, customer retention and repeat sales are key success factors.
Get a boost with PPC
With good SEO, potential customers will find you in Google or another search engine. But what about boosting the visibility of your content with paid advertising? Pay Per Click, or PPC, is proven to be an effective way of driving targeted traffic to relevant content on your website. The user will then be encouraged to complete a valuable action (conversion) on the page that they have landed on.
Display advertising uses Google Display Network to place media banners across any websites that host advertisements using Google AdSense. This network can also be used for remarketing ads, which is a method of targeting people who have already visited your website but not yet converted. These types of advertising are ideal for serving targeted content to prospective customers in the manufacturing sector.
You can find out more about PPC with our ‘What is PPC?’ blog article, or request a FREE PPC audit if you are using PPC, but need some insight as to how your performance can be improved.
Not forgetting social media and email marketing
Not everyone will reach your website through search engines or hit your website directly. Social media is a key part of any digital marketing strategy. In fact, 69% of people in the manufacturing industry follow social media channels relevant to their field.
Think of your website as your information hub. Social media should give snippets of information, driving users to your website, where they will find more information on the topic – ideally a blog or a landing page. Social media content should be visual – impactful imagery, infographics and videos work particularly well. Sharing industry news, as well as your own blog content is also a great way to position your manufacturing business as a thought leader within the industry.
If your business is already present on social media, but you’d like to know how you get more out of your platforms, our FREE social media audit is ideal for you.
79% of marketers in the manufacturing industry reported that an increase in focus on email marketing has increased their ROI by 48%. Email marketing is another way to get news, informative articles and product updates to your prospective customers, serving them targeted content that encourages them to click through to a relevant page on your website. You can track your open rate, click-through rate and conversions on your landing page.
Content is King...when it is relevant, useful and optimised for SEO!
All of the above is reliant on good content – content that is relevant, useful and keyword-rich. When writing content for SEO purposes, it is important to do your research. What are the key search terms that you would like your website to show up in Google for? Optimise your copy to include these, but keep it relevant and engaging to the type of person who will be searching those key phrases.
85% of marketers in the manufacturing industry now rely on content marketing as part of their marketing strategy. Also, 82% of manufacturing marketers using content marketing have reported that it has generated an increase in sales.
Well-written digital marketing communications will help your content to become more searchable, upping your search engine rankings, and thereby giving your website more authority.
Manage everything in one place with Marketing Automation
So all of this digital marketing for manufacturing talk is beginning to sound like a lot of work, right? You were already overloaded when you started to read this article, and now you’ve discovered the powers of digital marketing – how could you possibly have time to implement all of this? We can help you to create your digital marketing strategy and get you set up with marketing automation (we can even manage that for you too).
Marketing automation can save you heaps of time. It does exactly what it says on the tin – automates your marketing channels. Need to set up a series of emails to send out when somebody fills out a form on your website? Done. Marketing automation will handle that, and so much more, for you.
Once it is configured as you want it to be, you can let the system take care of the hard work and notify you when leads come through and conversion goals are met. At AlphaQuad, we believe that SharpSpring is the best system on the market and for that reason, we’ve become partners of theirs.
Leave your competitors in the dust
Stay ahead of the competition by creating a digital marketing strategy for your manufacturing business. If you operate within channels that your competitors aren’t active in, you have the advantage of gaining a bigger share of the potential customers that are also using those online channels. Why not set the standard for the manufacturing sector by implementing some of the digital marketing techniques that we have discussed?
Not sure if your competitors are doing well online? Sign up for a FREE competitor analysis, where we will assess how well your competitors are ranking in Google and compare this to your own performance.
How can AlphaQuad help?
With more than 20 years’ experience in the digital marketing industry, we are at the forefront of the ongoing digital revolution. We can tell you now, that digital marketing for manufacturing is here to stay and it will keep evolving for decades to come. We’ve worked with companies of many sizes and within varying industries and we always produce great results.
We have, for example, acted as the sole digital marketing agency for companies such as Calor and Baxi for many years along with a variety of SME manufacturers.
Digital marketing for manufacturing companies is one of our key areas of interest. Are you up-to-speed with servitisation in the manufacturing industry, for example?
Testimonial:
“We have a well established relationship with AlphaQuad, which is reinforced by each successful project undertaken. The level of support we receive is beyond expectation.
Alphaquad’s experience shows in the wealth of knowledge and advice they are able to offer for any new ideas or approaches to online activities. AlphaQuad have focused heavily on optimising the website and the improvement of our web site’s rankings has proven their success in this. Their approach to website design is creative and equally balanced with the consideration required for optimisation, improved customer experience and increasing conversions. Again, this is a direct reflection of their experience within the digital industry.
In summary, AlphaQuad offer a complete digital consultancy service that challenges our in house approach to online activities to ensure we never stop learning.”
Andrea Price (Head of Marketing Communications at Baxi UK)
