Manufacturing is typically a sales-driven industry where customers are acquired through outreach and word-of-mouth referrals. Online marketing is seldom on the radar for most manufacturing businesses. However, this has started to change in the past decade - there is growing interest among manufacturing businesses to use marketing to reach prospective customers in the initial stages of their buying cycle.
A big reason for this is the global opportunity that comes with this. With sales, manufacturing businesses can only hope to find customers within the zones targeted by their salespeople. However, online marketing can take businesses global and it is possible to find buyers for your products from around the world with as much effort as it takes to find them locally.
In this article, we will take a look at some tips to help manufacturing businesses use online marketing to find buyers for their products.
Manufacturing Marketplaces
Success with online marketing is relatively easy today compared to the past. This is because of the availability of platforms like Alibaba, ThomasNet and Hoovers. These websites are visited by thousands of potential buyers every day and investing on these platforms can get you a steady stream of new buyers every month.
There are two ways to benefit from such marketplaces. Listing on these websites can get you in front of thousands of potential buyers. But doing so can come with its own set of challenges since there are hundreds of other businesses to compete with. Advertising on these platforms can help you with your visibility. You may also choose to buy leads from these websites to reach out to yourself.
SEO
Despite the global opportunities that come with online marketing, a lot of buyers still look for local suppliers for products they are looking for. For instance, a customer looking for custom sheet metal fabrication in NYC would use similar terms while searching Google. There is hence greater likelihood for your business to find local customers with Google than you would find from other parts of the country or the world.
Use reliable local SEO software tools to optimize your business listing to rank locally. This involves listing your business on relevant categories in local directories, building reviews for your online listing page, and also building relevant links from various local and industry blogs and websites.
CRO
Google is just one of the many channels to bring traffic to your website. You may also seek to acquire targeted traffic through advertisements, press releases and partnerships with businesses that offer complementary services.
Bringing traffic to your website is just one of many challenges. Only a small percentage of visitors to your website eventually convert. There are two ways to improve ROI. The first approach is to increase the percentage of visitors who end up submitting their contact details on your website. Use of Smartforms allows you to integrate your forms directly with your contact management software so that sales teams can have all the information they need while reaching out to prospects.
The other approach which is complementary to the above is the use of remarketing. Remarketing lets marketers to distribute their ads specifically to an audience that visited your website but did not convert. Studies show that remarketing can dramatically improve conversion rates of your website visitors.
Regardless of which approach you choose (you can also choose both), it is worth investing in drip marketing. Manufacturing customers spend a lot of time in the research phase of the buying process. A drip marketing campaign helps in nurturing these prospects and nudge them towards a sale eventually. There are a lot of email marketing software tools like Constant Contact and others that can help you with this.
You can also invest in SMS-based drip campaigns. However, the rules around GDPR are stringent and thus requires rigorous compliance.
We are merely scratching the surface with these tips above. Customers for the manufacturing industry are just like other customers when it comes to product research and purchase. Understanding their buying behavior is pivotal to identifying the platforms that work.