knowLedge5 Ideas For Marketing a Manufacturing Company

Investing in digital marketing for your manufacturing company will not only serve your business right now, but it will build a foundation that will serve as a source of business for years to come. The process of finding clients has changed significantly in recent years, creating the need not just for standard advertising methods but the use of digital marketing for manufacturers.

We created this step-by-step guide to give you some ideas for how to incorporate the most effective digital marketing tactics. Our top 5 ideas for marketing a manufacturing company include:

1. Build buyer personas
2. Improve Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
4. Content Marketing
5. Email Campaigns

Building Your Buyer Personas

Before you can properly build out the rest of your manufacturing business marketing plan, you must first have an understanding of who you are trying to reach. The buyer persona functions as a filter and helps determine who is more likely to purchase prospects. 

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional version of your ideal customer based on research and data about your current customers. In a buyer persona, you'll want to define your customer's:

• Demographics
• Behaviors
• Motivations
• Goals

Importance of a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona helps you better understand your customers (and prospective customers). It’s based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Understanding your buyer persona allows you to create marketing messages and strategies that speak directly to them.

Steps to Build a Buyer Persona

1. Begin researching your ideal manufacturing buyer persona by talking to your sales and customer service teams. 
2. Look at your existing customer data from your website, CRM system, survey responses, etc., to help you better understand who your customers are.
3. Create your buyer persona by defining your ideal customer's demographics, behaviors, motivations, and goals.
4. Use your buyer persona to create targeted marketing messages and strategies to attract your ideal customers and close more sales.

Learn more about building a buyer persona here.

Search Engine Optimization

Our next marketing idea for manufacturing companies is improving SEO. When potential buyers and customers or your manufacturing business are searching for a provider, 81% of them search online. When they type they keywords into the search engine, they'll click on a few of the results that show up on page one. 

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, or "SEO" for short, is a technique that can be used on a website to improve site visibility amongst search engines. It’s a means of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a site from search engines, ideally resulting in increased revenue.

Investing in search engine optimization is the first step toward connecting with these prospects. It's not the only step; you can also invest in PPC Advertising for faster results.

How SEO Works

SEO is a complex and ever-evolving practice comprised of three main components.

1. On-page SEO helps make your website more visible and accessible to search engines through the optimization of your website’s structure and code and through high-quality content relevant to your target audience.
   
   
2. Off-page SEO focuses on improving your website’s visibility and ranking on SERPs, such as link-building from other high-quality websites and promoting your website on social media.
   
   
3. Technical SEO ensures that your website is not only accessible but easy to crawl and index by search engines. It involves optimizing your website’s hosting, server, and security settings in addition to setting up Google Search Console and other tools to help Google index your website more effectively.

There is no better long-term play to build your manufacturing business than to have core SEO in place. This is what will attract customers to you on a consistent basis for years to come.

To improve SEO:

• Develop refined keyword strategies based on authentic, specific research for the manufacturing industry
• Build out a keyword strategy that takes your competition into consideration 
• Understand which keywords you are currently ranking for
• Ensure your technical SEO isn't dragging your website, and rankings down
• Build out your local SEO effort if your manufacturing business wants to target local prospects

For a comprehensive overview of SEO for Manufacturing businesses, click here. 

Conversion Rate Optimization

With excellent SEO, you will start to have traffic flooding your website. Our next marketing idea covers what to do once this traffic is on your site. Most customers will wonder, "How do I do business with you?" after reading your content or exploring your website.

Many manufactures don't present/show a clear next step to start the formal sales process. They may have a section that states "Contact Us" but that isn't a clear way to say "Buy Now."

To ensure you have a website optimized to convert casual website visitors into paying customers, your calls to action should provide clarity on how to get started. A call to action stating "Request a Free Consultation" or "Upgrade your Process Today" clearly directs prospects towards buying. 

Optimization Best Practices

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) aims to get the most out of your website traffic by turning more of them into leads or customers.

Here are some of the best practices for optimizing your website for conversions.

• Understand your audience. Know who your website visitors are and what they’re looking for. Use this information to determine what kind of messaging and call-to-actions (CTAs) convert them most effectively.
• Simplify your website design - make it as user-friendly as possible. Visitors should be able to easily navigate your site and find what they’re looking for. If your design is too complicated or confusing, you’ll likely lose visitors before they even have a chance to convert.
• Use compelling CTAs. Use clear and concise call-to-action text, buttons, or images. Also, place CTAs in strategic locations on your website where they’re most likely to be seen and clicked on by visitors. And, of course, your CTAs should be compelling enough to encourage visitors to take the desired action.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing serves numerous purposes in an effective digital marketing plan. You have probably heard the concept that “Content is King” and it’s for good reason. 

Content serves to help with: 

• SEO
• Inbound Marketing
• Account Based Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Customer Engagement
• Building Industry Authority 

Simply put, if you are going to focus your efforts anywhere, focus on content. You can more easily grow into other areas of digital marketing once you have great content. 

The content on your website needs to be valuable, but you also need to consider content marketing from other vantage points.

• Creating content for your LinkedIn page allows B2B clients to find you. Becoming a thought leader on the social media site is one of the best ways to get the attention of other companies that need your services.
• A blog can help to provide answers to common questions your clients may have, including offering insight into what you offer, a behind-the-scenes look, as well answer questions that people often ask. 
• Ebooks, guides, and other valuable content can also be important for manufacturing companies. It allows you to build your business by developing backlinks – when you have high-quality documents like this, other companies will link to you, growing your presence online. 

Once your customer clicks on your content, they are likely to look at other resources on your website and start the formal sales process.

Sharing Blog Content

In addition, you can easily use your manufacturing blog content to engage potential customers through various digital channels. 

You can share your blogs through:

• Social media to provide your social media following an informative and engaging post, like LinkedIn mentioned previously
• An email list of contacts so you start building trust with your prospective customers
• Outbound marketing to provide a conversation starter for your sales reps
• Create a case study to highlight your success with another customer. 

For the best ways to create content for your website, click here.

Email Marketing Campaigns

Our last marketing idea for manufacturers is creating email marketing campaigns. Email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing tactics for reaching prospects and customers. With email marketing, you can effectively engage customers directly in their inboxes, directly on their phones.

Even if they don't read every email, your manufacturing company name appears in front of them every time you show up in their inbox. Those emails remind prospects and customers your company is still there and ready to serve them.

With that said, we are not encouraging you to abuse access to someone's inbox. The best email marketing always leads by adding value to the customer's life. 

Effective Email Marketing Ideas

Some of the best email marketing ideas are:

• Send blog content regularly
• Offer evergreen advice for your customers
• Provide a free guide to help your customer overcome a problem.
• Use a sales funnel: once the content has been delivered, an automated email series promoting them to take the next step in the process begins. 

The average consumer needs to interact with a business between 8-12 times before they are ready to buy. By utilizing email marketing, you will get numerous touches with your prospects without spending a ton of money. Once you have their email, your only cost is the software you use.

To learn more about effective email marketing, click here.

Need Help With Your Digital Marketing?

After reading this guide, you have a clear idea of what needs to happen to effectively promote your manufacturing business. If you’d like a custom digital marketing plan for your business, talk to one of our digital marketing experts about what a digital marketing plan could look like for your organization by requesting a free consultation.