With Untapped Digital Opportunity – Harvest High ROI Using Digital Marketing In Manufacturing Industry
Introduction:
If you own a small and medium sized manufacturing company, then you should be aware of the fact that around 77% of people read reviews online before buying a product. Many manufacturers rely on traditional marketing to promote their brands through trade shows, word of mouth, etc,. and they do work. But the question is all about the magnitude of leads, results and returns. The numbers are not sufficient to survive in this competitive market. To drive traffic to your website, generate leads and brand awareness you should focus on digital strategies and stop relying on traditional marketing approach.
Today's industrial buyers are more determined and more educated than ever to avoid your salespeople. Most of the industrial buyer’s journey is done prior to talking to sales (nearly 70%), and most prospective buyers are looking at your website as a part of their research process. Over 95% of B2B buying journeys start with an Internet search. Manufacturers must have strong digital presence to attract buyers online.
To stand out among the mammoth number of manufacturers in the market, to generate leads and convert them into potential customers, Digital marketing plays an important role in promoting your brand and products effectively.
Inbound marketing is a customer-focused, two-way communication. The goal of inbound marketing is to meet your customers where they are and providing relevant and personalised content.
Inbound marketing includes:
· Content marketing
· Websites
· Video
· Social Media
· PPC Ads (google, Facebook, Instagram)
Why manufacturers should use digital marketing channels?
In this rapidly evolving digital world, consumer’s buying patterns have drastically changed, they demand high digital presence that makes their decision making process simple and convenient. And the traditional marketing is no longer the best way to yield high ROI.
Nowadays, the buyer isn't dependent on the sales team to inform them about the product anymore. Internet simplifies the research process of a buyer by providing all the information and answers to their question in a fraction of second.
Digital marketing would help manufacturers in:
· Educating buyers on complex products
· Improving brand perception and industry perception
· Generating qualified leads
· Increasing sales velocity
· Recruiting skilled workers
The most effective digital strategies that brings your brand to life through:
1. Website
2. SEO
3. Content marketing
4. Videos
5. Social media
6. Paid ads (PPC)
1.Website:
Online presence of a company, regardless of its industry, will have huge positive impact on its growth. A website ensures strong online presence that can break the limits and generates high revenue.Websites can be accessed at anytime, anywhere and by anyone that will have better user experience that builds a positive brand image.
Why do we need a website?
· Any business would need a website as it creates first impression on the company, the websites will help us to stand out from the crowd in market.
· Showcasing your brand to your prospective customers, clearly establishing who you are, what you represent and what you stand for, you increase the chances of your customers buying from you.
· Websites will have its positive impact on your ROI through generating leads, websites can also help our customers to be updated with our products that makes upselling easier.
What are the elements that a website must have?
Information exchange:
One of the most favourable aspects of a website is how easy it makes information accessible to customers from any part of the world, a website acts as a medium to communicate with customers to provide them with information and resources.
1. Advertisements that update customers about offers on our products
2. Newsletters that informs customers about any upcoming events and news
3. Contact forms that invite queries or requests from customers
· FAQs
· Chatbots:
Chatbots can help users with important pieces of information like signing-up procedures, information about services/products, and so on.
2. Search Engine Optimization: (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your ranking on the search engine results page and getting organic traffic to your website.
SEO is important because your ranking is connected with your visibility. The visibility can be increased by focusing on what keywords you target customers are using and by knowing what they are looking for, solutions they are seeking and using them to optimize your website. The SEO can help a manufacturer to make his product highly visible which generates higher leads that yield increased revenue.
Benefits of SEO are:
· It increases brand visibility
· Helps to generate leads
· Improves site’s user experience
· It provides high promotion
· It amplifies PPC success
· SEO helps in generating high ROI and conversions
Best SEO practices can attract a whole new segment of your target audience. This helps in growing your customer base by significantly increasing the organic traffic on your website.
Brand credibility is better when you have organic views and reach and your business can be promoted without spending money on paid ads.
3.Content marketing:
It’s important to know what should be said than how it can be said, content is the base for any marketing strategy.
If you are selling complex goods, high value products then content marketing is a vital tool that helps your target customer to have better picture of your product. Quality content will provide clarity and sufficient knowledge about the product and its uses.
Examples of content marketing includes:
· Checklists
· eBooks
· white papers, etc,.
these are some content that buyers usually do research before purchase.
The content must be unique, informative and engaging that provides better reading experience. The content must be reliable and trustworthy.
Provide relevant contents will help you customers in shortlisting and evaluating your company during decision making.
4.Videos:
Do you know that 122 million people are watching YouTube each day, producing video content is a effective way to educate your customers about your product, production process and facility.
Data shows that the most powerful call-to-action is the play button. Video content drives organic search more than 50 times compared to plain text. The more effective way of nurturing your leads is by using relevant video contents.
As per Forbes, the average user spends 88% more time on a website with videos. And the target customer who watches your product videos are more likely to buy the product.
You can make use of videos can help your customers to understand your product better and can be used to showcase your product.
Videos can be used in many ways: on social media, in emails, on your homepage, etc.
5.Social Media:
The accelerating change of pace in mobile technology, played a major role in the impact of social media. With social media marketing, manufacturing companies can promote their product and services with the use of social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.,
Social media helps to promote blogs and related contents to showcase company culture.
Social media platforms offer powerful tools for tracking customer behaviour and measuring the success of marketing campaigns.B2B customers are majorly influenced by LinkedIn than other social media platforms.
The social media has a huge impact on the reach of your product and brand, above statistics insist the level of impact of social media in business and buying behaviour of customers.
Leads and conversions can be generated using Instagram and Facebook through features such as direct messaging, call to action buttons on profiles, and appointment booking capabilities.
Social media platforms has visual nature that effectively build your identity across people thus improving brand awareness, these will improve results will all other campaigns.
6.Paid ads:
According to Search Engine Journal, click-through rate (CTR) is less than a 1% for the results appear on page 2 of a Google search. Paid ads strategy will keep your company front of your customers.
98% of manufacturing companies pay to promote their website. In the manufacturing industry, both content marketing and paid ads play an important role in lead generation.
In PPC marketing, for each click on your advertisement you will pay a certain amount.
Paid ads are used by advertisers who bid to participate in real-time auctions in order for their ads to be shown on a specific search engine.
With Pay Per Click (PPC), you can generate predictable and targeted traffic to your website. When your paid ads goes live, it shows up all over the web like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Google ads:
Google Ads, often known as Google AdWords, is the world’s most popular and largest PPC advertising platform.
Advertisers use Google bid on keywords, a specific words and phrases often included in search queries entered by Google users. The advertiser is charged a certain amount of money each time a user clicks on an ad, thus known as “pay-per-click advertising.”
More than 3.5 billion search queries are recorded every single day in google.Google’s advertising has two strategies: the Search network, and the Display network. The Search network where advertisers can bid on millions of phrases and keywords to target customers.
The Google Display Network offers more visual ads such as banners, spans approximately 98% of the World Wide Web.
Facebook ads:
Facebook ads are example of paid ads on social networks, advertising on Facebook can be thought of as similar to Google Ads, in that advertisers using both platforms are essentially promoting their business via the Internet. Unlike paid search, paid social helps users find businesses based on the things they’re interested in and the ways in which they behave online.
With the highest number of monthly active users of any social network in the world, Facebook has become a highly competitive and potentially lucrative element of many businesses’ digital advertising strategies.
Google Ads will help you to find new customers, while Facebook helps new customers to find you.
Instagram ads:
Instagram ads are posts for which businesses pay to display ads to Instagram users. Similar to Facebook, Instagram ads, are included in users’ feeds, Stories, Explore, and more they appear throughout the app. They look similar to normal posts but always contain a “sponsored” label to indicate that they are an ad. They also often have more features than a normal post, such as links, CTA buttons, and product catalogues.
Instagram ads can reach over 1.2 billion people, or 20% of the world’s population over age 13.
Types of Instagram ads:
· Image ads
· Stories ads
· Video ads
· Carousel ads
· Collection ads
· Explore ads
· IGTV ads
· Shopping ads
· Reels ads
Cost-per-action strategy (pay-per-click) is used by Instagram and Facebook. Since Facebook owns Instagram, both has the same setup.
There are multiple benefits available in using paid ads:
· The first important benefit is strong ROI and instant traffic
· Paid ads are affordable and measurable - It’s easy to keep track of how much money is being spent, and in order to avoid overspending on ads. The users can get enough data to analyse the performance of the ads for users to make decisions on whether or not the ads are working.
· Helps in promoting brand awareness
· Paid ads are targeted to more specific audience
· Remarketing or Retargeting ads allows you to re-engage with customers who have previously visited your website.
· Easier to get ranking than organic ads - Websites take some time to rank organically, whereas paid ads provide you with the opportunity to appear higher on search engines from the start.
Most strong and effective digital strategies has good mix of both PPC and strong SEO.
Paid Ads helps us to bypass the competition and the tedious, long-term work of rising to the top by ranking organically. With PPC, businesses can funnel traffic to a website or a landing page immediately.
Conclusion:
The new digital era has changed the way of communication and transaction in market, the manufacturing industry has laid back trend in the emerging market but now they slowly start to adopt these new technologies. Manufacturing industry has a huge untapped opportunity in digital market. B2B customer research and buying decisions have been altered according to the technologies, so digital marketing is a need of the hour that even small and mid-sized industries can make use of it to compete against well established brands in this competitive market.
The digital market is an open stage where all the small, medium and top manufacturing brands have equal opportunities to showcase their products and attract potential buyers towards them. The only requirement is to know how and when to use this digital boon to exploit the opportunities in an effective way to outshine other competitors in your manufacturing sector.
“It’s never too late to make things better”, So never delay a minute, just implement your digital marketing strategy now.
