Digital Marketing for Manufacturers | 6 Methods
This is the ultimate guide on Digital Marketing for manufacturers.
We’ll be going over 6 ways to market your manufacturing company online. Giving you an overview of what each method includes alongside its benefits.
1. Invest in a modern website
The foundation of your digital marketing strategy is going to be a website. Not just any old website, but a sparkling modern website.
Your website needs to be easy to navigate, easy to filter through products, find information and contact you. The site needs to be fast loading, have a good technical SEO foundation (more on SEO later) and overlay, make the user’s experience simple.
The typography should be easy to read, leave enough white space and make sure it’s mobile friendly.
These are the main elements to a successful website. Remember, keep your user in mind. What do they want to see? What will make them want to continue browsing your site and ultimately, do business with you.
Conversion rate optimisation
There’s no point in spending your resources in getting those visitors to your site and having a handful convert. There are steps you can take to ensure to squeeze the most out of your visitors.
Reviews
Having reviews vs not having reviews will have a big impact on how many people decide to buy with you. Show off your testimonials, put them on your product pages and your home page.
Ask customers if they could leave a review on your site.
Media
Including media on pages adds a different dimension to your pages. Users will be able to understand the product more. Videos help massively, especially if your product has a learning curve to it.
Offer free shipping
No one wants to pay for shipping, it’s a turn-off for many consumers. They feel like they’re having to pay extra. So if you can, offer free shipping.
There can be certain requirements the user has to fulfil in order to qualify for free shipping. This can be a certain amount of money spent or how much weight the items are.
Quadruple check your copy
If customers are finding spelling and grammatical errors within your copy, they’re going to question if you’re a legitimate manufacturer. If you’re trustworthy. Afterall, if you haven’t spent the time to check your copy, why would you spend the time looking after customers?
2. Produce video
There was a time when blogging was a great way to drive lots of traffic to your site and it still is. However, video content is taking over, even when you Google search stuff, videos constantly appear.
Users want more video content, it’s a fantastic way to drive traffic. It’s also going to give users a better understanding of what the product does, its benefits and how to use it.
Creating video content shows you’re an authority in your space, you understand what you’re talking about and you’re happy sharing your knowledge with everyone.
3. Invest in SEO
SEO is by far one of the most lucrative traffic sources online. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s the act of ranking your web pages for search terms related to your business.
For example, let’s say you’re a pump manufacturer, a search query you could target would be ‘sewage pumps’. Ranking for this search query will help bring in highly qualified traffic and increase your bottom line.
There are 3 core principles of SEO:
- Technical SEO
- On page SEO
- Off page SEO
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is all about the technical aspects of your website. This overlaps with having a modern website, something we have gone through above.
The website must have a clean URL structure, fast loading speeds, optimised faceted navigation, optimised for the search index, secure pages, includes breadcrumbs, sitemap and much more.
Technical SEO is all about the foundation of your website, its structure. Without technical SEO, your website will struggle to rank.
If you’re confused and would like to know more about technical SEO, shoot us over an email
On page SEO
On page SEO is all about optimising the on page elements of your website. This will include things like your meta title, H1 tag, URL, copy etc. Everything that happens on your website is considered on page SEO.
Off page SEO
Off page SEO is everything that happens off your website. Off page SEO boils down to one thing and that’s backlinks. A backlink is a link from one domain to another domain. For example, if website A is linking to website B, website B has received a backlink from website A.
The best way to think of backlinks is as votes, the more backlinks (votes) you get, the higher you will rank.
However, these backlinks have to be relevant. If you’re a Pump manufacturer, it doesn’t make sense getting a backlink from a gambling website. There’s no relation. So keep all of your backlinks relevant.
4. Take advantage of PPC
PPC stands for Pay Per Click and you guessed it… you pay for every click. PPC is different from platforms such as Facebook. With Facebook Ads, you pay for impressions, whenever someone sees your ads, you are billed.
Google Ads is the most popular PPC platform and you should be advertising your business on there.
Make sure to advertise your categories, this is the fastest and easiest way to get your ads up and attain sales.
Make sure to set up your Google Shopping Ads. Google Shopping ads are the boxes that come up in the search results showcasing the product. This is a great way to get a lot of eye balls to your products.
Out of all the types of Google Ads you can create, Google shopping ads give you the greatest reach.
You create a budget with each campaign, easily allowing you to control costs. You can get into more detail with the costs by choosing how you spend each click.
For example, you can choose to spend 50p per click, £1, £5, £20 etc. It’s up to you. The way your ads show up is by bidding for keywords, the higher your bid, the higher your ad will show.
PPC works great alongside SEO as SEO takes time to work but your PPC ads will show instantly on Google search.
5. Build your email list
An email list is an easy way to keep in touch with your customers and potential customers. There are different ways to build and market your email list.
For example, when someone purchases from you, you can later send emails asking how the experience was, to give you a review and upsell them on your other products.
You can also create a lead magnet to get people into your email list. A lead magnet is something you give away in exchange for the user’s email address.
The lead magnet could be an eBook, a cheat sheet, tool etc. It’s something the user will find valuable and would be more than happy to give their email address in exchange.
Building an email list is a great way to nurture leads and get them into a sales funnel. It’s a way to build trust and rapport with your leads and eventually get them to do business with you.
6. Track all the data
You need to track all of the important metrics on your website. To find out what the important metrics are, first define your goal and then see what metric leads to that goal. For example…
Goal: Sales
What leads to a sale: Traffic
Traffic source: Google
Keywords that bring in Google traffic:
So in the above example, the goal is sales. What leads to that sale is traffic, you can track how much traffic you get with a free tool called Google Analytics.
What’s the source of the traffic? It’s Google. You can use Google Analytics to track the source of the traffic also.
Which keywords bring in Google traffic? You can use the Google Search Console to help you, along with using a rank tracker like SerpRobot.
Track your data so you’re able to understand your business better.
If you need help marketing your manufacturing business, feel free to get in touch with us.