Were You Even Marketing in the First Place?
For a lot of industrial manufacturers, the answer to this question is no. For another big segment, it’s “we go to trade shows”—so, not really. It doesn’t seem like marketing is really necessary or relevant when you’re an industrial manufacturer, after all, you’re not marketing to consumers, but to other businesses, most of whom need your product to make their product or perform their service. Additionally, industrial products aren’t exactly high appeal; they’re useful and utilitarian, but they aren’t going to bring the boys to the yard.
But, you still have a product to sell, and you still want to reach new customers. Your industrial manufacturing marketing strategy needs to be different than B2Cs, but it shouldn’t be no strategy at all.
Inbound Marketing for Industrial Manufacturers
So, you know you shouldn’t be running TV ads with celebrities endorsing your spring for garage door openers or hubcap bolt covers, but what should you be doing to attract potential buyers? Inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is kind of what it sounds like: rather than going out to your customers with interruptive ads or cold sales calls, you bring interested customers to you. (Learn more about the methodology in our complete guide to inbound marketing.) You do that by creating targeted digital content and ads that will appeal to your ideal customer and the person in the role responsible for sourcing and purchasing your products.
SEO and Digital Content
If you don’t already know this, you need a website and a digital presence. It’s 2018 (almost 2019!). But you don’t just need a website—if yours looks the same as it did in 1998 or even 2008, that’s not good—you need compelling digital content that will appeal to potential customers and make your site easy for search engines to find and categorize. This is SEO, Search Engine Optimization (find out more about SEO for manufacturers here). The content on your site should provide customers with all the information they need about your product, whether they’re just discovering that your product exists or they’re trying to decide on a new supplier, as well as the keywords for which you want your website to show up in the search engine results.
PPC and Paid search
PPC, pay-per-click advertisement, and paid search are also crucial components of inbound marketing for industrial manufacturers.If you have a good site and strong content, you need to make sure your desired clients are seeing it. Advertising is how you do that. Click To Tweet Paid search allows you to be featured as a search result at the top of the page in a native ad for search words that you select that your ideal clients will be searching. This puts you in front of your audience when they’re looking for what you sell.
You can also use PPC ads to target your ideal buyers. For industrial manufacturers, LinkedIn ads are the perfect way to do this. Your ideal customers are often buyers or sourcing specialists for a manufacturing company, and they’re professionals who use LinkedIn. Not only is your audience using the platform, their job title and company information is included in their profiles, and LinkedIn uses this information to target ads. You can target ads to people with specific job titles, like “Purchasing Specialist,” “Sourcing Specialist,” etc., as well as by specific company, ensuring that your ads are seen by the people to whom they will be highly relevant, the people you want as customers.
While traditional marketing techniques haven’t always worked for industrial manufacturers, inbound marketing is changing how industrial manufacturers can attract potential customers and edge out their competitors. Click To Tweet
If you’re interested in learning more about how inbound marketing can work for your industrial manufacturing enterprise, it’s time to talk with the experts at Evenbound. We have experience marketing in the industrial and B2B space and can increase the ROI of your marketing efforts.
