As a manufacturer, your marketing has always been last priority.

Your team of design engineers and production guys are the best in the business. Your facility is full of the newest materials, precision machinery, and leading-edge technologies.

But your marketing efforts… well, let’s be real here: your marketing efforts are virtually non-existent. 😩

At best, your company’s marketing is stuck in the dark age of industry print magazines and mundane (yet extremely expensive) annual trade shows.

So, if you’re feeling a bit like Bill Murray on Groundhog Day, you may be wondering: is right now the time to hunker down and get marketing up to speed?

Yes — now is the time to engineer a comprehensive, digital marketing plan for 2019 and blow the socks off your sales projections! 📈

Consider this quick list of best-performing digital marketing and social media tactics for your manufacturing business this year.

 

New Branding & Web Design Overhaul

Your company website is the foundation for your online presence.

• Cold leads will visit your website immediately.
• Warm leads will visit your website immediately.
• Even hot leads, referred by trusted clients/friends/family members will visit your website immediately.

Does your website help to close the deal? Or does it make the person hesitate?

Does your messaging attract potential clients, partners, and team members? Does it feel compelling?

Do you put your audience in the driver seat and portray them as the hero? Or does your site talk only about you?

If the look and feel of your website does not quickly convey the value you bring to the table… showing your company as a successful, expert guide for your customers… then the website is not serving its purpose. It will not work well for generating leads or winning new business until you fix it.

 

By the way, the manufacturing sector is notorious for having extremely outdated websites!

 

In true Jeff Foxworthy style, if you answer YES to any of these questions, you just might be in need a new website:

• The “About” page features photos of your facility and team from more than five years ago.
• You no longer offer the core services or products listed on the site.
• You have a tab for “Resources” with the words “page coming soon” displayed.
• Your contact page form is broken and you aren’t receiving any messages!
• Your existing website screams 1992 with pixelated WordArt and flashing buttons.

All jokes aside, your website serves as a critical first impression to potential new customers. These types of issues act as a major roadblock to winning new business, by giving you a near 0% conversion rate. We see it every day.

All other marketing tactics revolve around your website. Don’t skip this vital step of redesigning your company website. Or you’ll end up spinning your wheels with lost time, low returns on your money and lots of frustrations. If you’re looking to jumpstart your marketing efforts this year, a modern website revamp is a required starting point.

 

B2B E-commerce & Customer Portal

In the manufacturing world, you know that design is not everything. Functionality is also key. E-commerce has become a successful trend in 2019 for many B2B companies across the world. Here’s why…

Your business partners and consumers alike are addicted to personalization and convenience. We like to call this the “Amazon Effect” or the “Netflix Effect”. Society’s patience has been broken with on-demand movies, same-day shipping, and instant messaging.

While the game is changing, there will be clear winners and losers. You can either avoid the game or play to win. We suggest playing to win. 🏆

You win by making it super quick, easy, and convenient for your customers to log into your website, look up purchase order history, item quantities, production and ship dates, inventory levels, personalized pricing, filtered reporting, and more.

With greater convenience for your customers, you will win more orders, gain critical feedback, and continue to improve the entire user experience.

Think of ways to make your customers’ lives easier, and then automate these processes. Build an advanced e-commerce section of your website that does the work for you.

While the game is changing, there will be clear winners and losers. You can either avoid the game or play to win. We suggest playing to win. Click To Tweet

 

Paid Ads for Lead Generation 🎯

For the past decade or so, clients have loved to come to us asking about SEO. Search engine optimization has forever been the “holy grail” of marketers worldwide.

However, as the big search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! become more and more saturated with content, the chances of your company popping up in organic search results get slimmer — even when you take all the advised SEO actions.

The digital marketing game in 2019 is “pay-to-play”, with a plethora of effective advertising opportunities.

Facebook (FB) and Google are currently the top two paid ad platforms, with a combined ~60% market share of the paid ads category.

The approach is generally different for FB vs. Google ads. FB ads usually contain images or videos, whereas Google ads primarily feature text. FB allows you to carefully target the type of ideal client you want to reach. Google, on the other hand, targets anyone who is actively searching for a certain keyword or key phrase.

You want to know what you’re getting for your money, of course! ROAS, return on ad spend, is the gold standard KPI (key performance indicator)… it’s the most important metric you should track. If you have $10 ROAS, it means that for every one dollar you spend on ads, you bring in $10 of revenue directly attributed to that ad.

Paid ads can also bring a fairly quick return on your investment, compared to organic tactics like posting for free on your company Facebook page, for example. 👏

When done correctly, paid ad campaigns can bring you anywhere from a 2x-10x overall return on your investment in both ad spend and management fees, within the first 3-6 months. 

 

Direct Recruiting Pipelines

With unemployment levels here in the U.S. being the lowest they’ve been in 49 years, recruiting is proving to be quite the challenge in most industries and manufacturing is no exception.

Additionally, there is a shortage of qualified people in the skilled workforce.  

With these two factors working in conjunction, most everyone already has a job and is not actively seeking a new position.

Therefore, no one is using the traditional online job boards. 😮

To combat these external forces, you must create and work your own directly managed, recruiting channels and pipelines.

You can use social media to drive new interest, retargeting ads and email drip funnels to keep candidates in the loop, as well as auto-scheduling apps to quickly set up interviews.

You’ll want a careers section on your newly built website, to be a landing page for prospective team members, while serving as a direct database which you manage, and not have to rely on an outside source platform to fuel your pipeline with “not-so-qualified” applicants.

 

Strengthen 💪💪 Your LinkedIn Network

LinkedIn has been around since 2002 but still, they are steadily increasing new user signups and enhancing overall engagement, from a social perspective.

As the world’s largest business-first social network, 90% of your business contacts should be on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has opportunities for both organic and paid tactics. You’ll want to work both angles simultaneously if possible, as they are complementary. It will help you accelerate quicker when both sides are done together.

 

Organic reach and engagement levels soar when publishing native video to LinkedIn, so don’t be shy!

 

Did you know?: Video is actually processed 60,000x faster than a text-only update. This is a major reason why video works great in advertising.

 

Choose One Tactic and Own It! (Or Hire it Out)

While it’s easy to get all gung ho about these growth hacks and rush off to implement each item on this list… A better approach is to focus on one tactic and do it really well, before moving to the next.

Or you could hire our expert inbound marketing team to kickstart your digital marketing. 🚀🎈🎉👍🍕

Let us know your #1 biggest marketing challenge and we’ll put together an action plan to blow past your growth goals this year.