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ou deliver quality, time and again. Your devoted to your customers and focused on staying up to date with efficient, accurate technologies to deliver top notch results.
One place you can take advantage of in order to stay at the cutting edge is in your marketing plan. Many manufacturers struggle with creating a solid digital presence that delivers results to the company, and oftentimes this means its left to the wayside.
But that means you’re missing out on opportunity. (Don’t believe it? Check out the statistics that prove marketing is important for manufacturers.)
Long story short, your customers conduct research online before buying and if they don’t find your company there or don’t like what they see … well, that’s not so top-notch news for your company.
So, what should you do about this?
The following six items reference a starting point for your marketing strategy. A long-standing building is built first with a strong foundation, and that’s where we begin here.
Your customers tend to search Google first to find a company like yours to meet their needs, meaning you need a website that will show up in those results. So, start there — do you have a website, and does it show up?
Next, when someone clicks to your website … what will they think? Think about making that first impression a lasting one. You want website visitors to resonate with your company and brand so that they are interested in moving forward with you. If they land on a website that is difficult to navigate, doesn’t adequately communicate what you do or is visually unappealing – they will likely pop away.
Here are 3 quick items to check off as you review your platform.
After someone can easily find you online, you need to be strategic in the message you share with those digital visitors — it can make or break whether they want to move forward with your company.
It's important to consider your message from a few angles. One, your overall brand voice: how do you represent yourself? Are you authentic in that voice? Also, carefully consider this: do you come across as a brand that resonates with your ideal client? For a very straight forward example, this means if you are trying to attract an ever-so-serious client and you use light and airy humor in your brand messaging — it’s not going to click.
With this message established, its important to confirm you’re consistent about sharing it. Look at all the places you appear online (website, social media, google results, and so forth) and make sure your profiles sell you the same way.
The last key piece to your messaging is a call-to-action. When someone finds you, make sure you’re telling them how to take that next step in your buyer-seller relationship.
To recap, here are 3 key items to check off as you review your message.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and while we’re not about to debate quantifying that value — we will agree, imagery is important. Pictures are a great opportunity to showoff your capabilities and wow potential clients. When they see something they like, and its similar to their own needs — they will not pass you up.
It’s important to review your images and make sure they are accurate representations and also quality photos. We don’t want to see pixelated, blurry photos or images that are slow to load – or that don’t load at all – on your website.
Also, review your graphic designs – brochures, infographics, etc. - that explain what you do and consider whether you’re missing any opportunities here.
To recap, keep these 3 key items in mind as you review your visuals.
A digital marketing strategy is only useful when you strategically align the pieces of the puzzle. If it doesn’t fit together, it’s not going to produce the results you’re hoping to achieve.
You may be familiar with the concept of a sales funnel already, which involves moving your prospects through certain “checkpoints” as you build that relationship and convert to a paying client. When it comes to marketing, you need to be clear on incorporating the various steps of your strategy into this funnel so you can be aware of where a prospect sits — and whether it’s effective.
Think about things such as how you will use social media, how to build an e-mail list and leverage that newsletter, how to use search engine marketing and more.
Here are 3 concepts to check off as you review your marketing funnel.
With a funnel in place, you’ve decided a few steps you believe prospects should take along the path to becoming a paying customer. Create specific goals that align with these steps and your sales goals in general. Think about the size of your social media following, e-mail list, website traffic and other pieces — what type of growth do you want to see on each step of the way?
Here’s a quick checklist to help define goals.
We hope this 5-step checklist provides clarity when it comes to getting started on your marketing strategy with a solid foundation. We can walk through these foundational concepts with your company and create a plan we can implement for you – just contact us for more information today.
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