If you’re seeking modern, reliable, and cost-effective manufacturer marketing strategies that will allow you to use the Internet to reach more clients and customers, sell more of your amazing products, and grow your business, look no further. We’ve put together this list of industrial marketing solutions for manufacturing companies to help you reach more potential partners online below.
And if you’re new to Internet marketing, don’t worry. These strategies are written out in plain English, so you’ll have no trouble understanding them.
Let’s begin by explaining why Internet marketing is so effective for manufacturers and other B2B organizations.
If you’d like to speak with a specialist before (or after) reading about digital marketing for manufacturing companies, you can reach us at 888-601-5359 or contact us online!
Why use online marketing for manufacturers and distributors?
In the past, your customers may have relied on a variety of methods to find sources for products to purchase for resale in their storefronts. You may have received phone calls from placements in the Yellow Pages or other local advertisements, or you may have invested in brochures, print mailers, or even cold calls to businesses. But as time went on, you probably noticed that these sales methods lost their effectiveness, and the phone calls dwindled.
With the emergence of the Internet, retailers found that it was far more convenient to go online to research potential distributors and their products. They were not only able to find a larger selection of companies and products quickly but also to read reviews, customer feedback, and see detailed photos or specs in a matter of seconds.
This shift in preference requires your marketing to shift, as well. If you aren’t using the Internet to reach potential customers, you’re likely missing most of them.
However, this is actually good news for your manufacturing company. Online marketing is far more cost-effective than traditional methods, and the ROI is much, much easier to track.
Additionally, because the cost of marketing online is lower, marketing for manufacturers or distributors can be highly experimental, with little to no financial risk. You can try different things and fail without worrying that you will lose a large amount of money or damage your reputation. In fact, one of the strategies we’ll recommend is all about testing and seeing what works and what fails!
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Our top 7 manufacturer marketing strategies
Now that you know why digital channels are so valuable for manufacturer marketing strategies, let’s dive into some of the tactics you should try.
These marketing strategies for manufacturers and distributors are some of the most successful ones we’ve used for our clients:
Using these strategies will help you reach more potential customers at the lowest cost possible.
1. Optimize your website for searches
The first step in your manufacturer or distributor marketing strategy should be to ensure that potential clients can easily find your website in searches — and that it outranks any competitors. This is done through search engine optimization, often abbreviated as SEO.
Expert insights from
Adam G.Lead Ongoing Strategy Consultant at WebFX
“We’re seeing our manufacturing clients have success in SEO by targeting the middle of the funnel with industry pages that highlight their unique selling propositions and include social proof such as certifications, case studies, etc.”
If you aren’t familiar with SEO, here’s the short explanation. SEO consists of numerous methods that make your website more likely to show up and rank highly when someone types a keyword related to your business into a search engine. It can range from editing the titles of your individual pages to acquiring more links to your site, and it can be very simple or very complex.
If you’re new to SEO, the easiest way to start is to think about the words and phrases that potential customers would associate with your business or products. These phrases — which are known as keywords — may range from very short or single words to longer phrases.
For a manufacturing company like yours, some of the best keywords to target are the products you manufacture. For examples, let’s say you manufacture ballpoint pens. You could start targeting keywords like “ballpoint pen manufacturer” or “buy ballpoint pens with black ink.”
To target these keywords, you should incorporate them across your website, particularly in relevant web content. For instance, you might write some blog posts or articles on your site. By including relevant keywords in the titles, headings, and body copy of those pages, you’ll help them rank in search results for those terms.
Of course, while this is a good starting point, there’s a lot more to manufacturer SEO than keyword optimization. (You can learn the basics in about five minutes by reviewing our handy CEO’s Guide to SEO.)
For one thing, it’s important to ensure that your website is responsive. By ensuring that people can access your site from a variety of devices, including smartphones and tablets, you can increase the number of leads and ultimately close more deals.
Pro tip: Partner with an experienced SEO agency like WebFX that specializes in helping manufacturing companies reach the top of the search results, outshine their competitors, and drive traffic and product sales.
Another of the most important marketing strategies for manufacturers comes in the form of advertising — specifically pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. PPC is a modern advertising method that involves placing ads on search engine results pages (SERPs) and other web pages.
PPC ads are typically inexpensive and can have very high returns on investment for manufacturers or distributors. They contain just a sentence or two of copy with a link to your website, but the biggest benefit is that you only pay for them when they are clicked — not when they are viewed.
As a manufacturer, your PPC ads will likely look similar to the ones pictured above. The ad itself looks like a regular search result, except for the “Sponsored” label at the top. When someone clicks on the ad, they’ll be taken to a landing page that encourages them to take a particular action. That action might be a purchase, or it could be something like signing up for an email list or simply viewing the products you manufacture.
Expert insights from
Adam G.Lead Ongoing Strategy Consultant at WebFX
“Our manufacturing clients getting the highest ROI from PPC are executing account-based marketing strategies and leveraging data. We’re also seeing a lot of success in remarketing for our manufacturing clients.”
One of the major benefits of PPC is that results are instantaneous. As soon as ads are clicked to go live, they can start driving qualified traffic to your website. This is especially helpful if you’re looking to quickly increase leads without exhausting your budget or employees.
PPC reports are also very detailed, so you’ll know exactly how much you spent on each click, how many people clicked each ad, which ads attracted the most clicks, and how many phone calls or emails you received as a result. That’s why PPC is one of the best strategies to use if you’re aiming to use data-driven marketing.
Pro tip: Ensure your PPC campaign drives traffic to your website and improves product sales and business growth with PPC services from WebFX!
A little earlier, we mentioned that online marketing allows you to experiment with different methods and gives you room to fail. This particular method, conversion rate optimization (CRO), encourages testing and failure — and it’s all in the name of making you more money.
The premise of CRO is very simple. It allows you to test changes to your website to see which updates lead to increased conversions, such as requests for quotes or phone calls.
For example, maybe you want to increase sales of the products you manufacture, so you’re considering moving the “purchase” button on your product pages to a different spot that you think will lead more people to click it. However, you don’t want to implement this permanently and risk having sales actually decrease if it turns out that your hunch is wrong.
Thankfully, CRO allows you to test ideas like this safely. With CRO, you can run A/B tests to show one group of website visitors the original or “A” version of a page, and another group a new or “B” version. Whichever version results in higher conversions can be implemented permanently.
This approach allows for safer experimentation, since a significant drop in conversions in the “B” version can result in an immediate removal of the test. However, a considerable jump can result in immediate implementation and more profit for you!
Pro tip: Need help with CRO? WebFX has a team of CRO specialists standing by ready to help your manufacturing company optimize your website for maximum conversions and product sales!
4. Create engaging content and media that ranks well
When retailers go online to look for products to carry in their stores, they may be looking for photos, videos, or in-depth information that goes beyond the basic summary they might normally get. One way that you can capitalize on this desire — and attract more potential customers to your website — is to create this engaging content and ensure that it ranks highly in searches.
Results on search engines now go far beyond links to websites. When someone searches for any given query, they can also receive videos, images, locations, and shopping results. As such, creating engaging content that is likely to rank can draw visitors to your website and allow them to learn more about your products.
Here are some ideas for content marketing for manufacturers:
Add a video: Would one or more of your products benefit from a video showing it in action? Create a video, write a keyword-rich title and description, and host it on YouTube (with a link to your website in the description).
Optimize product photos: Ensure product photos on your website have relevant keywords in their filenames, and also have their alt text assigned saying what is in the image. This helps them appear in Google searches for those terms.
Create written content: Write content, like blog posts and articles, that answer questions your customers may have had in the past. If these are popular questions that are commonly searched, the pages are likely to rank well. You can also write articles explaining how you manufacture your products.
Pro tip: Don’t have the in-house resources or expertise to continuously craft valuable, custom content? Content marketing services from WebFX can help you create a range of content types that drive traffic to your site, send trust signals to your audience, and paint your company as an expert in your field.
Sometimes, manufacturing companies are slow to integrate social media marketing. After all, you’re selling to other businesses, not to consumers. There’s a misconception, therefore, that your clients can’t be found on social media, because social media is just for consumers, right?
Wrong. After all, those retailers you sell to are still run by individual people — people who are probably on social media. So, all you have to do is target your social media marketing toward those individuals. By doing so, you’ll also be targeting the retailers you’re trying to reach.
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow manufacturers to increase brand recognition and make meaningful connections. You can also use social media to share product photos, set up competitions, and create brand ambassadors.
Additionally, YouTube is a great tool for manufacturers. We just explained the benefits of video content in the last section, and just as you can put those videos on your site, you can also put them YouTube. There, you can demonstrate your products and provide educational content in a video format.
Manufacturers can also use social media to gain ideas and feedback during product development. Social media listening tools allow you to capture customers’ sentiments about your company, and you can adjust your marketing strategy to meet their expectations. And you can use product forums to gain further insight into customer opinions.
Pro tip: Make expanding your online presence with social media a breeze with WebFX’s team of social media marketing specialists. Our team can help you post engaging content, engage with your audience, launch targeted advertisements that boost product sales and site traffic, and much more!
If you’re looking for a way to keep in contact with your leads long-term, email marketing is a great strategy. It starts with an email signup form on your website. Site visitors can submit their email address, and then you can send out emails to them over time. Since people will only sign up if they have an active interest in your business, this is a great lead generation strategy.
Of course, no one will submit their email address without an incentive. Make sure you’re clear about what they’ll be getting when they subscribe, and make sure it’s something of value to them. A weekly newsletter is a great idea. You can include industry tips or company updates that keep people in the know.
The idea is that over time, your subscribers will develop a deeper trust in your expertise, and eventually become customers. So while an email signup form is great for lead generation, the emails themselves serve to nurture those leads toward conversion.
7. Make it easy for potential clients to contact you
The final strategy we recommend is making it extremely easy for potential clients to get in touch with you. This may be as simple as placing your phone number somewhere very noticeable at the top of your website, adding a dedicated contact form, or being active on social media.
This may seem like an obvious tip to you. You may be wondering how this is a marketing strategy. However, if you look closely at your website, you might be surprised by how many proverbial hoops a potential customer has to jump through to send you an email.
Can they fill out a simple form to request a quote, or do they have to fill out eight or nine fields? Or do you have a contact form at all? Can your phone number be easily found, or is it buried in your footer or on a separate page? Is it easy for prospects to order products from you? And since most of your clients are likely retailers, can they easily purchase those products in bulk?
By giving your potential leads the path of least resistance, you can ensure that more of them pick up the phone, send you an email, or buy your products. You can also increase your chances of getting in touch with them by being present and active on social media, where many of them might reach out to you with questions. It’s not uncommon for questions about your pricing or products to be sent to you via social media, so be prepared!
P.S. If you’re looking for one of the best ways to stay in contact with your prospects to encourage them to convert, look no further than a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. A CRM for manufacturing like Nutshell helps you seamlessly track valuable data about your prospects and current customers, like their email address and job title, so you can form long-lasting relationships that turn into revenue.
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Need help with manufacturer marketing strategies?
Creating a marketing plan for a manufacturer can be tricky. Your needs are unique, and your methods have to be perfectly suited to those needs. If you’re struggling to balance your marketing with the other aspects of running your business, why not let us help?
WebFX is a leader in Internet marketing, SEO, advertising, and more. We focus on helping you implement strategies that will provide the highest possible ROI for your business, and we can create a completely customized quote to get you there.
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insights from 237,500+ hours of manufacturing marketing experience
