The manufacturing industry tends to rely on traditional old-school marketing methods. They hold on to the idea that trade shows are the only method to make new connections. They send direct mail campaigns and make cold calls to prospects.
These outbound marketing methods have become less cost effective, as access to information on the Internet has fundamentally changed people's buying habits. As a result, successful manufacturing marketers are scaling back their budget for traditional tactics.
Instead, they are shifting their efforts toward inbound marketing and opting for more cost-effective methods such as search engine optimization (SEO), blogging and online lead nurturing to connect and engage prospects and acquire new customers.
Track Your Leads, Customers, Sales
Imagine this: You create a display ad for an industrial trade journal. You buy the space, you insert the ad and find out the ad was a failure...no readership, no interest, no phone calls, no leads. In inbound marketing we call that "no-conversion".
Now imagine this: You create two or three of the same ads with different graphics, different copy and different emphasis. You deploy the first ad, once again it flops. Now you try the second ad and the "conversion rate" is significantly improved and the phone rings as a result of your adjustment.
With inbound marketing, you don't have to wonder which part of your marketing campaign works. That's the power of inbound marketing, except the ads (i.e. content such e-books, blog posts, white papers, etc.) are in the digital space instead of traditional media.
Convert Visitors and Generate Leads
While companies that blog get more website visits than those that do not, all that anonymous traffic is meaningless unless it generates leads. By offering downloadable whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, and other information that a customer would find relevant, marketers can request the name and email address, or other qualifying information from the prospect that would be helpful to their company sales department.
Automating The Sales Cycle
In an ideal world, every website visit or sales call would convert into a sale. So if prospects come to your website, browse for a little and then leave without a backward glance, how do you capture their attention without being too intrusive? If an e-mail blast goes out and a prospect actually downloads the report you are touting but does not receive any point of contact after that from you, how are you scaling the sales process to reach more people with less man hours?
Internet marketing tactics - including understanding analytics and nurturing sales leads - can help capture this lost demographic automatically, though automated e-mail follow-ups and system alerts to the sales team. That means less time spent on sending out e-mails (or making calls) and more time pursuing warm leads that are ready to hear how your business can solve their problem.
Measure Results
Finally, you cannot improve what you cannot measure. One of the largest benefits of inbound marketing is the ability to monitor the success of every element of a marketing campagin and continuously prove and improve the return on investment of one tactic over another.
You Have a Choice
Go along with the status quo and accept the results, or set course for a new destination for your company. While most will opt to stay in the safe zone, the disrupters have an opportunity to beat the odds with new marketing methods aimed at stimulating buyers with messages that matter to them. There are lots of obstacles to overcome in building a content creation ecosystem within a manufacturing company, but it can be done.
