Let’s face it, manufacturers are living, breathing and selling in a digital world. If you’ve read our page on inbound marketing, you already know why manufacturers need to devote their time and talents to inbound marketing. However, manufacturers shouldn’t discredit the power of traditional publicity tactics; as well as advertising and trade show marketing. In this blog, I’ll highlight the top 5 reasons your manufacturing company should “tie the knot” with traditional marketing and inbound marketing for ultimate success.

Why Traditional Marketing Tactics Should Be Incorporated with Inbound

Attract People to Your Brand

The first step in the inbound marketing process is attraction. Business-to-business manufacturers don’t want just anyone visiting their website. They want qualified leads who can benefit from their products, services, and knowledge. In marketing terms, you want your ideal prospective customers or “buyer personas”. By going to a trade show, being featured in an industry publication or by advertising in the right magazine, you are enhancing your brand. The key to inbound is first attracting people to your website and then “converting” the lead, or enticing them with an offer that your prospect thinks has enough value to trade their information (email, company name, etc.) to receive. Interested in how this works in inbound? Click here.

Build Credibility in Your Industry

A study by Pew Research recently found that more people trust information coming directly from the news media than they do from social media. Sure, you could have a great case study of how you helped a manufacturers save time, money, and resources with your solution but having it on your website works better if it was first published in an established industry journal.  Published articles shows your prospects and current customers that you are who you say you are, that you provide great products and services worthy of recognition.  Your customers and prospects will view you, your experts, and your company, as a thought leaders or innovators..

Ability to Reach a Larger Audience

Looking to reach a larger audience? By receiving frequent recognition in industry and local publications, your message is able to reach thousands and thousands of people in that publication’s circulation who otherwise may not find you. When considering pitching a story or developing a magazine ad campaign, check their circulation statistics. The magazine should be able to provide you with a media guide detailing the number of readers and their demographics. Also, your customers are a great indicator of where you should pitch your stories. During your calls with loyal customers, ask them what are the top 3 industry publications they feel are valuable and you must read during the month?” If you see a trend, that’s where you should focus your strategy.

Traditional PR is still a powerful marketing tactic that marries well with inbound marketing. Editorial coverage, trade show marketing, and advertising help manufacturer position themselves as an industry thought leaders and reach a larger audience. For more information on our public relations and media services for manufacturers, visit http://www.felberpr.com/services/public-relations-manufacturing/.

How to impact manufacturing sales and be ‘sticky’ with LinkedIn contacts

Why do you use LinkedIn? Are you trying to find new manufacturing sales prospects, trying to keep tabs on your customers or were you just told it’s the place to be for business professionals? Our manufacturing clients ask us all the time about how to use LinkedIn for marketing and generating leads.

As with most business relationships, familiarity leads to trust. People need to know you, like you and trust you before they will do business with you. Here’s a past blog about cultivating prospects and building trust, the old-fashioned way.

Sharing valuable content, acknowledging milestones; such as work anniversaries and truly engaging with your prospects profile is crucial to building a relationship. In this blog, you’ll learn how to strengthen relationships with your existing contacts by using various tools in LinkedIn. I call these the “sticky” tools, as they allow you to be genuine and ever-present with your contacts.

The three most useful LinkedIn tools I use are 1) Following prospects posts, 2) Liking milestones, and 3) Conversation starters (new feature).

Prospect Posts

To show you truly care, be the first to like and then comment on your prospect’s post. You can post a follow up question to really show you appreciated their post. Consider sharing the post as well. These simple tasks can be done very quickly. Your contact is monitoring their own post traffic and will certainly take notice of your action.

Milestones

You may have notice notifications on the top right hand side of your LinkedIn profile, which notifies you of active LinkedIn users birthdays, job advancements, and yearly work anniversaries. From your desktop or just as easily the LinkedIn smartphone app, you can acknowledge these milestones. I find I can get through 10-15 milestone notifications in just as many seconds. Often, I will be thanked for noticing and then the reengaged prospect becomes that much more open to another conversation.

Conversation Starters

This is a very new feature from LinkedIn. I first noticed a banner on the message portion of the iPhone app. It simply said ‘reconnect.’ I clicked it and it began suggesting contacts that I had not connected with in recent months. The feature might reference a recent article they were mentioned in or a recent post. What a cool way to remind us (through their magical algorithms) just how important it is to stay top of mind. Another easy way to access this is start a new message from your desktop and click on the lightbulb idea icon. As you can see in the photo below, if you click on the idea icon, it will give you great conversation starters to break the ice with contacts you haven’t spoken with in a while.

So, there you have it. Three more ways to become more than just a past connection on LinkedIn and impact manufacturing sales. Reconnect, start conversations, and be truly visible to build those crucial relationships.

Do you have a feature you love? Comment below and share.

Attract Ideal Customers to Your Website with Buyer Personas

You are a manufacturer, which means most days, you are swamped between responding to customers, managing inventory, solving a technical issue and the list goes on and on. You may think you have a clear understanding of your customer base but do you really understand their behaviors, goals, challenges and demographics?

To create a sound content marketing plan, it is essential that you take the time to identify your ideal customers. This process is called creating buyer personas. Buyer personas help manufacturers identify their best prospects. The profile of your best prospect and how they buy is the buyer’s’ journey.

Note: Manufacturers should conform to the “buyers” way of purchasing and not the other way around. If you are quick to send literature or conduct a product demonstration, you’re using your process, not theirs. With 71% of B2B research starting with a generic search, manufacturers need to reach prospects digitally and engage in a completely new way.

What Are Buyer Personas?

Semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on select educated speculation and real data about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.

How to Create Personas:

1) Day in Their Life Scenario– Creating a day in the life example for your persona can help you better understand your customers challenges and motives.

2) Demographic Behavior– Identify the typical age, income, education, and location of your buyer personas.

3) Identify Goals– Knowing your persona’s goals and dreams is crucial. This helps you craft your content, products and services to help them achieve these specific goals.

4) Discover Their Pain – Does this persona have certain pain points in their day-to-day operations? Are there ways that you can reduce business interruption or bring new products or services to this person to eliminate these pain points?

5) Information Search Process– How does this person search for information? Are they at a desk or on mobile? Do they switch off their phone at dinner or are they working 24/7? You need to know how and when to contact based on their specific behaviors not how you operate.

6) Common Hesitations or Objections- Manufacturers overall are very careful and risk-averse by nature. Are there common hesitations or objections they typically have working with a company like yours? If you identify their hesitations, you can better prepare a solution to counter them. This will be an invaluable asset to your sales team.

7) Create a Story- I know, I know. You’re a manufacturer, not a writer. The idea of writing a story is daunting.. But trust me, it’s invaluable. By writing about your persona in a story format, it is much easier for everyone in your organization to recognize people that fit under that persona and it’ll provide your sales team with the skills to communicate with prospects in the way that best suits them.

Daunted? Here Are Some Ways to Make the Process Easier

• Look through your CRM to discover trends about how your customers find and take your content (Are they at their desks or on mobile? Are they more receptive to a quick email blast or an in-depth white paper?)
• Interview customers about what they like about your products and services.
• Create forms on your website that capture information about that individual’s buyer persona. (Example: Size of the company, Title, Biggest 3D printing challenge, etc.)
• Talk to your sales team. They have intelligence on your sales cycle and the customers that work best with your company. Ask them what generalizations they can make about the various customers you serve.

Buyer personas provide structure and insight for manufacturers to nurture leads through the sales process. A detailed buyer persona helps determine where to best spend your time, guide product development, and empowers your sales team with knowledge to better communicate with prospects. Then, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.

It’s October, which means it is the season for fall colors, clambakes and football. Additionally, it is Manufacturing Month, kicked off by Manufacturing Day on October 7, 2016. Founded in 2012, Manufacturing Day is an annual national event that “has been designed to expand knowledge about, and improve public perceptions of manufacturing careers and manufacturing’s value to the U.S. economy.”

Participants of Manufacturing Day use the hashtags #MFGday16 and #MfgDay to join the movement and support US manufacturing as a whole, with people and businesses around the country.

Admittedly, I am the last person you want building anything. I am a firefighter part-time; I know how to break stuff with fancy tools. But fix or manufacture something….not even.

So, why am I writing about manufacturing? Our region, our country for that matter, was founded by builders, makers, and innovators. While many of the old-school steel mills and factories that we grew up with are gone, many have been replaced by a new-age of manufacturers that are creating parts and products with cutting-edge technology and 3D printing.

Manufacturing and all those that support the process are what Manufacturing Month is all about. Manufacturing goes beyond the young engineers and safety personnel at a factory. There are so many companies (like our agency), that are also employed because something needs to be built.

Sales people who start the process are an integral part of the manufacturing process. I often say, nothing happens until someone sells something. Let’s not forget about the financial folks who are instrumental in finding the fuel to acquire the machinery and raw materials. Website designers and writers, journalists and hotel operators. And the list goes on and on. We are all impacted by the manufacturing sector.

Our mission at Felber PR & Marketing is directly supported by all those who manufacture. We’ve been here too for 23 years – rolling up our sleeves, donning safety glasses and doing our part to promote manufacturers in all sectors, from roofing to flooring, fasteners to 3D printing. That’s why we say We Get Manufacturing. Later this month we will sponsor, for the third year in a row, Crain’s [M] Manufacturing Assembly, on October 19^th, 2016. Want a chance to attend for free? We’re giving away tickets to the event.

Please join me in supporting manufacturers. Northeast Ohio is home to some of the most incredible manufacturers work hard. Tag us, @FelberPR and we’ll share your manufacturing month posts and amplify your message with our network. Last year our campaign went national! Want to see how we have celebrated in the past?

However you support the manufacturing process, we salute you.

During college — a time when myself and my peers were trying to “find” themselves and realize their true career potential — I was required to take an online personality assessment in my senior capstone, called StrenghtsFinder. Over the years, I’d taken a fair amount of these personality assessments– Myers Briggs, The Five Love Languages, The Colors Tests, you name it. Although I enjoyed taking personality assessments, I always felt like they told me what I already knew about myself. To my surprise, StrengthsFinder was entirely different and allowed me to view myself in an entirely different light. It was by far the most valuable book I read during my college career and is one that has helped me tremendously, both personally and professionally. Below are the top 5 reasons you and your colleagues should take the Strengthsfinder assessment.

1. Focuses on Talents Not Tendencies– StrengthsFinder, was developed by Gallup’s team of scientists and positive psychologists to help people “uncover and develop their natural talents.”  While it’s an assessment you can take in 10-15 minutes and a book you can read in one sitting, it is a tool that you can use for years to come. Most personality focuses on your personality tendencies (introverted/extroverted, thinker/feeler.) This assessment is different because instead of focusing on your basic personality traits, it focuses on what makes you unique and special. Once you take the assessment, it will list your top 5 strengths in order (Gallup has identified 34 strengths.) The assessment not only focuses on “typical strengths” like “analytical” or “communication” but also on strengths most people don’t focus on in work and educational settings (ex: one of my strengths is “Positivity”, something I never viewed as a “strength”.

2. Teaches You How to Maximize Your Strengths– Even for the person who feels like they have a strong understanding of who they are, Strengthsfinder gives people the validation that they are exceptionally great at something and also gives suggestions on how people can hone in on their strengths and work to their fullest potential. Once you take the test, I highly suggest you take it a step further and read StrenghtsFinder 2.0. In the book you’ll find:

• Your top five theme report, built around the Strengths Insight descriptions
• 50 Ideas for Action (10 for each of your top five themes) based on thousands of best-practice suggestions we reviewed
• A Strengths Discovery Activity that helps you think about how your talents, investment, experience, skills, and knowledge work together to build strengths
• A Strength-Based Action Plan for setting specific goals for building and applying your strengths in the next week, month, and year

3. Gives You Focus to Reach Your Full Potential– Traditionally, we’ve been taught that if we work really hard, we can do better at anything. While I truly believe in the power of hard work, it is obvious that some people have certain aptitudes that others don’t. For example, I could try my hardest to improve my basketball skills. I could practice every day, I could join a team, I could get one-on-one practice sessions in with a coach, and I could practice my free throws every single day. I would improve but I will never have a WNBA player level of talent. Instead, it’s much better for me to focus on my unique skillset and bring my strengths to the table, in both my personal life and in the workplace.

4. Stronger Team Building and Camaraderie– Strengthsfinder is an excellent tool for team building. It is great not only for staff to take on the individual level to learn their own individual strengths, but it also an extremely beneficial tool for management and allows you to see the strengths and potential in your team.  I suggest everyone take the test prior to reading the Strengthsfinder book and then read up on their specific strengths, learn them inside and out. Then, I suggest management read about all the other strengths in the book. Yes, you only get 5 top strengths but there are 34 uniques strengths in the book that your co-workers or employees may possess. Learning about the other strengths allows you to better identify other people’s potential and work better with and assign projects that people will thrive doing and be happy doing.

5. Happier Employees Leads to a Stronger, More Productive Workplace

According to a study by University of Warwick Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, happier employees are more productive. The experiment showed that productivity increased by an average of 12% when they were happy. The study stated opportunities, professional growth, and recognition at the workplace as some of the main factors in overall employee happiness. Strengthsfinder is an excellent stepping stone to give employees the recognition they deserve and opportunities to grow in their careers.

Allie’s Strengths

1. Achiever
2. Learner
3. Input
4. Individualization
5. Positivity

Rob’s Strengths

1. Empathy
2. Responsibility
3. Restorative
4. Arranger
5. Woo