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Inbound marketing is one of the most buzzed-about topics among manufacturers. Many manufacturing companies have implemented successful inbound marketing strategies, which are bringing them more qualified leads and giving them better insight into their prospects and customers. However, for as many manufacturers that have successfully implemented inbound, there are just as many who have dropped the ball and made some major marketing blunders. Keep reading to learn the top inbound marketing mistakes manufacturers make and my top tips on how you can avoid these pitfalls at your manufacturing company.

1. Not Integrating Sales with Marketing

The beautiful thing about inbound is that it ties sales and marketing together. With an inbound marketing platform, such as HubSpot, you can track your prospects and their behavior. In one, easy-to-view command center, you can look at prospects and customers individually and see what emails they’ve opened and clicked, where they’ve been on your website and what content they’ve downloaded.

When integrating an inbound strategy, it is necessary to get sales onboard. By integrating CRM with an inbound platform, sales managers get a “360” view of who the prospect is and receives a valuable insight on that individual’s needs, wants, and goals. That way, when a sales rep reaches out to a prospect, he or she is equipped with solutions tailored to that prospect. When sales are disconnected from inbound, you will not see optimal ROI from your marketing efforts.

2. Eliminating Traditional PR & Marketing Tactics from Their Strategy

Inbound marketing allows manufacturers to track just about everything from website visitors to leads and sales. We’ve seen a lot of manufacturers dropping the ball on public relations thinking that inbound marketing is replacing the need for the name recognition and eyeballs publicity delivers. However, PR & traditional marketing (editorial, advertising, direct mail, etc.) have an important place in an inbound strategy. How you may ask? The first step in the inbound marketing process is to attract.

By exhibiting at a trade show, being featured in an industry publication, or by advertising in the right magazine, you are enhancing your brand. Going to a notable industry trade show or having a case study of yours featured in a respected industry publication is a great way to intrigue prospects and attract them to your website! Read my blog “Why Manufacturers Still Need Traditional PR & Marketing in a Digital World” for more information on the importance of inbound.

3. Underestimating the Power of Social

Many manufacturers are not tapping into the power of social media. If social isn’t integrated into your inbound marketing plan, you are missing out. You can write all the relevant content you want, but you still need to distribute that content. Social provides just the right mix of channels to broadcast your message. Let’s face it: we’re living and breathing in a social media driven world. More and more people are getting their news from Twitter instead of television news outlets and making connections on LinkedIn instead of cold calling or email introductions. If you read Rob’s blog on social selling, you’ll understand the impact social has on the sales process and how easily social selling incorporates into the manufacturing sales process.

Are you currently utilizing pay-per-click ads in your marketing strategy? Are you seeing little lead conversion or ROI from your efforts? Creating an excellent pay-per-click ad is about more than writing snappy copy. It’s a mix of creativity and data-driven science that focuses on the right keywords, the right budget, the right pay per click rate, and engaging copy that answers your audience’s search questions. Below, you’ll learn the foundation of paid search—the difference between pay-per-click and paid social ads, how to find who to target and keywords, what offers to get the best lead conversion, and more.

The two types of paid ads we primarily use for our business-to-business manufacturing clients:

Google/Bing pay-per-click: Advertisers pay to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content, and generate mobile application installs within the Google or Bing ad network to web users. For example, if a contact search “lathe cut gaskets” or “food-grade gaskets”, our lathe cut gaskets manufacturing client will most likely come up in the search.

Paid social ads:

LinkedIn ads can help your business reach a powerful audience of professionals. Not only are LinkedIn members influential, but they also have two times the buying power of the average web crowd.

• Sponsored ads are essentially promoted LinkedIn posts
• There are three different formats available for Sponsored Content ads: single image, video, and carousel
• Campaigns can run as native news feed ads and lead generation forms

To create a sound pay-per-click strategy, 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.

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.

Looking to develop your own buyer personas? Read “Why Developing Buyer Personas is Invaluable for Manufacturers”

Selecting the Right PPC Keywords

A well-organized PPC campaign will include a number of different types of keywords such as:

• Brand keywords: These are keywords that include the name of your company. Brand keywords tend to be low in cost and have very high quality scores. In addition, they yield excellent results in terms of click-through and conversion.
• Commercial keywords: These are keywords by prospects who are closest to the close stage of the sales cycle with the highest likelihood to buy. Whether to refer a given keyword to the commercial depends on the site niche.
• Broader, low-intent keywords: In order to expand your business’s reach, it’s important to also bid on some broader PPC keywords that have low intent, but give you the capability of increasing brand awareness. You can increase your conversion rate on broad keywords through remarketing strategies.
• Long-tail keywords: These are highly specific, longer, unique phrases that are often very low-cost and have less keyword competition. However, long-tail keywords often have low search volume.
• Competitive keywords: It’s a good idea to allocate some budget toward keywords your competitors are also using. This allows you to get your brand and offerings in front of people who are searching for the products and services of your competitors

Grouping and Managing Your PPC Keywords

Once you’ve established PPC keywords as your base to start with, you need to be able to put them to use in an organized way that optimizes your time and money investment. Proper keyword grouping allows you to stay organized so that you can target your customers more successfully, thereby improving quality score and reducing cost.

Check out this great HubSpot article on How to do keyword research for more great tips

Increasing PPC Conversion Through Great Content Offers: 

A great way to increase conversion on your paid ads is by offering a great piece of content. Your prospects are much more likely to fill out your forms if they are getting something valuable in return. Our clients have seen great success by offering the following pieces of content in their pay-per-click ads.

• eBooks
• Technical/White Papers
• Capabilities Papers

 

 

Happy Tactics Thursday! Like each and every one of you, we are adjusting to our ‘new normal’ amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. While the Coronavirus has shifted the way that we operate our businesses and daily lives, there could be a silver lining in this for manufacturers. Now is an excellent time to revamp recruitment strategies to fill open positions. There have been massive layoffs in entertainment, restaurants, small business and even manufacturing companies over the last 2 weeks. The Department of Labor reported that 3.28 million people in the United States have filed for unemployment benefits. There is a pool of great talent out there that are eager to find new positions and ready to work hard. Learn what we are doing to help our manufacturing clients market their open positions in this week’s Tactics Thursday video!

 

This guest blog was kindly provided by Ty Haines, President of Manufacturer Solutions, LLC.

Most of our customers are under $20M in sales and range from $500K to $7B.  The top personnel laments are:

 

• Can’t get good people (hiring practices and attraction improvement needs)
• Can’t keep new people (leftover screening effectiveness and retention needs)
• And, I need people (piled-on stress is unfortunately shared with many)

 

Yes, the past four years of robust economic expansion have driven down unemployment to levels not seen since 1969 so the choices have become far less in quantity and quality of the lesser skilled applicants.  With what is left of the labor supply, a large part of the employee turnover is now inspired by the new hire unable for a variety of reasons to show up ready for work.  Many see the annual turnover rate in the group of associates with less than two years with the company at 20%, some as high as 50%.  My question to them is what are you doing differently in this time of greater competition for good workers to change these continuing results?  Too often, the answer is not much has changed with our practices since the cutbacks to survive the recession.

 

Recurring themes from employees of what they want from an employer include, in rough order:

1. Recognition, respect, appreciation of their work
2. Communications: inclusion & transparency on how the company is doing, where it is going – these are two-way and include both listening and acting on your teams’ needs
3. Growth opportunities, advancement path
4. Job security
5. Fair compensation, wages & benefits pop up for people with families or the more mature worker
6. Help on life issues & empathy
7. Interesting work
8. Loyalty from peers and management
9. Working conditions including lavatories, changing areas, break room and work area
10. Fair discipline

 

One factory with high turnover had a policy that required their hourly to stay in and eat in the lunchroom.  Not the most competitive, but OK.  The lunchroom was dark, dirty and smelled well, no, it stunk!  It had been that way for years.  This was one clear issue on the list we identified that was inspiring people not to hire on and not to stay long.  We helped management recognize and fix this negative, removing a first clear impediment to the retention and that hurt attraction too.

 

Few contract manufacturers have a 30%+ net profit like seen on Microsoft’s published Annual Report or can afford to provide on-site daycare, or free gourmet cafes (Google) so what to do?

 

Do what you can!  Require change, be inclusive and get creative are a great start.  All can afford the low cost to tweak the culture to improve recognition, communications, loyalty and even fairly administered policy enforcement – these have high returns.  A good option is to follow the Lean culture support for involvement, communications and to celebrate successes as we pursue improvements.

 

Working conditions – these start with a reliable & safe area to park your ride and extend to details like replacing dead lighting – even a coat of paint can help!  Meeting State and Fed requirements should be evident.

 

One company found their local millennials cared more about higher wages and more time off than benefits – they hire part of their team as part-timers and can pay them more without benes.  From mentoring newbies to the monthly injection of fun & pride into a lunch hour to celebrate something that went well:  the list is endless of what can be done or adapted in your company.  It takes someone to take that first step to try something different, is that you?

 

Connect with Ty Haines by visiting  Manufacturer Solutions Website  or emailing  HainesMFG@gmail.com

 

The above is an opinion not endorsed by the publisher.