Archive for month: April, 2020

For your typical interview, you should have a strategy for these five steps: 1) Know their audience, 2) Research the reporter and their history, 3) Have your facts straight, 4) know your desired outcome, and 5) Have your art ready.

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