Although manufacturing businesses are typically brick-and-mortar, the digital marketing landscape has changed the way companies establish themselves. Business cards are becoming less and less crucial for meetings as your social media presence is deemed more authoritative.
Marketing strategies differ for all types of businesses, but inbound marketing efforts specifically for manufacturing businesses can generate real results when done well.
Running through the benefits of inbound marketing for manufacturing businesses will show you the importance of building an organic strategy that can optimise your business for healthy growth over the years to come, creating new audiences, generating more leads, and keeping customers happy.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy for business owners to create long-term, healthy relationships with their customers.
Unlike traditional paid media, where you will interrupt people’s experiences on digital platforms, an inbound marketing strategy promises to build connections through informative, valuable, and meaningful pieces of content.
Rather than paying for people to see their content, it will be published organically through social media platforms and websites to provide value and experiences that people will remember.
Rather than looking for ways that people can give you money with the click of a button, the inbound marketing methodology prides itself on giving customers knowledge and actionable advice that they can use. Giving customers high-quality tips, habits, or daily tasks they can perform to improve goes a long way.
If you have a business in the manufacturing niche, it can be something as simple as giving a tip of the day to your customer base (and potential customers) to help them improve their handy work.
Giving without expecting anything in return and applying thoughtful lead nurturing strategies powered by automation, along with providing solutions to problems and helping to empower your customers, must be your top priorities.
Inbound is not just creating content and hoping for engagement to increase; it is a mixture of creative content, clever automation, and strategic optimisation.
For manufacturing companies, staying ahead of the curve and beginning inbound marketing work before your competitors will give you a massive boost in visibility. So, if you’re not putting this strategy ahead of other tasks in your schedule, you’re going to miss out.
Google is the biggest search engine of them all, and if you’re prioritising your search engine optimisation (SEO) through extensive inbound marketing tactics, you will naturally begin to rank above other competitors on Google.
Making it to the first page in your local search results will give you trust and authority that not many manufacturing businesses will be able to compete with, meaning your inflow of leads will grow.
With all of the components of inbound marketing for manufacturers combined—from blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, etc.—you will not have to worry about investing your entire disposable budget on sales and marketing.
Paid advertising is a form of traditional marketing, but inbound marketing focuses on long-term, affordable marketing tactics to generate revenue. There will only be costs for specific SEO tools, content creation systems, editing software, automation tools, etc.
These tools will not demand much investment like consistent print advertising and trade shows do. Plus, if you’re monitoring your investments with inbound marketing, you will be able to make an educated guess on what your return on investment (ROI) should be (if you’ve split-tested before).
With consistent best practices being put into your inbound marketing strategy, your lead-generating funnel will inevitably reward you with more warm leads.
As you begin writing valuable blog posts with relevant search-related terms in your niche, creating landing pages, and devising an email marketing strategy with irresistible call-to-actions, you will build multiple ways for a customer to find you and convert.
Executing a content marketing strategy with multiple points of contact will give the sales team at your manufacturing business the goal of converting leads into customers or clients through your array of products and services.
Rather than waiting for someone to come into your brick-and-mortar store, you must be willing to optimise an inbound marketing strategy to make it easier for your customers and clients to reach your marketing team, so you can hit revenue targets that you have never pushed before.
If you’re confident in your manufacturing company and believe you will be highly rated by your customers and clients (you do everything required to satisfy your customers), customer retention with inbound marketing will be a bit easier.
Through your customers’ ‘buyers journey’, you have to be hyper-aware of what you’re doing to provide the best customer service. Delighting customers with added value when they least expect it, along with creating genuine customer relationships, are just a couple of simple tips for your inbound marketing strategy that you should look to implement.
When you're always solving for the customer, you're bound to increase long-term customer retention.
Here at Fuelius, we’ve had hands-on experience with a luxury manufacturing company, Caesarstone.
We worked closely with them to develop a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy that generated real results.
Caeserstone is a premium manufacturer of quartz surfaces that specialises in kitchens and bathrooms, partnering with fabricators and fitters all across the UK. With not much prior experience in building an online presence, they needed to find a way to reach new audiences and promote their products.
With a poor analytics dashboard, we knew that an effective inbound marketing strategy would help add value to their customers and build education, while slowly yielding a customer profile over time.
Following extensive workshops to understand their goals and brand, we began structuring inbound marketing campaigns and implementing automation tactics to drive awareness and generate new leads.
For this client in this case study, we gained 50% sales growth YoY (year-on-year), 641% lead increase YoY, and compiled a 30,000+ database of engaged contacts. Read more about how we achieved these results here.
If you’re interested in seeing a return on investment this high, book a free discovery call with our team, and we’ll be more than happy to see how we can assist your manufacturing business!
Images: Envato Elements