If you are an Industrial company looking to open your products to new markets, wanting to create brand awareness for your products, announcing new product launches or improving your overall marketing of industrial products and services it is vitally important that you begin by building an effective industrial marketing strategy. It is not enough just to create a few advertisements for radio and television. In today’s advertising world a multi-faceted approach that relies heavily on building your brand as well as your online presence is necessary.
Use a Multi-faceted Marketing Approach
A multilateral marketing approach builds heavily on the success of inbound marketing and takes your marketing of industrial products and services to the next level. This Industrial marketing strategy incorporates a variety of SEO tactics within the content of your website, draws interest through social media, builds a pay-per-click advertising campaign, and sends targeted emails with valuable content offers. The many facets of this approach are the following.
Build your Brand for Recognition
Your brand is your business identity. It is vital that you create and build your business brand. Your brand should have a life and a voice that speaks clearly of the character, vision, mission and values you hold to most tenaciously. Brand focuses on the people you wish to engage and invites them to engage with you.
The first step to your Marketing Strategy is to create/discover/renew your Brand and then to build your brand so that it will be recognizable and will stand for what you believe and value. At zo.agency we often start work with our clients by engaging them in a two-day intensive Brand Workshop to help them through the intricacies of this vital first step.
The process involves top leaders in your industrial company brainstorming what are the top three values of your organization? This may sound easy but it involves a lot of thought and effort to cut these essential values down to just three. What you gain in a laser focus for what you stand for as a company. This focus will define your brand, your image, your culture, your products and your customer service.
From those values a Brand can be conceived, refined, re-refined until it is ready to launch. This brand will guide and define every detail of your industrial marketing strategy.
Relationship Building
In the end, marketing and sales are about the importance of relationship building. The importance of building relationships with suppliers, buyers, customers, stock-holders and the general public cannot be emphasized enough especially as a facet of the multi-faceted marketing approach that will work best in today’s fast paced, rapidly changing business environment. Above and beyond all of the technological advancements your company will still need to build and maintain strong relationships with your clients and partners.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Optimizing your website means making the value of its content, organization and layout clear to the artificial intelligence (AI) crawlers (spiders) that search engines use to collect data. These search engines want to get reliable, helpful and quality information to their users. SEO identifies keywords that consumers use most often when they go searching for information. And then SEO looks for quality content that uses these keywords to offer back to the searcher.
Great websites weave these keywords into the content of their webpages, blogs, infographic content and links to optimize the quality of their content for SEO crawlers. Strategic keywords are woven into as many places within the web content as possible so that the site will get noticed by Google as well as other search engines. Search engine software scans the content of billions of pages and notes and indexes the use of these keywords. The desired end result comes when a consumer types “best maker of the latest widget” into the search engine and the result of their search gives them your business name, website address, phone number, etc., on the first page of their search.
For the foreseeable future quality content will continue to be the determining SEO factor. Therefore, creating content on vital topics that your audience will be interested in is a first priority. This will require you to consider your audience and ask yourself what kind of content will most benefit them. Then write or get professionals to write high quality and high impact content in your blog, in your newsletters and on your website. Quality content about your products and their uses will soon get noticed and shared by others through social media and will inevitably lead more people to your website. Producing high quality relevant content requires a business owner to consider what are the most likely questions and objections of our potential customers? Specifically what questions will they have in each stage of the sales cycle, from awareness to pre-purchase?
How you will maximize the incredible marketing power of SEO should be forefront in your mind as you craft your brand messaging in each of the following types of content:
Regular Blog Postings
Blog posts are topical articles aimed at informing potential customers who are interested and would benefit from your products and services. Your articles are published on your website and are free of charge to any user. Types of articles often include:
- Lists of tips and problem solvers
- How-to guides
- Editorial opinions and/or topical analysis
- Answers to common questions
- Lists of upcoming events in your business/service
White Papers, Checklists and Guides
While similar to blog posts, these informational give-aways are more in depth, with greater detail and insight, and available for download in PDF format. Unlike blog posts that are free to any user, white papers and guides are content that gets leveraged into offers. These “offers” are available if the user provides their email or other information in order to download the document. This just means that the content of the offer has a dollar value, but will be given for free in exchange for something else of value – the user’s contact information. Examples include:
- Multi-step guidebooks for improving an area of business.
- In depth research into a product or a way to use that product.
- Lists of how-to’s covering a vital aspect of your products.
Videos
Anything that you can write about you can create a video about. And while informational content is king, visual content (video) is the emperor of content delivery. Well done videos are incredibly effective communication tools for explaining difficult topics and complex ideas in a short amount of time. What is more they are easily deliverable through most digital marketing streams:
- Websites
- SEO
- Pay per click ads
- Social media
- Email campaigns, etc.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay-per-click marketing is one of the most effective and cost effective modes of marketing today. It is basically a way to use search engine advertising to drive clicks to your website. And it works primarily in two ways. First, you can buy a sponsored ad at the top of Google’s search results page and assure that your business is one of the first options that shows up when someone does a search with your business keywords. Second, your business can run PPC campaigns on Facebook or LinkedIn. A targeted ad is created that appears on the FB or LinkedIn accounts of those who would be most interested in your products or services. Any time your ad is clicked, the user is sent to your website, and you pay the search engine a small fee. An excellent and well-designed PPC ad campaign will generate a high percentage of quality leads making the fee a very worthwhile investment.
Social Media
One of the cutting edge areas of marketing industrial products and services is to harness the growth of social media, 60% of small and medium businesses report gaining new customers through the use of social media. The explosion of social media has created wide ranging opportunities for getting your Industrial brand and products spread far and wide. This growing medium provides lots of benefits including:
Brand Exposure
Growing your brand and familiarity with your potential customers is essential. People very often choose a product or service based on their familiarity with it. They have encountered your brand before. Growing this kind of familiarity with your brand through social media is effective, has the potential to reach a global audience and does not have to cost a lot of money.
Fish where they Bite
It seems crazy but the average person today spends 2.5 hours on social media daily. This is where people are interacting with others and increasingly are getting information and receiving advertisements. Staying relevant means going to where people are engaged and active. By building a presence on social media, answering questions and building relationships you will be fishing where people are biting.
Become the Go-To Expert
By providing excellent content, advice, answers to questions, relevant sources and friendly service you can create a following on social media in which you are the go-to expert in your field. If customers return to your page for quality content and pass that information on to their “friends” your list of clients will grow and their trust in your business will increase. More trusting contacts will lead to higher sales conversion rates.
Final Thoughts
By incorporating these industrial marketing strategies into your future plans you will begin to see the focus of your business become more defined and targeted, which will lead to greater brand exposure, improved customer relations and growth in sales. These steps are demanding and can be done any number of ways. You can hire a marketing director, you can hire a marketing firm to come in and do these things for you or you can bite off a piece at a time as you find the time and energy to do so. The good news is that you have options.
Or you can approach a full service marketing agency with your goals in mind, and work with them to hone your brand, design an overall marketing plan that is tailored to your needs, and let your marketing agency develop and grow your marketing of industrial products and services.
Here at zo agency we work to build long term relationships with our clients. We call it Tribe!
We will work diligently to discover your vision, your passion, your needs, your hope and dreams for your business and then will create an overall marketing plan that meets your needs and fits your budget. Visit us today at www.zo.agency
