With internet taking off in a big way during last one decade or so, digital marketing has emerged as one of the most formidable marketing strategies possibly for every industry out there. However, despite its overwhelming advantages and benefits, manufacturers and B2B industry largely seems to be least impressed and has always given a cold shoulder to the internet driven marketing. Amid this rigid thinking, there is a pressing need to ask the question as to whether the negative mindset is doing more harm than good for manufacturers and the entire B2B industry.
In this article, we’ll look into reasons why digital marketing hasn’t exactly received the love and adulation from the manufacturing industry and why this needs to be changed. More importantly, we have also discussed the digital marketing tips that will certainly help B2B companies in increasing sales and lead generation.
Why manufacturers are hesitant in embracing Digital Marketing
There are multiple and legacy reasons why manufacturing industry, which is traditionally rooted in physical production, has been rather slow in warming up to the internet marketing.
Overwhelming focus on production: Inmanufacturing, production takes precedence over literally everything including marketing. Prioritizing production helps manufacturers in maintaining control over quality and efficiency. This means that other areas are pretty much ignored.
Continued faith in traditional marketing: A rigid mindset is still deeply entrenched in most manufacturers that traditional marketing is still their best bet if they want to increase their client portfolio. Traditional marketing mostly includes networking, word-of-mouth and hiring and deploying dedicated sales team.
Too many technical details: Manufacturing activities are often replete with too many technical jargons and details. Hence convoying value proposition effectively through digital platforms becomes quite challenging.
Traditional B2B approach: Digital marketing is too B2C centric to offer any value proposition to the B2B companies.
Lengthy sales cycle: Sales cycles in manufacturing are unduly long, sometimes taking months or even a year. The long sale cycles possess great challenge for digital marketing as it is more suitable for products and services with short sales cycle.
Complicated customer journey: The buyer’s journey in manufacturing is often replete with complicated process as it includes multiple steps and several stake holders. Adding further to this challenge is the fact that measuring ROI in B2B is just as complicated. Most manufacturers are, therefore, dismissive about digital marketing’s ability in understanding and adapting to these challenges.
Highly niche markets: Some manufacturing and B2B companies cater to highly specialized and niche markets where online marketing has a minimal scope and hence mostly rely on traditional marketing.
What really is Digital Marketing?
While this blog post may be trying hard to convince manufacturers for warming up to digital marketing, there might be many who may not have iota of an idea or have very minimal knowledge about it. Hence we thought of briefly brushing up the concept of internet marketing before moving ahead.
Digital Marketing refers to marketing actions or process that leverages all the digital channels for selling or promoting products and services. These channels include website, social media, search engines, emails and mobile app. Essentially, it is very much similar to traditional marketing but the fundamental difference being that all the marketing activities are done in the online world.
Pillars and Types of Digital Marketing
- Search engine optimization or SEO
- Social media marketing
- Search engine marketing
- Email marketing
- Display advertising
- Influencer marketing
Benefits of Digital Marketing:
Global exposure: Online marketing is one of the best investments for manufacturers with serious ambition for global expansion. A successful and effective digital marketing campaign helps in breaking the geographical barrier and reach out to the potential clients as well as business opportunities in the international markets. In fact, when it comes to global exposure, nothing can give small manufacturers the level playing field like online marketing does.
Cost-effective: Manufacturing is a capital-intensive industry where spending millions or crores in production activities is a standard practice. However, internet marketing does not demand such huge investments. In fact, it will take up only fraction of the over-all budget of the manufacturing companies.
Unparallel flexibility: While traditional marketing comes with serious limitations that can hardly be fixed or ever be resolved, internet marketing offers several flexible features. These features not only enhance user experience but also help in generating better leads. Whether it is running targeted campaign based on geographical location, data driven decisions, ability to abruptly stop or restart your campaign and much more.
Efficient product launches: Just like for B2C, digital marketing can prove to be an amazing platform for launching B2B and industrial products. It can create a buzz about your product that traditional marketing won’t be able to match. With targeted marketing, online events and social media marketing, you can create excitement for your products that can generate lot of quality leads and push up your sales.
Enhancing brand appeal: Today with internet being ubiquitous and a mass phenomena, a successful online marketing campaign can elevate and give B2B products as well as its company an attractive brand appeal. Therefore, people in general including your potential clients and partners can view them more positively and respect, which can translate into increase lead generation.
Lead generation machine: With great efficiency and sharp focus, internet marketing can prove to be a goldmine of quality lead generation for manufacturing companies. However, here it is important to note that your digital marketing campaign may not give the desired result if your company caters to highly niche segment.
Crisis management: Digital PR is one of the important parts of digital marketing. Whenever your company’s reputation faces a major crisis for whatever reasons, Digital PR can prove to be your savior. When facing negative publicity and unfair allegations, it ensures that your company’s brand value remains completely intact.
Digital Marketing Tips for Manufacturers
As hesitant and dismissive as most industrial producing and B2B companies are towards online marketing, the latter has the potential to put their business on an accelerated growth path. Below we’ve shared some tips that will help you in harnessing the potential of digital marketing for your B2B business.
Develop a professionally looking & informative website: In the digital landscape,nothing can represent your company more aptly and perfectly than your official website. Your website is by far your company’s best representative and brand ambassador in the online world. This is exactly why you should be having a professionally attractive website. Your website is the most important ambassador in the online world, informing the visitors what your company is all about as well as about your products and services. Hence you must be making amply sure that your website casts a positive impression and gives your online marketing an affirmative push.
| Additional Tips: Make sure that your website is properly optimized for mobile viewing. Today on an average more than 60% of visitors are from mobile. Equally make sure that your website is technically sound and boosts optimal website speed. |
Optimize your website: You may be having the best-looking website but its impact will be minimal if your website is not properly optimized to ensure its visibility on search engine. This is called search engine optimization or SEO. When properly optimized, your website will achieve greater visibility on search engines like Google & Bing; paving way for more traffic and also increasing the possibility of quality leads.
| Additional Tips: Do a through Onpage SEO of your website and follow this up with Offpage SEO strategy to build backlinks for your website. Use paid tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs for performing Onpage and Offpage SEO. |
Content is always the king: Use only high-quality content across all your digital marketing platforms including your websites, emails, landing pages and social media. Make sure that your content is in-depth and informative to give complete overview about your products as well as the company.
| Additional Tips: Do a through keyword research and make sure that all your primary as well as secondary keywords are used across all content posted on different content channel. |
Leverage social media: if done consistently and efficiently, social media can contribute immensely to your branding. Select and zero in on the suitable social media platforms that best represents your industry and marketing opportunities. Remember you don’t have to spend yourself too thin across all platforms. Most B2B companies prefer to have strong presence on LinkedIn while you can certainly choose to expand and explore other options.
Additional Tips: Create a monthly or weekly social media schedule and use a good scheduling tool. This will help in posting consistently. You must also ensure that your social media posts are some offering value to the readers, which will help in increasing the engagement level.
Leverage paid advertising: Paid advertising directly puts your brand and your company at the front of your target audience, giving them wider exposure. It is important to remember that in the online world, paid advertising gets a preferential treatment visa via companies that are trying to rank organically. You can either choose Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or social media marketing, which are two of the most popular paid advertising channels. PPC includes Google ads and Bing ads, while social media marketing includes facebook marketing, Instagram marketing and LinkedIn marketing.
Additional Tips: Preferably start small to test waters. If you see good quality leads coming your way then you can increase your paid ad budget. However, don’t be impatient for leads and make sure to run your campaign at least for couple of months.
Keep measuring and analyzing: One of the best advantages of digital marketing is that it offers analytical tools, which you should mandatorily harness to maximize the performance of your campaign. Ignoring analytical tools is a blunder, which unfortunately many people commit either out of sheer ignorance or laziness.
Additional Tips: All social media platforms have their own analytical tools that you need to keep checking. Equally important to regularly check are free tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, which are immensely important for your SEO campaign.
Should you opt for in-house team or outsource?
If you have indeed decided to embrace digital marketing then your company will obviously face the dilemma of whether to create an in-house team or outsource it. The final decision in this regard should be determined by your company’s financial resources. If you have deep pockets and plan to experiment with online marketing as a part of your long-term strategy then hiring an in-house team would be a wise decision. On other hand, companies with limited financial resources should preferably take the outsourcing route. However, it should be outsourced only to agencies that boost good track record in running successful digital marketing campaigns.
Conclusion:
B2b and manufacturing companies should not necessarily see digital marketing as an alternative or competitor to traditional marketing. Rather it can be even used as a supplementary force or used in tandem as part of the holistic marketing strategy. Using digital marketing as a secondary strategy will at least allow manufacturers to break the shackles of its conservative mindset and open up to its overarching benefits. Above all, with internet becoming a dominant force, manufacturers are more likely to gain than lose by opting for online marketing. As Bill Gates once famously said that if your business is not on internet then your business will be out of business. Although this is a pretty old quote, it still rankles with irrecoverable truth.