Digital Marketing Archives - OceanOne Design

Effective Online Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers

by DG | Apr 26, 2022 | Lead Generation, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Online Marketing, SEO, Website Design

Manufacturers and distributors have very different marketing strategy challenges than B2C companies. Ultimately, your goal is to convince other businesses to work with you and marketing efforts fail if you cannot accomplish this goal.

The time have changed and using the internet to contact more companies and grow your business has never been easier. If you’re looking for modern, reliable, and cost-effective manufacturer marketing strategies, look no further.

The following industrial marketing solutions have been compiled to help you reach more potential partners online. Even if you don’t have much experience with digital marketing, you can follow these steps written in plain English.

Let me explain to you why internet marketing is so successful for manufacturers and other B2B businesses.

The Internet made it easier for retailers to conduct research on potential distributors and their products. Within seconds, they were able to view detailed photos or specs, read reviews, and view customer feedback from a larger number of companies and products.

Due to this change in preference, your marketing must adapt as well. You’re likely missing most of your potential customers if you don’t use the Internet to reach them. Fortunately, you can use this to your advantage. The ROI is much, much easier to track with online marketing than with traditional marketing methods.

Moreover, because online marketing costs are relatively low, manufacturers or distributors are able to experiment more freely, with little or no risk to their business.

With a wide range of options, you can try things and fail without worrying about losing a great deal of money or damaging your reputation. Actually, testing is not only recommended, it’s an important part of the overall strategy as you will soon see.

Here are ways to you can use online marketing to reach more potential customers

Let’s talk about some of the tactics you should try now that you know why digital channels are so beneficial for manufacturer marketing strategies. Here are some of the best marketing strategies we’ve used to reach more potential customers at the lowest cost possible for manufacturers and distributors.

1. Make your website rank for the right keywords

Taking steps to ensure that your manufacturer or distributor website can be found easily by potential customers – and outranks your competitors – should be the first step in your marketing strategy. In search engine optimization – also known as SEO – this is accomplished.

Here’s a quick explanation for those unfamiliar with SEO. When someone types in a keyword related to your business into a search engine, SEO is one of several methods to make your website more likely to show up and rank highly. Choosing the right keywords to target is key.

The easiest way to get started with SEO is to brainstorm words or phrases potential customers would associate with your business. It can be as simple as a phrase or a single word. If you manufacture hardwood flooring, for instance, you might consider everything from “hardwood flooring” to “how to choose hardwood flooring”.

IMPORTANT – DON’T DO THIS…

This is where we see other marketing companies giving bad advice. Let’s stay with the “hardwood flooring” example. If you manufacture hardwood flooring, and try to rank # 1 in Google, you will be in direct competition with every large retailer like Home Depot and Lowes. It will cost a fortune and it won’t help with sales unless you sell directly to consumers.

It is extremely important to understand search intent. Google is all about providing the best results for the assumed intent of keyword search. If someone searches for “hardwood flooring”, Google assumes someone is looking to buy hardwood flooring and wants to see choices. Sure enough, if you do search “hardwood flooring”, all the top results will be from flooring retailers.

As a manufacturer, you should focus on optimizing your site to rank for site search terms that retailers and distributors would use to find your products. Target keywords like “hardwood flooring manufacturer” and “what is the best hardwood flooring”, “wholesale hardwood flooring”.

Take time to brainstorm terms for your industry, and then create content that is optimized to rank high for those terms. We won’t go into an SEO tutorial here but once you understand keyword intent, you can move forward with a successful SEO strategy.

2. Advertise using pay-per-click

Manufacturers also use advertising as one of their top marketing strategies, but not the kind of advertising you’d expect. A pay-per-click ad is one that appears on search engines results pages (SERPs) and other websites.

Manufacturers or distributors can achieve very high returns on investment with PPC ads, which are generally inexpensive. You only pay for them when they are clicked – not when they are viewed – and they contain just a sentence or two of copy with a link to your website. Even if people don’t click on your ad, you are still getting brand exposure for free.

The use of PPC ads, which allow you to control the amount of money you spend to appear in search engine results, can be a tremendous benefit to your brand if you are not ranking highly in search engines. The reports are a huge benefit because they will detail what people are actually searching for and you can do a lot of testing to find out what works best for your company.

Results from PPC are instantaneous, which is one of the major benefits. You can start sending targeted traffic to your website and attract qualified leads as soon as you click to go live with your ads. You will be able to generate leads quickly without exhausting your budget.

3. Find out what converts on your website

We mentioned earlier that online marketing gives you room to try out different methods and to fail if necessary. The conversion rate optimization method, also known as CRO, encourages testing and failure with the goal of increasing conversions and ultimately revenue for your company.

CRO is based on a very simple premise where you test changes on your website and discover what changes provide more conversions. Whether your successful conversion is measured as a phone call or request for quote, a simple change of wording like “Contact Us” to “Get Started” or “Learn More” on a button can sometimes be the answer to significantly boosting your conversion rate. You can try different Headings, images, color schemes etc. The challenge is not to implement this permanently and risk losing all your leads if your gut feeling turns out to be incorrect. With CRO, you can test ideas without losing all your leads.

A/B testing is a method that is implemented to show version “A” of your landing page to one group of website visitors. Then a “B” version of the page is set up to show a different group of visitors. Once the winner is discovered you stick with that page. An experiment can be made safer this way since a drop in conversions in the “B” version immediately causes the test to be dropped. If you make a substantial leap, you can reap immediate benefits and more profit!

4. Develop engaging media and content that ranks well

When retailers search online for products to carry in their stores, they may be seeking photos, videos, or more detailed information than what they might get from a basic summary. Create engaging content and ensure that it ranks highly in search results to capitalize on this desire – and attract more potential B2B customers to your content.

Links to websites are no longer the only result in search engine results. In addition to receiving search results for any query, the searcher can also receive videos, images, locations, and shopping results. Good engaging content that you can get ranked is likely to attract visitors to your website where they can learn more about your products.

Here are some content suggestions and ideas for manufacturers:

Are there any products you would like a video of in action? Host the video on YouTube (with a link to your website in the description) with a keyword-rich title and description.
The images on your website should have relevant keywords in their filenames and alt text explaining what is in the image. This can increase the chances of them ranking high in Google Image search for those keywords and lead viewers to your website when they click on it.
Provide answers to customer questions in your content, like blog posts and videos. Having answers to these questions are likely to rank well on search engines, causing potential customers to read them, then peruse your website for more information. Answer questions on Quora.
Repurpose existing content. Content repurposing is very effective when you take good quality content and repurpose its structure and message to get more use from your valuable information. You might turn a video into blog posts or slide presentations. Create downloadable cheat sheets or ebooks and use them to build an email list.
Use surveys to find out what people think about your products and gain insights so you can make improvements to existing products or get ideas for new ones.

5. Establish a strong social media presence

Social media marketing can be slow to take off among B2B companies. For manufacturers, however, social media marketing is a very effective tool. Create a social media profile and your manufacturing company will be exposed to decision-makers and engage with potential clients.

Manufacturers can increase their brand recognition and make meaningful connections through social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

As well as sharing product photos, setting up competitions, and creating brand ambassadors, social media can be used for many other things.

YouTube can be a great marketing tool for B2B companies. It’s an excellent opportunity to showcase products and distribute informative content using video.

Social media can also be utilized by manufacturers during product development to get feedback and ideas.

Your marketing strategy can be adjusted based on customer feedback using social media listening tools. Additionally, product forums can be used to discover what customers think about your product.

6. Make it easy to contact you

Last but not least, we suggest making it extremely easy for potential clients to get in touch with you. A simple way to achieve this is to have your phone number prominently displayed on your website, add a dedicated contact form, or utilize social media. Here are some examples of excellent industrial websites.

It may seem obvious but some sites make customers has make it a hassle just to find the contact email or phone number. Take a look at your website and make sure it is very easy to get in touch with your company.

If you want people to call, keep the phone number visible at all times while they are on your website.

You will get more leads. Also, being active on social media can increase your chances of getting in touch with them, as many will reach out to you with questions there so be prepared with answers.

Would you like help with your manufacturer marketing strategy?

Manufacturers often find it challenging to develop and implement marketing plans in-house. Every need is different, and every method must be just right. If you’re struggling to balance your marketing efforts with the demands of running your business, we can help!

We have been working with manufacturing businesses since 2000. Every business is unique and we have the experience to look at the big picture, figure out ways to reach your ideal customers and build a strategy to meet your goals.

Also check out our post on “The Power of B2B Marketing Automation – How does it work?“

Social Media Strategy Tips for Local Businesses

by DG | Aug 25, 2020 | Social Media, Digital Marketing, Online Marketing

In recent years, we have seen great advancements in data connectivity and a rise in mobile users. Due to this, social media has risen up as a new platform for marketing. While the conventional platforms have not yet become obsolete and still play an important role for some businesses, social media not only provides you with an opportunity to target a wider set of audience but also enable you to interact with them at a more personal level.

So, before you start your social media marketing campaign, it is very important for you to have a well-thought-out strategy ready to be executed. This will not only help you to identify the hurdles in social media marketing but you will also be able to use the right tactics to tackle these hurdles and reach your goal in the time.

Keep A Business Objective in Mind:

Social media has its own perks and by using it effectively, you can achieve many things. It has made a lot of things easy such as performing customer service, engaging with customers, increasing web traffic, expanding the audience, getting valuable feedbacks and much more.

But to achieve all these you need to have a goal in mind that you can work towards. Now to achieve your objective, you need a strategy and you need to very careful while making it. Don’t let social media make your objective, instead make your own business objectives and let the social media drive those them.

Optimize Your Content

You probably have read many blogs in which they mention that your content must be high quality, original, relevant and appealing to your audience. But how does one create a content like that? If you want to position your brand at a very high position in your industry, then you should take a look into what the successful brand are already doing.

Follow 60/30/10 Rule

This rule means that you should create and post 60 percent of the content that is relevant to your product. Share 30 percent of content that is relevant to the local community or a non-competitive local business and share 10 percent of the content regarding sales and promotions of your services. This will help to create high quality content and still maintain the consistency.

Your Content Must Be Shareable

Better than original, high quality and relevant, you must put focus on content that is shareable. If you are confused what is content is most shareable, take a look at your competitor’s activity and note what content gets the most likes, comments and shares. Now go back to your project and start creating posts and curating content that has similar elements but better. Sharable content can include…

How to Posts
Positive Content
Trending Topics
Social Causes

Be Present

This is the easiest way to talk directly to your customers and you can do that without spending any money. Be sure to like, comment, share and answer content relevant to your niche as well as on monitoring and engaging. It can be challenging to optimize the time you’ll spend on this activity so keep in this in mind.

Good news is that you don’t need to monitor all the social media channels all the time. A good way to start deciding where to be present is to look where your competitors are. For instance, if they are posting more on Instagram then maybe you should start paying attention to that platform too.

Share compelling visuals whenever you can

People now days, specially millennials are always in a rush, so you get only a few second to grab their attention. You need make those few seconds count, else they’ll move on to some other post or website. So, always try to include quality visual components in your posts because if your content seems to be below average no one will stop scrolling and see what you have to offer. Posts including image produce 650% more engagement that text-only post and is more like to get shared 40 times more. Again good quantity visuals are important as they tend to increase the people’s willingness to read it by 80%.

Prepare to Spend Money on Social Media Marketing

“There is no free lunch”. Yes, this also applies here. Fact is that organic growth is dying. Platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter have updated their apps to prize more to paid content and less to non-paid content. This means it’s harder to get space in your customer’s timeline. Now, what would be the point of spending so much time and effort in producing content, if nobody is going to see it.

However, you must understand that you should prepare before you start to pay, otherwise you’ll be just wasting money. Now the question arises that how much should you spend? Well, this all depends on the nature of business and target customers.

When we are talking about Facebook in particular, there are a few approaches. If you are promoting something specifically like a Product Sale or Signing up for a mailing list you should run an ad campaign because there is a lot that you can control. There is much to know about Facebook Advertising strategies which is beyond the scope of this post. In fact we have a Free eBook called “How To Win On Social Media” on this topic. See the signup to the right of this article.

USEFUL TIP – Sometimes you just want to get people to read your blog post. In this case use “Boost” and set it for $1/per day for 7 days. This is very low cost exposure but “what’s the value?” you ask? If you have Facebook Pixel installed on your site you can use Google retargeting ads so those visitors to your blog post will see your ads on other sites. They will become more familiar with your brand and you’ll increase the likelihood of them buying from you.

DOWNLOAD Our Free Social Post Planner (In Google Sheets, click FILE > make copy). It has a daily, monthly and archive view as well as a brainstorming tab.

Get Your Content Shared

Do you best to encourage people to share your content. There are also some great services like quuupromote.co that will spread your blog posts to get shared by influencers for a small fee and this works great. There are similar services but this is one of our favourite and very affordable.

Grow Your Following

Post frequently – 4x per day if possible
Optimize your posting time
Use visual content – Photos – & Videos
Use hashtags strategically
Engage with replies
Create an inviting profile
Find followers within your network

A special note about Instagram…

How to quickly grow your Instagram Following.

When you post something on Facebook, how many people engage with your post? 5? 10? 20? Instagram is very different. With zero followers you can get a lot of likes.

How you say?

The magic of Hashtags!!!

With Instagram you can post up to 30 hashtags per post! That’s a huge number. Now you just have to be strategic about selecting the right ones.

With a new account you should put up about 12 posts.

You want to find relevant hashtags with 50k-300k images per hashtag. After you get over 10k followers, you can use more popular hashtags, but at the early stage don’t go after hashtags with more than 300k images because you’ll get lost in the feed and get zero engagement.

Your goal is to get featured within the 9 top posts under each hashtag.

Moving forward, you should post 3-4 times per day.

Instagram doesn’t work for every kind of business. It’s a very visual platform. If your business is not very visual, like accounting or insurance then Instagram is probably not worth the time. Think about whether you could come up with 3 or 4 good images per day to help make your decision about trying Instagram. Accounting and insurance came to mind as not being visual. However, I have not looked into that and there may be companies in those categories having success.

Repeat what worked

Don’t get disheartened if something didn’t work just try something else. Don’t give up on the idea of using social media as your marketing tool. And if your social media efforts were successful, just stick to what you have been doing. It is as simple as that. Just if one thing didn’t work for you doesn’t mean that nothing will work. Try again, just stick to the basics, redefine your audience and reconsider about the amount of investment.

Social media is great tool for small business owners as it is unique and it can take a company’s fame to new heights, broaden its reach and can create a wide range of customers. But all this is going to work only if you are determined to do it.

If you need help with your Social Media Strategy, our design agency offers a full range of Social Media and other digital marketing services. Just click here to book a Free Consultation.

How To Develop A Digital Marketing Strategy That Gets Results

by DG | Oct 18, 2018 | Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, Branding, Business, Online Marketing

Today’s advertising mediums include more digital channels than ever before. Factors such as faster reach capabilities, lower advertising costs, and global branding opportunities make digital marketing a viable avenue for building awareness. When creating a digital marketing strategy, it’s imperative to plan out each messaging deliverable, communication channel, and content strategy so that you don’t lose yourself in a whirlwind of social media accounts and content deadlines.

Approaching your strategy means taking initial steps to determine what your end goals are and then devising a practical plan to bring them to fruition. Here’s a 4-step process for creating a solid digital marketing strategy.

Create A Finish Line

Know what your goals are before you embark on your strategy. Create a list of measurable short and long-term goals. For example, are you looking to increase sales? If so, by how much exactly? Are you looking to increase your social media followers? If so, by how many exactly? And on what platforms? Don’t rely on vague goals that can’t be measured.

Put numbers to your goals. For instance, we want to generate 800 leads in one month, Increase sales by $5,000 this month or gain 1000 Twitter Followers in one week. Whatever it is you want to achieve, make it a number and then you can figure out a way to get there. Then you can track and measure your results to see whether you were successful or not in achieving the goal.

If you achieve your goal successfully, great. If not, look at what worked and what didn’t make some adjustments and try again. Try different messaging or images or maybe it was just not enough budget. If you’re tracking everything you should be able to figure out how to improve your results. Expect that there will be some trial and error.

Setting realistic goals gives you accountability and allows you to forecast things such as cost, time, and resource allocation. You don’t want to have to guess what your marketing budget is, and you certainly don’t want to assume which team members can complete certain tasks. Create realistic goals and milestones.

List Your Mediums

What digital marketing channels do you plan on using to get your message to your audience? Are you planning to focus on one main channel or a combination of three or more? Consider making a list of 10-15 potential marketing channels and then narrow it down to your top five. Next, find out which platforms work best for your target audience based on their demographic and online behaviour and then decide which ones work best for your plans. Laser focus in on your main channel to help you get the initial traction that you need when you first begin your campaigns.

Plan Out Your Content

Knowing what type of content you’ll create and how often it’ll be delivered is crucial to your digital strategy. Whether it’s article writing, social media posting, or video production, there should always be content that’s being created behind the scenes. Find out which types of content work best for your products and your audience and then create a calendar to keep a steady messaging stream flowing your audience’s way. Content calendars are essential to digital marketing, as they help you avoid the headaches and confusion that can come with last-minute content development.

Implement, Monitor, and Measure

Once you’ve outlined your digital strategy it’s go-time. Make sure that you have all of the resources you need. Make sure that all of your team members know their deliverables and when they’re due. And most importantly, make sure that you’re monitoring and tracking your progress throughout the entire time. Know what metrics will be used to track each goal, and if you fall short of meeting a goal, use it as a lesson for your next project and campaign. The more you monitor and track your activities, the better insight you’ll have on what types of content your audience responds to best.

Setting up Google Analytics is the most important step to track all your results. There are many online tools out there to help you track all of you digital marketing activities and choosing the right one depends on the depth of your campaign. If you are only using Google ads, then tracking through your Google Analytics and Google Ads control panel are probably sufficient. However if you ad Facebook Ads or any other advertising channel to the mix, there is a lot more to track and you’ll want those reports to be side by side for easy evaluation and comparison. As I mentioned, there are a ton of tools out there price according to their level of capabilities. We have a free tool that is great for tracking your Facebook and Google Ad campaigns. It’s called Advertising Intelligence and you can read more about it on our pricing page.

A well-planned digital marketing strategy will ease the confusion that can come with setting up marketing campaigns. Once you have your content and channels figured out, it’s just a matter of setting up the right goals and metrics.

This sounds simple but it can be overwhelming without some guidance. We would be glad to help you with a Free Marketing Strategy Consultation where we will discuss your goals and we can provide you with solid advise to start building your successful Marketing Strategy!

This is a high level view of what is involved in building a digital marketing strategy. For a more detailed deep-dive, check out this post: Execute a Powerful Marketing Strategy to Grow Your Business