Turn more prospects into customers
So it will be 2017 soon! Yeah! New year, new cool things we can do in marketing! Right! Right?
Well, maybe….however if you haven’t proven that your marketing is effective then maybe not. You might have the same budget you had last year. Or even worse, lower. Yikes
So what can you do now to make sure you have a bigger budget in 2017.
The problem is that marketing departments often have a challenge tying an increase in your marketing budget into an increase in company KPI’s. So let’s start there
It is the fall, which in addition to pumpkins and turning leaves, also means it is marketing goal setting season.
We have written before about the marketing metrics that your CEO cares about, and how you can use those to make sure you get the most resources possible.
However, today I want to talk about how to make better marketing goals that are more powerful and how you can meet them.
First of all, your goals need to be well thought out. Saying “oh we want to increase leads” is not an excellent goal. Why? Because it is not SMART.
It doesn’t have the limitations of time, specificity, or well, anything. This goal is not a SMART marketing goal. Making your goals SMART will help you know when you meet them and help give you a mark to hit.
Secondly, your goals need to have buy-in. And not just from the marketing department. Talk to sales and learn what their goals are. How do your prospective goals match up to theirs? If they don’t, there is a problem.
Look at your company’s overall goals. Where can marketing help them meet it? While many of marketing goals tie closely to sales, there are other aspects of marketing including brand awareness, PR, etc. that don’t necessarily pair directly with sales goals.
Thirdly, you need to make sure that you have an effective strategy to meet your goals. Increasing inbound leads by 30% is not going to be a realistic goal if you don’t have an effective strategy to do so. Make sure that you have the budget and time to enact the plan that fits the closest with your goals.
Lastly, be conscious of your budget. Having a 100k strategy to meet your goals is not going to fare well if your marketing budget is only $60,000. Figure out ways that you can judge past strategies and tactics and see if you can move money to more efficient marketing techniques.
If you need help with your marketing goals, download our SMART Marketing Goals Template.
Marketing for construction companies has its own set of challenges. You have to get in front of the right set of eyes, with the right message, at the right time.
And there are a great deal of tactics that can help you do that. In fact, there might be too many tactics. And you can’t waste your time on tactics that don’t have great marketing return on investment for construction.
So what you really need to do is step back. Before we talk tactics, return on investment and cost of inaction, you need to start with one question.
What do you want your marketing to accomplish for your construction company?
Really that’s it. What do you want to do? From that, everything else will flow. But if you don’t ask that one question, you can spend a lot of time spinning your wheels.
Once you have an answer, you are going to know where your strategy is leading and what tactics you will need to pursue.
After you answer the “What do you want to accomplish question” you can start to break it down to a few more narrow components.
These questions will get you on the path to consider what is unique about your customer and what makes you stand out from your competitors.
It will also get you to think about the demographics of who you want to target. Is it general contractors in the Charlotte, NC area? Or is it HVAC installers in Rock Hill, SC?
Then you can start thinking about what you want these people to do. Subscribe to your newsletter? Consider you as a supplier or partner?
Answering these few simple questions will help guide your marketing efforts for your construction company and give you a much better ROI on your marketing spend.
Click on the button to learn the foundation for a great construction or general contractor website.
You finally convinced your team that to effectively market your manufacturing company you need to update your website. Now you have a new site, it looks great and you are crushing your competitors site.
Message? We have a great message!
And check out those images. Man, they are crisp!
Video? Heck, yeah we have awesome video. An interview with our CEO! And man he can tell a story!
So… I guess we just sit back and wait for the new leads to pour in….and let’s keep waiting….and wait a bit more…..
OK, so now what?
While a great looking, slick website is important for branding and presenting a good outward face for your company, it is not necessarily going to draw in hordes of new leads for manufacturing companies.
For that you are going to need a digital marketing strategy. You have your fancy new website, but now you need to promote it.
Here is a step-by-step intro to a campaign to promote your website.
Step 1: Find or create a great piece of digital content that will be of value to your customers. Ideally it is content that will help prospects solve a problem they just discovered.
For instance, a possible problem might be that they need more accuracy in their distribution center. Your piece of content should be something along the lines of an e-book or a kit to help them figure out how to solve this problem.
Step 2: Set up a landing page on your new, cool website where people can download the content. I would put a form in front of it so people have to give you a bit of information to download. If your content is valuable people should have to pay for it with a little information, don’t you agree? And this is how you are going to generate the audience.
Step 3: Now you need to promote your awesome digital marketing strategy. Write a blog post with keywords that will appeal to your target audience. Talk about your content on your social media channels. When you send your newsletter, use a great call to action to push your content.
Step 4: Repeat next month.
While this is a time intensive strategy, it has some clear advantages.
It serves multiple goals. Not only does great content generate leads, you can also use this digital marketing strategy to position your product.
It brings more qualified visitors that you are trying to attract. Because you have targeted content for your audience you get more of the people you want on your website.
It is evergreen. Meaning that unlike other tactics that if you stop spending, or stop promoting, it will cease to generate leads. Once you produce something it will always be there, and in fact, the longer it is up garnering likes it becomes more powerful.
Want to learn more about marketing strategy for manufacturing? Download our guide.
Marketing for Manufacturing and Industrial companies is unique and comes with its own set of challenges. One of the biggest problems is that there is never as much time in the day as you need.
In nearly every manufacturing environment that I have been in marketing never has enough resources to get exactly what they want done. And on top of that there is always the desire to use the newest, shiniest toy. Whether it is a new social network or trade show or whatever.
However, I think there is a way to solve both of those problems with creating a complete and integrated marketing strategy for your manufacturing or industrial company. An integrated marketing strategy helps you limit where you spend your time so that you can do a great job with fewer tactics then an OK job with a bunch of them.
But putting together a complete marketing strategy for an industrial company is not an easy task. That is why we created a Industrial and Manufacturing Strategy Guide.
The immediate question is,”But if I don’t have time to do everything already how is spending time creating a marketing strategy going to help me?”
True, there is a time investment here, however the return on the time spent is going to make marketing your manufacturing company tons easier. You can focus on what works and let the rest of the tactics that don’t slide to the side.
Another question might be, “How do I get buy-in to spend time on this from my boss or the C-Level?”
We know that getting buy-in from the C-suite can be tough, but with this guide you can move past that problem by engaging the owners or president by talking about their goals and showing how the marketing strategy can help meet them. In fact one of the things we talk about is how you can find the key performance indicators (i.e. what moves the needle) for the president or CFO.
You also need to know who is going to be on your team to decide the strategy. This is where management and sales leadership can be brought in. Sales might even have a sales strategy in place you can use this strategy to help form your marketing strategy.
To get more details on how to build a Marketing Strategy for Manufacturing and Industrial companies. Click on the red box and get your own strategy guide and make the time you spend on your marketing more effective.
Sometimes I talk to people about web development, who clearly could benefit from a website, and I get the oddest excuses for why they don’t need one.
Want to hear my favorite?
“We don’t need a new website because we have too many leads already.”
Yep, people say that. Often with a straight face.
“Really? You have too many leads already? Then why are you here with me eating overheated appetizers and drinking sub-par beer instead of on a boat in the Bahamas?”
But, OK let’s say that you do have “too many leads”.
That is not the only reason you need your site redesigned or even, gulp, need a site to begin with.
Want to know why you need a new website?
It is your face. You partners go to it, your suppliers go to it, your customers go to it. Do you want to look like you and your company is stuck in the early 90’s? Probably not.
Do you want your first interaction with a customer to happen via some random third party website, that doesn’t know your message or your audience?
No, you don’t. Perception is reality. Make your reality a little better.
Show expertise
Your website gives you a great place to share your thoughts and tell your story. You can illustrate what makes you different from your competitors. It enables you to let the all of your customers know how you can help them with their problems in their distribution center or warehouse.
Shorten your sales cycle
OK, you have too many leads now, but what about in the future. Some sales cycles take 3, 6, heck even 18 months! Wouldn’t it be nice to have some customers in your sales funnel already for when those possible lean times come around?
Target
Your website allows you to target the best leads for your business. Yes you maybe getting a “ton of leads” but what are those leads doing for you? Are they your ideal customers? Or are they people that you have to bend your solution to fit?
Are they in your geographic region that you can service easily, or are they 4 states away where you don’t have a presence?
Interested in talking about your website? Contact us.
