We meet with a fair number of companies about their industrial marketing. Many of these companies want a new website. Their current sites are dated, not functional or just look well…bad.
We help companies with marketing and website design. However, often the underlying problem is not their website, it is that they don’t have a real message. Their message is flawed, dated or they try to cram a bunch of different messages together.
AND they have a bad website…
That’s why we want to talk about how to find your industrial marketing message. (Even if you don’t have an industrial or manufacturing company this process will work for nearly any B2B company.)
Let’s get started.
First Step: The easiest way to find a great message is to ask a question to your customers. What do you do that makes them choose your company over everyone else?
Don’t worry if you have more than one answer. Most companies probably will have a variety of responses. Although, you might have different versions of the same idea.
For instance, if you get “quick delivery” and “easy ordering” that might all lead you to the fact that your ordering process beats your competitors.
Second Step: OK, you have your input from your external sources. Now put all of the answers up on a board and try to group them. In our above example “quick delivery” and “ease of ordering” could be grouped. 
How you ask? Those are totally different, right? Because the real thing we are trying to tease out of our questions is not the features that our customers like, but the benefits that we offer them.
For instance “delivery time” could in the customer’s mind, in fact, be “shorter downtime” or “increased production.” People and companies don’t buy features; they buy benefits.
So we want to focus on the benefits that our company provides
.
And let’s all hope that why your customers choose you is not cost. Cost ‘s hard to compete on and not a great long-term solution. If it is cost, maybe look for your second reason.
Third Step: Now you know why customers choose you. Let’s say that it is delivery speed and ease of ordering. We might know the benefit that we are trying to find.
Great. Talk to your marketing and salespeople. How do they speak of these factors in their presentations? How do they have that message formulated? What really resonates when they talk about “quick delivery”?
Fourth Step: OK we can take our benefit that we found in step three and build our message around that.
Let’s say that our benefit that everything coalesced around the most was “shorter downtime.” That’s a really marketable benefit that has a financial gain for our customers.
We want to build all of our messages on our website, print collateral around the fact that we offer a short downtime.
It would be best if we could say that we have the shortest downtime in the industry, the southeast or something along those lines. But unless you actually have stats to back it up, I would be reluctant to print that.
Note: Be wary of combining too many features into a very broad benefit. Yes, it will appeal to more people, but broader message is often a weaker message.
We hope this helps.
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