Marketing Blog

October 26, 2016 By Travis Baker

7 Ways Your Outdated Industrial Website Design Hurts You

Often we get used to the status quo. Whether it is our own house, or an old industrial website design. I have been avoiding the raised floor between my kitchen and my dining room for three years now. It is involuntary that when I cross the threshold, I lift my foot, so I don’t trip and fall.

The problem is that when we have visitors over they are invariably looking at something else, trip and try to throw themselves into the sink.

Luckily at the house, I can explain that we are keeping it as a mid-century example of primitive burglar alarms (a lie). However, when someone is visiting your website you aren’t there to tell them why your site looks the way it does. You know, old.

While old homes can be charming, old industrial sites give a poor first impression of your company. Fair or not, people assume that your business is like your website. If your website is old and outdated, well. Not really fair, but a reasonable assumption.

Outdated websites also hurt how you appear in search engines and limit your leads.

So here is how you can update your site and make it look like the cutting edge company you are.Industrial website design 366 marketing.jpg

Flash: Flash was an excellent way to have animations or illustrations on your site a few years ago. Now, however, it often will not work on newer devices or browsers, so it looks like a big blank spot. Not the best look for your site.
Static: Make sure your site is responsive and looks great no matter where people access it. More and more people every day are visiting your website on a tablet or mobile phone. If it is difficult to see or easy to not use, they are on to your competitor’s site.
Dates: See that little copyright down on the bottom of your site. Does it say last year? Or, say, 2007. Change it immediately. If you have testimonials from 2002, you might want to update those.
Tiny Pictures: As websites have progressed there is more reliance on larger images. If your site is text heavy, with small images, it tends to look more dated. You need to use larger, better pictures. Extra points for using pictures of your real employees on your pages instead of stock images.

Limited pages: Many times on dated industrial websites you click on something and only a part of the page changes. You are still on the same page just a bit of text has changed and maybe there is a new picture. You need to build each page around an individual idea, product or offering. This is not only a design flaw, but it also hurts how your site ranks and pulls in visitors. Modern industrial websites have every click go to a new page because every additional page means more pages that the search engines can crawl. Added pages equal more pages that you have the opportunity to rank, and more places people can find you.
Blog: Speaking of helping your site generate leads you need to have a platform to speak to your customer and present yourself as a thought leader. Not only does it let you share your ideas with prospects it also gives you a better opportunity to be found via search. A blog also gives you something to talk about on social media.
Landing pages: You need more landing pages or pages where you are offering valuable content to your visitors. Not just contact us pages, but pages that will rank in the search engine and generate leads.

Want some help with your industrial website design? Contact us maybe we can help.

October 13, 2016 By Travis Baker

Don’t Use a Website Builder for Your Insurance Website

Your Insurance Website Needs More

Website builders are great for some companies. Your mom and pops, your neighborhood restaurants.

Website builders for insurance companies? Not something I would recommend. I know it is quicker and it is cheaper than hiring a professional. And I know being one of those professionals I have a bit of skin in the game. But I think my arguments stand.

Here is why.

Flexibility: Website builders only let you do certain things in certain ways. Granted they are all easy to do, but you end up looking like your competitor’s website. Using a more advanced CMS, (Content Management System) like WordPress, gives you a ton more flexibility.

Customization: Using a website builder you only have a few ways to customize the look and feel of your site. Usually, the fonts are set to only a few variations. Also, the colors that you can use probably don’t match your corporate colors. This violates brand integrity. Not only does it irritate designers and marketing professionals, it also gives your visitors a not so great feeling of brand dissonance. This feeling is when you expect to see something but it is all subtly off.

Advice: When you use a website builder for your insurance company pretty much all you get access to is a website builder. You don’t get advice on what to write, how to talk to your audience or how to build pages that convert visitors to leads.

Nothing.

At the end, all you have is a website. And one that won’t necessarily give you the results that you want.

I think the advice from a marketing professional is the most valuable part of the equation. They will ask some difficult questions, but it will pay off in the long run. You learn how to tell your story and what makes you unique from your competition. In addition, you get the advice you need from someone who doesn’t treat you like a number, but as a valuable partner.

Conclusion: In order to avoid website builder frustration, go with a professional marketer who can build your site on a CMS and make it exactly the way you want. Companies have contacted us who got partially through a redesign with a website builder with a major issue. They had come to a sticking point where they just could not move any further. Not only is it a waste of your time, but it will cost you more money in the long run.

October 4, 2016 By Travis Baker

Marketing for Construction Companies: 1 Question You Must Answer

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.

Who do you want to talk to?
What do you want those people to know about your company?
What do you want those people to do after they know it?

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.

September 28, 2016 By Travis Baker

Marketing for Manufacturing Companies? Your Site is Only the 1st Step

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.

September 20, 2016 By Travis Baker

Marketing for Manufacturing and Industrial Companies

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.

September 13, 2016 By Travis Baker

Why CFO’s Should Love Inbound Marketing

We have preached the benefits of inbound marketing and content creation on this blog before. In my opinion, everybody should love inbound marketing. In fact, even your CFO should love inbound marketing.

Actually, especially your CFO.

I know that the CFO of an organization seems like an odd choice on the surface when it comes to loving a marketing strategy, but follow me on this one.

As a marketing agency we tend to approach inbound marketing from a marketing or sales perspective, but today I wanted to talk about it from a more bottom line approach. Something that most accounting people and CFO’s seem to have a great deal of interest for some reason. Weird, right?

As a real quick definition borrowed from our friends at HubSpot “Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention.”

While there is always expense associated with marketing whether it is in opportunity cost or capital, inbound marketing gives a great return on your investment.

Let’s look at a few reasons why.

Evergreen: Inbound marketing is built around content creation. Any content that your marketing team creates is for all intents and purposes evergreen. It lasts forever.

That makes it different from other marketing tactics like trade shows or PPC, which are limited by time period or budget. When you pay with either time or money for a piece of content you are creating something that is valuable for a much longer time and continues generating leads.

In fact, content can get more valuable as it accrues more links back to it and more mentions on social media.

Recyclable: Content can also be recycled, which means instead of starting from square one you can reuse it. For instance, if you start with a video you can then change it a bit and have a whitepaper, ebook or case study, then an infographic. That means that you don’t have to pay for brand new content every time. You can take an older piece of content, recondition and refresh it, and have something that attracts new leads saving money in the process.

Closing: Your company probably makes more money when sales is closing sales, correct? If sales is prospecting, or god forbid cold calling, isn’t that a huge waste of resources? If sales has a valuable pipeline of MQL (marketing qualified leads) that means that theoretically your sales teams should be making more sales.

If you institute an inbound marketing strategy, your marketing team can toss highly qualified leads over to sales to pursue. That means that sales is spending more of their time closing sales rather than chasing down leads.

Want to learn more? Get our Guide to the 6 Marketing Metrics Your CEO Cares About.

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