As a manufacturing company, your primary goal is to have a steady influx of viable leads. And the kind of marketing that best suits a manufacturing industry is inbound marketing as bait.
This is a process of creating content that acts as magnets that attract prospects.
The inbound marketing method for manufacturing companies gives prospects adequate knowledge and information that benefits them.
And the more sufficient knowledge prospects have about your company, the more their chance of patronizing you.
Top 10 Lead Generation Strategies for Manufacturing Companies
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The ability to generate high-quality leads is a very vital aspect of any sales process. Many successful manufacturing companies build their sales process around lead generation strategies that center mainly on attracting and identifying these high-quality leads efficiently.
Below is a list of our top 10 effective lead generation strategies for your manufacturing business.
STEP 1. Leverage existing customers
It is a very useful strategy to make use of your already existing clients and customers to promote your business. This method also comes in handy when you are planning on expanding your business or creating a new one.
One of the ways you can leverage your existing customers or clients is to ask them if they know of any similar companies that are on the lookout for services that you offer.
You could also ask them if they have contacts elsewhere that they would be willing to share.
Another method of leverage existing clients is by asking for testimonials that you can use throughout your marketing and sales process.
These positive reviews and testimonials can be posted conspicuously on your website, in newsletters and brochures.
Reviews posted regarding your company on Yelp and other popular review sites can play a remarkable role in establishing your brand as one that can be trusted.
The moment you have earned the trust of prospects and potential leads, it ultimately becomes much easier to successfully convert them to buying leads.
STEP 2. Organize or Participate Actively at Industry Events
Attending industry events or speaking in industry events is one of the best ways of reaching out and getting the attention of a targeted audience.
When you sign up to give a presentation, it is a means of demonstrating your expertise and providing value to prospective buyers.
It also serves as a means of developing trust in your potential prospects. and at the end of the lecture or presentation, make sure to set up meetings with interested clients or prospects.
Even if you won’t talk or make a presentation, your presence and participation in events like this enable you to establish your company brand as an expert in that field.
STEP 3. Create a Blog
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It is important to have a website for your company or industry. If you already have one, consider leveraging the website to attract potential clients and customers.
The best way to leverage your website to achieve this purpose is to begin creating valuable content that answers the questions your buyers frequently ask.
This process is actually blogging. And the kind of content you post should be of good quality. You can achieve quality blogging by conducting keyword research to know the terms your ideal customers use when they ask a question on Google.
When you know the words they use, you can then proceed to write contents that are optimized to appear in search results.
STEP 4. Optimize Your Website To Convert
Your website must be optimized in a way that encourages people to convert. This can be achieved only by posting accurate, complete, and up-to-date content.
Make use of Call-To-action on the web pages to encourage the site visitors to take a step by either signing up for a newsletter, register for a webinar, request a consultation or even download an e-book.
Make use of forms on your website to collect data about your site visitors. This will eventually become your list or database of leads.
Haven done all these, it is also very important to analyze its performance to know what is working well and what is not and fix them promptly
When your website eventually begins to generate leads, you must make a duty to regularly follow up with the leads as they are being generated.
A Harvard Business Review revealed that companies are 7 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation if they follow up with their leads within an hour. While those that don’t followup promptly takes longer to convert.
STEP 5. Occasionally Give out Freebies.
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These freebies can be in form of free assessments or free consultations to your site visitors. One of the advantages this offers is that it helps you establish trust with your prospects.
When you offer your prospects a free assessment, it accurately sums up why they should be working with you, you are at the same time indirectly empowering them to build a case internally within your organization.
This strategy enables them to champion your manufacturing company in a wonderful way. As long as you are the one that helped them identify a certain business challenge, you increase their chances of turning to you to help solve it.
STEP 6. Re-connect With Old Or Lost Clients/Opportunities
Sometimes your existing prospect over a long time might have decided to go with a competitor. You would do well to check in with them again.
If it turned out that they have actually decided to go with a competitor, ask them if they are happy or if they had been going through a hard time and ask them if this is settled.
Also, ask if they would like to create new opportunities with you. Consider reaching out o old clients that have left you in the past and find out how things have evolved with them since the last time you were in touch.
Finally, if they aren’t interested in having a business with you, you can ask if they know someone else who might be interested.
STEP 7. Engage in Proper Communication With Your Customers/Clients
These days, customers are better informed than they used to be in the past. Therefore, this wealth of information and knowledge empowers them to tune out unwanted emails, calls, and advertisements.
Customers now control more of how they communicate with businesses
To keep up with time, businesses have to ensure that their customers can reach them in other convenient ways possible. If your customer spends a significant amount of their time on social media, it is best to connect and communicate with them via the same platform.
And if your customer is already on your website and has some questions, It is best to make use of live chat to answer their question immediately and even possibly close a sale.
STEP 8. Keep track of your supporters
Some companies sometimes have some loyal employees that move around for one reason or the other. These people can be your mouthpiece at countless new companies.
They can even become emissaries of the sort, they help in funneling your business and contacts as they land in new positions.
As a company, if you have such employees or supporters, you have to keep track of them.
STEP 9. Always Be Abreast With Current Industry News
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Make sure you are always keeping up with the latest news that is important to your industry. This ensures that you always know whenever a client or prospect asks a question.
Also, make sure you keep up with publications like manufacturing industry magazines and press releases which can offer you insight into what companies are actively looking to buy or build.
STEP 10. Leverage Account-Based Marketing
So you may sometimes find out that a company is such a perfect match for your product or services and you need to prioritize them.
You may even find that account-based marketing can help you close a deal and it serves as a link between you and the companies that could significantly boost your business.
Other Lead Generation Guides for Manufacturing Companies
1. Create a Marketing Strategy
Come up with a viable strategy and stick to it. You must realize that inbound marketing requires a great deal of work to get the desired results.
You need to come up with a plan and be prepared to work through plan delivery. To make things easier, assign responsibilities to each member of your team or staff and grow it into the way you work.
You need a viable marketing strategy because it is this strategy that helps you generate leads because it gives you clarity on the goal you are trying to achieve and how to go about it.
2. Understand What You Want to Measure
How many leads are you trying to generate per quarter? How many page views do you need to generate that many leads? If you ask these surface questions, it’ll lead to more in-depth questions.
3. Follow Up With Your Competitors
It is very important for you to learn from your competitors and take the necessary inspiration from what they do.
But do not duplicate your competitor’s content as it can get you in trouble. Rather, take note of what your competitors are doing and pick the useful parts and improve on them.
4. Create And Maintain An Online Presence
As a manufacturer, you should make sure to have an online presence, in form of a website, e-commerce store, blog, and other social media platforms.
A research by Accenture revealed that 19 out of 20 buyers claimed that they do some research online before they make an actual purchase.
It is very important for your business to have a web presence if you want to be able to reach out to a very large audience and get more leads.
5. Establish And Maintain A Quality Buyer Persona
Bear in mind that when you are manufacturing products they are usually sold to other businesses that sell it at a retail price.
The people that visit or patronize these other businesses in search of your product are usually a mix of engineers, scientists, maintenance, and production managers. They may also be purchasing managers.
It is therefore very important that you create personas for each of these people, in which you describe who they are, what they need, and what they intend to achieve.
When you have a detailed understanding of your buyers, it makes targeting them a lot easier and when you target the right audience, you will get more leads
Communicate In a Simple Language They Understand
You will make a lot of sense by using the customer’s words to describe challenges and proffer potential solutions to his challenges. This makes him understand you better and avoid any confusion
If you choose to use some terms and expressions that your customers don’t know, you will only end up getting a mismatch between what they are actually searching for and the content you are producing.
Using complex terms and expressions does not impress prospects it only confuses them and makes you lose good leads.
7. Know The Goals & Challenges Of Your Prospects
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Knowing the actual goals and the actual challenges your prospects are confronted with will help you align your contents with their interests.
After you must have decided the caliber and kind of people you want to visit your site, you have to also think about what they actually want.
Bear in mind that it is not just that amazing features of your product that is on their mind for a start. There are definitely some challenges they are faced with and some other things they will be interested in. These are what you should seek to know.
Their priority is the solution to a problem. Therefore you have to put yourself in their shoes, think like they do, and figure out the problems your potential customers want to solve.
Do not let product-based selling syndrome hinder your ability to generate leads.
8. Make Your FAQ Keyword-Based
It is very important that you answer questions that people ask your sales team during sales calls. Answer questions and help your customers understand how they could and how they should use your product.
Give them detailed explanations on how to use your different products to solve different problems, clarifying the situations where each product is most appropriate. This should include advice on the installation procedures or operation steps.
This information must also be free as your goal is to provide valuable resources for free to your customers
9. Make Quality Content Your Priority
If you are to create a blog or white paper you will have to find a competent Content Marketer with abundant technical knowledge.
You must not compromise the quality of your company by posting poor quality content as this is an immediate turn-off and can make you lose leads
10. Regularly Update Content
Say you already have a very nice search engine ranking in the past, you don’t have to let those contents remain the same for too long.
Optimize your content, by identifying new keywords and phrases and add them to your content frequently.
Bear I mind that Google loves old content that is constantly being updated. You want to keep up this practice if you want to stay on the top page of search results and generate more leads.
11. Be Credible
Your website visitors won’t appreciate skewed and inaccurate content. It is important to get your facts and figures right. You should also convey them authoritatively.
12. Optimize Your Web Pages
Improving your SEO score will make search engines like you and your website contents, and once search engines like you, your chances of appearing on the top page are high which translates to more traffic and more leads.
Web page optimization can be achieved by using some powerful web applications and plugins.
For instance, if your website runs on WordPress you can install Yoast which shows you what you need to optimize your site for search engines.
13. Create a Pay-Per-Click Strategy
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You can use Pay-Per-Click to target specific audiences and your ad can make it to the top of search engines if it’s good enough. That’s just how important Pay-Per-Click is for your business.
Ordinarily, contents may take a very long time to rank on the search engine top page, but PPC will get you there quickly.
Therefore, make sure you use PPC as a strategy to support your content marketing efforts.
14. Effective Website Design & UX
The overall appearance of your website and the design.is important and must be able to facilitate lead generation. Your design must indicate a clear user journey with a clear call to action.
Your goal is to make people want to stay on your website, so you must make your design intrigue them and show them it’s worth sticking around.
15. Share Your Content On Social Media
After creating perfect content you must get it out to reach potential customers. And one of the ways to achieve this is to utilize social media platforms.
It is important to post your content on social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter Facebook, and Instagram. Social media platforms serve as a means of reaching out to a very large audience.
16. Interact With People
Establishing a decent interaction with people is very important in driving in leads and improving your business.
This can be achieved in a lot of ways like asking for comments, feedback, questions, and responding to them.
If you can interact with people positively, they’re more likely to become a lead.
Conclusion
As a manufacturer, you know how important it is to have high-quality leads. Your goal is to make sales and stand out among your competitors.
By incorporating the strategies outlined in this guide above into your sales plan, you can drastically increase your chances of closing high-value deals.
After identifying these leads, you should keep on building trust by delivering automated lead and deliver additional value and warm them up until you close the sale.