Marketing, even for product manufacturers, is not a new practice. While many industrial and manufacturing companies have successfully implemented different marketing aspects like social media engagement, email campaigns, and even a modern-intuitive website, there is always room for improvement.
An effectively implemented strategy by a product manufacturer will do wonders in boosting sales. As a company, your strategy should touch every area of the business and especially product, pricing, and sales.
To do it right, you need to:
- Acquire more customers
- Get more high-quality leads
- Boost revenues
- Expand the business into new markets
To come up with a working strategy for your business, you’ll have to factor in a couple of important inputs and outcomes. These are:
- What’s your target audience: Conduct credible research concerning your ideal target customers or prospects. Critically see who really works for you considering the type of products you are dealing with. Analyze their woes and priorities adequately so that you can be able to set your product in a way they appreciate.
- What’s your budget for the marketing: Budgeting is quite crucial during the formulation of a sales strategy. You have to decide on a reasonable budget to allocate for marketing. Some channels of marketing can be quite costly especially when you decide to hire specialists.
- Performance objectives: Performance can be tracked using KPIs (Key performance indicators) and ROI (Return on investment). These two can really come in handy for small business owners. They help you measure your level of success in attaining specific set objectives. Both tools will provide managers with ways to conduct evaluations and later be able to analyze all the hard work they have put in.
- Uniqueness and ingenuity: You will have to employ a creative and unique strategy to ensure that you stand out. Competition is always a normal scenario, especially among small businesses. Your small business should be identifiable by a unique selling proposition that clearly sells out your product more than the rest.
Perfect marketing strategies to sell more will come at a price based on budgetary implications and also time and resources allocated for the same. These strategies will facilitate your success however you have to strive after attainable objectives.
The following strategies if carefully implemented will boost growth in your small business and increase your sales significantly. Always remember different strategies work differently with different businesses. Most of these tactics require iterations to succeed in your business.
Strategies For Product Manufacturers To Increase Sales
Here are some of the strategies product manufacturers can implement to increase their sales;
- Digital inbound marketing
- PPC advertising
- SEO strategies
- List building
- Social media strategies
- Coupon sites
- Content marketing
Digital In-Bound Marketing
Inbound marketing is one of the most effective strategies when it comes to marketing and boosting sales for product manufacturers. Rather than being a complicated practice or industry buzzword, it is a coordinated effort to bring engineers, procurement pros, and buyers directly to your company.
You can increase your sales exponentially when you run digital lead generation coupled with other marketing efforts. In addition to maximizing your company exposure, you can drive record numbers in terms of qualified leads that directly convert sales to dollars!
Inbound marketing unlike traditional marketing does not depend on word of mouth referrals or costly trade shows for purposes of driving new business. Rather, it focuses on addressing the needs of your clients online.
Your company comes up with educational or valuable content that pulls visitors to your website where they learn about your offerings in their comfortable time and at their own pace.
If done right, digital inbound marketing can move target customers from anonymous strangers to engaged customers.
PPC Advertising
PPC is among the popular forms of paid promotion online. Pay-per-click ads are highly efficient at getting your business in front of important decision-makers from both distributors and clients.
Having said that, the million-dollar question that then begs is how can your company reach that need for your products and how do you attract distributor partnerships?
Two unique PPC strategies can be handy in helping you achieve this goal;
- Marketing to prospective clients
- Marketing to distributors
When it comes to marketing to prospective clients via PPC ads, it is safe to settle for Facebook Business and Google AdWords. These two stand out as the most popular mainly because they’re effortless to use and many people online use Facebook or Google.
Regarding marketing to distributors, unless you are a manufacturer for a vertically-integrated enterprise, it is necessary to find your own 3rd party distributor for your products.
Engaging distributors should be a breeze. All you need to do is use Facebook Business and/or Google AdWords, just like with clients. Once you have everything running on Google and Facebook, you make some tweaks.
For Google, changing your landing page and advertisement text to show your intention to partner with a distributor. For Facebook, choose job titles and industries that will get new business. Additionally, change the criteria for when your advertisements display, the cost you’ll pay for them, and other aspects based on your distributor’s behavior.
SEO Strategies
Having a website is important but not enough. You will have to optimize it to rank in the search engines. Higher rankings and impressive traffic can do wonders to increase sales. SEO is not a surface topic either. On-page markup, title tags, meta descriptions, local SEO, keywords, content strategy are just a few of the opportunities to optimize your website for increased sales.
You can adopt the following ideas in your SEO for your manufacturing business:
- Create a Google My Business account
- Create relevant blogs and videos on a regular basis
- Optimize location pages on your website
- Target local keywords
- Ask for Google reviews from clients and customers
- Monitoring and reporting KPI’s
List Building
Email marketing is an efficient way for product manufacturers to display their offerings to distributors as well as current and potential customers. Through list building, you can collect tons of email addresses from users or visitors of your website to not only grow your subscriber base but also empower future business communication with existing and prospective clients.
According to statistics, up to 59% of consumers opine that marketing emails negatively or positively influence their buying decisions. Many business professionals agree with this by admitting that email marketing is incredible at increasing customer retention.
Email list building is a somewhat sophisticated task. It is impossible to create a single lead capture form and anticipate getting countless subscribers overnight. Creating an efficient email list is above all a strategy in addition to exercising patience.
Use social media accounts, embedded signup forms, pop-ups, and website pages to run your list-building campaign online. Offline, you can build your list in-store signup sheets or at your events.
Social Media Strategies
Social media platforms in this modern age and time have become a perfect avenue for young entrepreneurs to not only market different products and services but sell the same as well. Successful businesses have embarked on building a network of followers and influencing their market using social media.
If you want to interact with your clientele on a regular basis, then social media marketing is a fundamental strategy for your small business.
With millions of social media active users for countless hours on these platforms, it would be unsustainable to be on every social platform performing your marketing.
You will need to narrow down to only a few or even one then go back to the drawing board and find out who you are really targeting for your product.
Get to understand where they spend more time, the kind of content they enjoy watching or listening to and how you can make an impact there.
You can post on Facebook statuses and also success stories, share inspiration blogs on Pinterest, share videos on YouTube, post photos on Instagram stories, and also share news about your product on Twitter.
Coupon Sites
Giving discounts is a very effective way to attract new customers to your small business. If you have a business that gives discounts, you can engage coupon deal sites to prop up your products to interested customers.
Keep in mind that the main objective of this marketing strategy is not exactly making sales but an exposure of product and brand awareness. Once you get a network of new customers, begin your customer retention plans.
You should be informed that you might suffer costs pertaining to the revenue of the sales.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is very crucial and should be at the epicenter of all marketing strategies for businesses. This is an efficient tactic for providing compounding outcomes.
It mainly focuses on product/service education to the prospects through value addition via content. This strategy is a long game and when done consistently can have a high ROI.
To be unique you will have to create and distribute content with consistency and efficiency. You may influence this strategy with stages encountered in the customer’s journey.
- Top of funnel – ToFu describes the problems facing your prospect and solutions to the same. Here you can use blogs, newsletters, videos, etc.
- Middle of the funnel – MoFu describes your brand, solution to a problem, and your product. You can use webinars and other educational sources· Bottom of the funnel – BoFu showcases ways how the product solves a problem. Use testimonials, case studies, etc.
