Without a digital marketing strategy, your marketing efforts might not be yielding the ROI you're looking for. Manufacturing, like any business, has quite a few characteristics that make it unique. However, every business has fundamentals that aim to provide products or services that solve customer problems. Despite manufacturing's uniqueness, the question remains the same: How do we put the customers and our products together? The answer is through strategic and innovative marketing. A digital marketing strategy allows you to achieve this connection more quickly, with less effort, and with a higher ROI than traditional marketing.

Still skeptical? Well, consider the fact that a lowly pay-per-click (PPC) ad can generate a 200% ROI. Imagine the results when you combine PPC with other digital marketing channels. However, success requires knowing what you're doing. With over five steps, you'll be an expert in the digital marketing strategy in no time.

Form a Plan for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

The first step to creating a successful digital marketing strategy is having a solid plan. There are several steps that need to be completed before you have a comprehensive marketing plan, and the first is research.

Start your research initially by reviewing your previous marketing campaigns. Identify what worked and what didn't. By identifying successful strategies, you'll be able to modify and reuse those strategies in your future marketing efforts to great effect. If you haven't run any marketing campaigns before, analyze your peers and competitors. Study why their products are selling and reverse-engineer their strategies. Don't copy them outright; instead, use them as inspiration and adapt their approaches to suit your brand.

Now, one of the most important things about forming a plan is identifying the core values of your business. What is it you're trying to do? What are you selling? What problems are you trying to solve? Understanding these core values will help you focus your marketing campaign. These values will be your main selling points and will serve as the hook to attract new leads.

Finally, no good plan can exist without a proper timeline. Oftentimes, hitting the market with your ads at just the right time is as important as the message they're carrying, and a proper timeline will help you plan out those crucial moments and stay on schedule throughout your campaign.

Identify Your Clients' Pain Points

One of the crucial steps toward creating a powerful digital marketing strategy is identifying your clients' pain points. This means understanding their needs, pinpointing their challenges, and determining how you can help alleviate those issues.

By identifying these key pain points, you can then focus your marketing efforts toward addressing those pain points. You can do this directly by creating ads that promote possible solutions or content (blog posts, videos, social media posts) that are directed toward you as the company that has all the solutions. SharePoint consulting firms can also be invaluable in this process. SharePoint, a CRM integrated with Microsoft Office, can be an excellent tool for analyzing your customer base and identifying the pain points that need addressing.

Develop Content for Every Stage of the Marketing Funnel

Did you know that 95% of the companies worldwide create top-of-funnel (TOFU) content, yet only 86% do so for the middle of the funnel? Even worse, 75% create content for the bottom of the funnel, despite this being the crucial turning point where a lead becomes a customer.

Creating content and spreading it equally for all stages of the funnel can be crucial for the steady trickle of leaders converting to customers. If you content strategy wows people at the beginning but fails to follow through, you'll often see people just jumping ship, bouncing around and turning to your competitors.

Consider Several Content Options

Content reigns supreme in digital marketing. This is further reinforced by the fact that more than 90% of B2B and 86% of B2C companies use content marketing as their primary marketing strategy.

However, content comes in various shapes and forms. Here are a few examples.

Include Blog Content

Blogs are by far the most popular and the most prolific content form. They are relatively easy and inexpensive to create, yet they are essential for generating customer interest and informing potential customers about your business and products.

As such, blogs are ideal TOFU hooks, but are also useful in the middle and bottom of the funnel because they can provide extra information to help a customer make a decision.

Use Video to Engage

Video content has slowly been gaining popularity, even seeking to outpace blog posts in terms of efficiency, ROI, and conversions. This is because video content is highly digestible; people prefer watching and listening to content rather than reading it. Additionally, with many social media platforms promoting short-form video content, video has become an excellent tool for quickly reaching a wide audience.

However, video content has a notable drawback: it can be expensive to produce. Creating a video requires more equipment, talent, time, and expertise than producing a blog post. You might consider issuing a video production RFP to outsource this task, but this adds to the costs. That said, video and blog posts are quite interchangeable, and what was a good video can become a blog post, and vice versa.

Email Is Key to Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Believe it or not, email marketing remains one of the most powerful marketing methods today. In fact, 89% of all marketers use it as their primary lead-generation channel, nd this figure rises to 93% among B2B marketers.

The reason behind this is that email marketing is really easy to set up and launch. Emails can be used throughout the funnel to hook new leads, inform them, and keep them in the loop once they convert to customers.

Email is one of the most popular ways most companies promote their sales and deals. Emails are also used to promote a variety of other events (such as seminars and webinars) that are designed to keep prospects, leads, and customers interested in what the company has to say.

In fact, email marketing is becoming an even more powerful tool through the use of automation. Automation technology has become quite advanced in recent years, and email lends itself perfectly to being automated. With new AI technologies, email marketing campaigns are getting even easier to launch, while the emails themselves are getting more and more personalized. leading to better responses from the recipients.

Get More ROI With PPC Ads

As mentioned earlier, PPC ads have an insane ROI while being cheap to create and easy to set up. That said, most people don't like ads. However, PPC ads are so deeply integrated into Google that most people won't even notice they're clicking on an ad, making PPC's very digestible for users and not too intrusive.

To illustrate the effectiveness of PPC ads, consider this: they have a 50% higher conversion rate than organic ads. Additionally, PPC ads can boost your brand awareness by 80%, making them invaluable for attracting new leads and converting existing ones. Moreover, PPC ads are crucial for establishing a strong online brand presence and can help propel your website to the top of search engines result pages (SERPs).

Speak Through Customer Testimonials

Customers trust other customers a lot more than they do brands. This is why many companies like to use customer testimonials as a way to prove that they're trustworthy and that their products/services are quality and useful to the customer. Customer testimonials are even more prominent among B2B, making it one of the best ways to promote your manufacturing business.

In B2B relationships, bonds between businesses and clients are typically stronger and more enduring compared to B2C interactions. Securing a testimonial from one client significantly enhances your creditability and increases the likelihood of attracting new clients to your business.

Include Social Media Posts in Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Lastly, social media posts are among the most prevalent and popular forms of content used by marketers and brands worldwide. Social media platforms facilitate a more personal connection between brands and customers. This relationship is characterized by a friendly rapport, unlike transactional bonds of the pas. Through social media, a brand's identity is shaped not only by its products by also by the quality of its customer interactions, customer service, and overall image.

Measure and Revise

Ultimately, the last step towards creating the ultimate digital marketing strategy is to measure your progress and revise it if necessary. There are many ways you can measure your success and track your progress. Each of the methods will provide you with valuable insight into what's working for you, where you are getting the most leads, and the reasons those leads are converting. Measuring results also shows you where you're losing people and helps identify bottlenecks.

With such insights, you will now have much better control over your digital marketing campaigns and will be able to revise your strategies on the fly, adjusting them as necessary to get the best results.

How Manufacture Nevada Can Help

At Manufacture Nevada, we provide tools and opportunities to help your small or medium-sized manufacturing business market to customers and various firms. Whether it's incorporating more digital marketing strategies, or training employees on how to market to a larger audience, we can help. For more information about various business growth solutions, click here, and reach out to our Business Advisors today.

Content from this blog was sourced from Industrial Marketer.