(Courtesy of Guest Blogger Jennifer Ristic, vice president, content, Point To Point)
Industrial manufacturers often discuss the need to use marketing to help increase sales, yet most never pull the trigger.
Gone are the days of winning business strictly through personal relationships or using traditional marketing tactics like high-priced advertisements in trade publications to capture the attention of prospective customers. Today, buyers are in control more than ever, which requires manufacturers to engage with them on the buyers’ terms.
As a B2B marketing agency focused on industrial manufacturing, we’ve found that taking an inbound marketing approach is the most effective ways for a manufacturer to generate qualified sales leads.
According to HubSpot, inbound marketing “focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close and delight over time.”
It’s all about ensuring your business can be found easily online, which is accomplished through a blend of content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and marketing automation. These efforts, when used in the right way, will turn website traffic into leads and qualified leads into customers.
Here are the top three reasons manufacturers should use inbound marketing:
- Your prospective customers already are online researching solutions for their business problems every day. If you’re not there, your competitors are.
- There’s no better way to build your credibility and thought leadership than by showcasing what you know. Doing so will earn your audience’s trust while naturally positioning your company’s products as best-in-class.
- Qualified leads coming from your website have a higher likelihood to close and become new customers than having your sales team “smile and dial” down a list of purchased contacts.
Because inbound marketing is about attracting – not interrupting – your target market, the more valuable the content, the more engaged your audience will be and the more they will share their information. Building great content, disseminating it via the right mix of marketing communications vehicles and measuring the impact via marketing automation tools will drive real business results for manufacturers who understand the power of marketing.
Point To Point is a premier B2B digital marketing agency focused on accelerating growth through more intelligent customer interactions driven by deep customer insights and data. As a trusted advisor to clients, the company’s cross-functional team brings a unique combination of strategic guidance, creative brilliance, technology innovation and delivery excellence to manage the change and resources to achieve success. For more information, visit www.PointToPoint.com.