The Online Marketing Buzz For Manufacturers
If you do a quick search on Google for Manufacturing Marketing, all of the “hot” online marketing strategies will pop up, promising to grow your brand and increase leads (instantly of course). These strategies range from paid advertising with PPC to the buzzworthy and ground breaking “new” strategy of content marketing (Okay, content marketing isn’t new at all, but don’t tell us online marketers, we like to adapt strategies from the offline world, and celebrate them as brand new online. But that’s a different article.)
Although I am a millennial and learned “online marketing” before I even heard or understood the phrase “direct response marketing,” I know that any marketing campaign is only as good as your ability to track the results and make decisions based on those results.
And while pay-per-click marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization and content marketing are all important when it comes to manufacturing companies building a bigger and better brand, getting leads and increasing sales, none of these tactics matter if you don’t have good data. In fact, if you don’t have the data, I might even say you’re not marketing at all – just spending money and hoping to get results.
If you are going to do any marketing online, the first thing you need to do is set up Google Analytics correctly (correctly being the operative word) and you need to use this free tool to guide your marketing campaigns to more traffic and better conversions – this is where most manufacturing companies drop the ball.
I know analytics isn’t as “sexy” as content marketing, but if you really want to get some results from your content marketing or any inbound marketing strategies, analytics will be critical.
“One of the wonderful things about Google Analytics is – if used correctly – you can increase the number of leads and reduce the cost of acquisition without spending any additional money on marketing.”
That’s more leads and sales with the same budget. It doesn’t matter what your current budget is, you just have to make strategic decisions based on what Google Analytics is telling you about your website and the people who visit.
A Secret Weapon For Manufacturing Content Marketing
Earlier I mentioned (sarcastically) content marketing as one of the new buzzworthy tactics for online marketing, but in all seriousness, content marketing is important for manufacturers. But I don’t have to tell you that because according to the Content Marketing Institute, 65% of Manufacturing Marketers are creating more content than they were just a year ago.
With that said, one of the problems I’ve heard multiple manufacturers speak to is not knowing what content to create for their potential customers. Of course research can be done on Google, and different topics would arise, but why not just take a deep dive into analytics and see what visitors to your website are actually searching for(of course Google Analytics needs to already be installed).
Google Analytics will allow you to create better content that actually resonates with your audience and it can tell you what is already resonating with your market. Use this information to create a content strategy or editorial calendar based on what is already engaging on your website.
For instance, just take a look at your top pages. How can you improve that content? Can you create supporting or complimentary content?
Increase Organic Traffic with Google Analytic
Content marketing with analytic is cool, but what about SEO? How can we use Google Analytic to improve and increase the organic traffic to the website?
Well think about this, if we know what visitors are searching for and we know what pages are engaging to the visitors, we can optimize those pages to rank higher in the search engines and to get a higher click-through percentage.
If “Blue Widgets” is one of your top keywords and pages, you can do a variety of things to bring in more traffic on that keyword. You can optimize the title tag and meta descriptions to increase the click-through of the page, you can optimize the images to include “blue widgets” where appropriate or you could create an entirely new page dedicated to “blue widgets.”
These are just a few quick ideas. But what if you could increase the click-through from 1% to 2% on 10,000 visitors? You just doubled your traffic for that specific keyword.
Get More Leads with Google Analytics
Creating content is great and getting more traffic is delightful, but at the end of the day if it doesn’t add up to more leads, it really doesn’t matter (I feel like I’ve said that a lot in this article). Unless of course you only want eyeballs on your website, but I know, you want the sales and leads that come with the branding.
Good news. Google Analytics can help you get more leads too. You’ll need to have proper goals set up and tracking on all the pages, but Google Analytics can tell you exactly where there’s a problem in your conversion process.
Once you have identified the goal and page you want to increase conversion, you can use basic conversion optimization strategies to improve conversion. Things you are already familiar with like A/B split testing and analyzing and improving high drop off points in your marketing.
Smart Manufacturing Marketers Use Analytics
Hopefully, you have some ideas on how to use Google Analytics to improve your marketing and understand the importance of properly setting up your analytics and using the data to improve your marketing results.
Even though the bloggers aren’t talking about analytics like social media or content marketing, don’t fall into the “what’s hot” trap. Smart manufacturing marketers use analytics.
You should focus on your analytics as much as any other marketing tool you use. If you don’t you are missing out on traffic, leads and sales – there’s no other way to put it.
If you need help with your analytics, check out our analytics audit. We’ll help you find hidden opportunities that you can act on immediately.
