The technology in your products is top-notch. Shouldn’t your marketing have the same?
Industrial manufacturers are traditionally slow to adopt new marketing technology, and our annual international marketing survey confirmed our suspicions.
Nearly 75% of respondents are still relying on trade shows for new customers, and over half are cold calling still.
The bottom line: Most manufacturers continue to use “old school” sales tactics to attract customers. However, marketing automation offers a better way.
Marketing automation has enabled a technique called warm calling by gathering data on prospects and presenting it to sales teams before they even pick up the phone.
You can learn more about warm calling in a blog post I wrote here.
A good warm calling strategy is set up for success by changing the focus of you website from an online sales brochure to an online lead generator.
Many of the industrial websites I see are sorely outdated. Our survey showed 46% of respondents have a website that is more than two years old. This is an eternity when it comes to today’s technology!
If your website is dated, it probably isn’t mobile ready. Not surprisingly, 41% of our respondents reported having a website that is not able to be viewed properly on mobile devices.
With 61% of mobile users saying that if they were unable to find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site, they’d quickly move on to another site (according to a Google study).
You want to retain website visitors, and you want to offer content that helps them solve their problems. With nearly 80% of B2B buyers beginning their journey with a web search, being found through search is vital.
Offering potential customers information through blogs and white papers not only helps your ranking in search results, but also provides a chance for you to share your solutions and expertise with prospects.
While cold-calling remains a method utilized by many industrial manufacturers, it yields low-quality leads. With marketing automation, you can track the actions of visitors to your website.
Why would you spend significant sums of money to engineer and produce a cutting-edge product, only to use stale and outdated technology to sell it?
With the buyer / seller dance now being initiated by the buyer 90% of the time, you don’t need to waste time and money cold-calling. If your prospective customers need a product or solution, they will find you.
There’s no need to be old school anymore.
Photo credit: Caitlyn Willows cc
