Over the past few years technology has completely revolutionised the way businesses market their products and services.
Industries have been completely overhauled by the internet, with middlemen cut out and incumbents displaced. New business models have developed that would have been completely impossible in the pre-internet era.
However, some types of companies have been late to the party and still rely on old fashioned ways of reaching their customers.
Manufacturing marketing – Slow to adopt?
Manufacturing is one area that has been slower to embrace these new models and marketing techniques.
Many manufacturers therefore still rely on their B2B relationships and are missing out on the huge opportunity to sell directly to retail customers.
While this might have seemed a daunting proposition in the past, setting up an ecommerce store and building a presence online is now a simple task.
Selling direct to customers allows you to make far higher margin on your products, but also gives you much better visibility of what the customer wants, enabling you to improve your products over time.
Digital marketing techniques give you several options to promote your business and your website:
- Content marketing – i.e. writing a blog
- Email marketing – Emailing direct to customers
- Social media – Interacting with customers through Facebook, Twitter etc.
- Paid ads – Using paid advertising platforms like Google AdWords
How to get started?
Most manufacturing companies don’t have the expertise in house to build or execute an effective manufacturing marketing strategy, or to make the shift to selling direct to retail.
The key steps to making this work
- Find a partner – Partnering with a third party like AsOne will allow you to hit the ground running. You’ll gain immediate inside knowledge of what works and what doesn’t from people who have done it before. You also won’t have to divert resource away from other projects and can leave them to focus on the things they are great at.
- Start small – Marketing manufacturing and building an ecommerce offering needn’t be a huge investment. Modern technology development practices focus on starting small, testing the most important features and growing gradually over time. This allows you to gain confidence in your investment before deciding if you want to invest more.
- Iterate – Using performance analytics and statistics you can quickly learn which elements of your strategy are working g and which aren’t. This enables you to evolve over time to target products at the most profitable segments of your customers and tweak your messages to appeal directly to them.
At AsOne we’ve been working with companies for nearly 2 decades, helping to bring their businesses online and craft innovative marketing strategies.
We look to partner with our clients over the long term, learning the details that make their business run and applying our expertise to help them continually grow.
If you’d like more information on how a manufacturing marketing strategy could transform your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
