Many industrial marketers are still struggling to convince their upper management of the value of digital marketing. In our experience, the best way to do that is to achieve some early wins and use that success to justify further investment.
In the following roadmap to going digital we recommend that you match your efforts to the engineer’s buying journey. But rather than beginning with the engineer’s research stage and working through to purchase, you should start at the end of their journey and work backwards. That is to say, you would start by investing in converting the most prospects into customers at the end of their buying journey. Once that base is in place you can start to invest in bringing more traffic.
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Step One: Your Website
We recommend that you begin your digital marketing efforts by having an excellent destination, one that that will convert the most visitors into sales-ready leads. This way you can ensure that real prospects are going to be able to find what they need without getting frustrated and leaving.
Your website must highlight the terms that engineers are most likely to associate with your solution so that your site can be readily found. Your site also needs to be responsive so that the ever increasing number of visitors who are on mobile devices can enjoy easier navigation, rather than just seeing a shrunken version of your full site. Finally, your landing pages have to be designed in a way that appeals to engineers.
Step Two: Conversion Content
The next step in the process is developing content on your website that will help casual visitors become prospects. At this stage of the roadmap you to offer information about your products to visitors in return for their contact information. Content like case studies, product comparisons and price lists can often achieve this goal.
By the end of this step you will have a search friendly and informative website that converts visitors into prospects. In stage three of the roadmap it’s time to attract more of your target visitors.
Step Three: Search Marketing
Engineers typically begin their journey towards finding your company by identifying a problem that they have. They may not yet know that your solution will fix it, so keep in mind they are in a research stage. At this point, you need to increase the odds that the buyer finds your solution when they are searching.
Search marketing consists of the usual SEO efforts such as encouraging links from relevant sites, buying search ads and paying to appear on directory websites.
Stage Four: Generating Awareness
Once you have a great website and a search marketing strategy in place, it’s time to cast a wider net to catch those engineers who have a problem that your solution can fix. This is the stage where most engineering marketers spend the majority of their time, striving to create broader awareness through branding and thought leadership efforts such as blogging, white papers, sponsored posts, webinars, lead gen campaigns, social media and other techniques.
Rather than restating how to do each of these steps, the linked text above connects to blog posts that go into some depth about each of these techniques.
More details on the Roadmap to Digital Marketing
Check out this Success with Digital Marketing, a webinar that I recorded with Achinta Mitra, author of Industrial Marketing Today to get a more nuanced view of this roadmap.
Thanks,
John
