Manufacturers – Want Revenue Growth? Make the Shift to a Digital Marketing Agency Team By Your Side

The competitive manufacturing landscape requires a solid online presence. This means doing more than launching a website and creating profiles on social media – your overall marketing strategy must include digital marketing that generates results, and this is rarely a do-it-yourself proposition for traditional industries like manufacturing.

Your CEO might wonder if your marketing is working, or perhaps you’re seeing your competition eating into your market share. Then there’s all that customer data – is it available, accessible, and actionable? Do you know how to get more data, how to parse it, and how to leverage it in your marketing? Are you looking at the right metrics and how to analyze them? When it comes to measuring marketing ROI, only 3% of manufacturers say their marketing meets or exceeds business objectives.

Marketing is a complicated business, but 63% of manufacturers say it is a high priority. However, only 22% use marketing automation now, and a scant 37% plan to invest in it even though one of their most common marketing challenges is resources – which brings us to our next point.

Your company’s strengths lie in the things you bring to the table that your competitors can’t. You’re an expert in your industry and product category. It’s time to concentrate your expert efforts on brand and product marketing and let us help you plan and execute a digital marketing strategy that matches your expertise.

Why you need a digital marketing agency partner

Even if you have an in-house marketing team, the fresh perspectives, best practices, and technical expertise offered by a digital marketing agency are invaluable. Most manufacturers have marketing strategies that include a basic website that perhaps offers online ordering and other features. Yet, their site is hard to find, they don’t get much industry buzz, and they’re not getting the results they want from their users.

Your marketing strategy drives business growth by bringing in new customers and retaining current ones. This, in turn, depends on increased channel adoption and conversion rates, which rely on data analytics. You can easily see that you need digital marketing expertise to reach these goals.

At Shift7, we are incredibly growth-focused, and it shows in our work. Here are just a couple of examples.

How our partnership with Jerr-Dan led to accelerated growth

Jerr-Dan, an Oshkosh Corporation company, has been in business for over 50 years, defining towing and recovery industry standards through their extensive range of wreckers, carriers, and rotators. They had a website, but it was old, cumbersome, and offered a frustrating user experience.

Luckily, they have a savvy but small in-house marketing team that knew they needed help to make their digital channels an engine for growth. They needed help getting set up with best-in-class practices and overhauling their site experience.

Customer research led to seven defined personas with end-to-end customer journey maps and a site designed for a seamless, modern experience. In their business, marketing drives leads to distributors, turning them into revenue drivers. The new experience has also led to end-user brand loyalty. In addition, Jerr-Dan has realized:

– A 285% increase in visitors sent to distributors by an on-site locator tool
– A six-fold increase in monthly lead generation
– A 121% increase in average session pageviews

All of these site improvements also created operational efficiencies through self-service features that reduced call center contact.

FleetPride made the shift that drives revenue

A customer-centric user experience is a must today. FleetPride, the country’s largest independent distributor of heavy-duty truck and trailer replacement parts, had a B2B eCommerce site. But the user experience (UX) left something to be desired, which led to a lack of growth through the channel.

We worked with them to develop a digital 5-year monetization model, identifying more than $800 million in growth opportunity via new customer acquisition, increased wallet share, boosted retention, and reactivation of legacy customers. Further, we analyzed UX issues, defined a digital marketing foundation, conducted an onsite search assessment, and created a firm analytical foundation with dashboards to measure and optimize FleetPride’s marketing.

These efforts had quite an impact, resulting in:

– More than 70,000 customers engaged in personalized buyer journeys for the first time
– Doubled average order value with emails and ad campaigns as significant drivers
– Identified more than $800 million in growth opportunities over five years

Overall, the modernized, segmented, and personalized customer experience increased both customer satisfaction and improved conversion rates. Revenue was boosted across all channels – online, direct, physical stores, and service centers – through digital marketing plans.

Our approach to digital marketing services resolves common challenges

While each business is unique, basic marketing principles apply. We’ve turned those principles and best practices into a Digital Marketing Performance Program specifically designed to generate pipeline, accelerate business growth, and drive revenue. We address the common challenges of:

– Lack of measurable returns
– Outdated marketing tactics
– Finding and leveraging the right digital marketing growth opportunities
– Lack of digital experience and/or capacity in your in-house marketing team

We help bring campaigns to market fast across every channel; help you collect, analyze, and clean up your customer data; and use digital marketing analytics to measure the impact of your efforts.

The scope of the Digital Marketing Performance Program

First comes planning, where we work with you to assess your business situation and define your marketing goals. Then, with our Digital Marketing Performance Program, you catch up with the market quickly with growth plans and the firm MarTech (marketing technology) foundation you need for automation. Next, you bring brilliant digital marketing campaigns to life fast and get the measurable results you need.

We plan campaigns that meet your target audience goals and pull growth levers. We automate and personalize customer journeys to provide today’s modern customer experience, manage ads from their creative start to execution to final reporting, and provide the campaign performance dashboards you need, designed for your KPIs.

Plan:

This is where we define your marketing landscape, looking at both your clients and your competitors. Then it’s time to see where the gaps are in your current marketing, gathering data that provides insights. Audience segmentation comes next – this is how you get the information to tailor your marketing.

At the end of this process, you’ll have a database growth plan based on your audience segmentation, a monetization model, and a strategy and tactical growth plan. Out of all this comes the next step – the foundation.

Foundation:

It’s time to develop the campaign strategy that will set your martech foundation. This includes campaign pilots for email, SEM/Google Ads, and paid social. We’ll look at channel-specific planning, develop creative assets, and do front-end development, staging, and testing.

We’ll also work together to develop an analytics strategy with a measurement plan, a data layer build, and dashboards and reporting. Next comes the SEO technical migration and build, along with content marketing optimization. Martech configuration and staging happens, and then you’re ready to RUN.

Run:

This is where all the hard work in the previous stages comes to beautiful fruition. You will bring effective, engaging campaigns to market faster than you imagined, and you’ll have measurable results to use for ongoing development, optimization, and execution across channels. We’ll work together to refine email, SEM/Google ads, paid social, and other channels. We do this through SEO migration, analytics and reporting, content and copywriting, and graphic design.

Shift7 Digital and our B2B marketing experts will get your marketing strategy to work, fast. It’s time for company leadership to make the shift to modern marketing techniques that acquire leads, convert them to customers, retain them, and make a measurable difference in both your pipeline and revenue. Connect with our expert team of B2B marketers today.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways:

– Only 3% of manufacturers say their marketing meets business objectives
– Manufacturers often lack digital marketing know-how when it comes to automation, customer segmentation, and data analysis
– Shift7 has helped its clients identify growth opportunities, generate leads, and fill their pipeline
– With a digital marketing services provider, you can reach new markets by adopting new digital channels, attain and retain customers through a unified experience, and optimize resources with marketing automation.