6 Steps to Launch an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

If you own or manage a small or midsize business in the manufacturing industry, you’re likely looking for ways to improve your digital marketing strategy. After all, digital channels such as email marketing, social media, and website design are more important than ever and a major component of a healthy and robust marketing plan.

Nonetheless, manufacturing firms aren’t the only companies prioritizing digital marketing to gain a competitive advantage in a fast-paced and dynamic space. Just check out the following digital marketing statistics for 2022:

  • Email marketing delivers, on average, a $44 return for every $1 spent.

  • A whopping 98% of sales reps who have over 5,000 LinkedIn connections meet or surpass their sales quotas.

  • Over 1.5 billion people shop online every year.

Your current and prospective customers are online, which means that you need to be there as well. Here we share six key steps to take to launch an effective digital marketing campaign for your manufacturing business:

Launch an effective digital marketing campaign in 6 steps

Step 1: Define your strategy

Marketing is a must-do in business—this is a widely accepted reality. That doesn’t mean that an organization’s marketing goals are all the same.

While most manufacturers will have universal marketing interests such as driving sales and building their corporate brand, they’ll also have unique objectives, such as employee recruitment, attracting new vendors, or product diversification. Being very clear on your overall goals and strategy will help to best optimize your marketing efforts.

Step 2: Know your audience

Digital marketing is a critical tool for manufacturing companies, allowing them to reach a broad audience of potential customers and one that’s unrestricted by physical boundaries. However, digital marketing is only effective if marketers take the time to understand their audience.

Understand your audience

  • What are their needs?

  • What are their wants?

  • What pain points can you help them to solve?

  • What are their top priorities?

  • What motivates them to make a purchase?

A deep understanding of these various aspects is vital. It allows companies to create digital marketing campaigns that speak directly to their target audience.

Step 3: Create quality content

So, what constitutes quality content in the manufacturing sector? In identifying content, it’s always helpful to consider your readers’ pain points and how you can help solve them. For example:

  • What kinds of questions are your sales team getting?

  • What queries are coming through to your general inbox and social media accounts?

If you are seeing common themes, that is a good starting point for crafting content that will proactively answer these questions. There are standard topics that all manufacturing companies have to keep a watchful eye on. Producing quality at scale. Predictable turnaround times. Cost management. Find creative ways to address these topics in a relatable and helpful manner.

Step 4: Optimize for search engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical piece of the digital marketing framework. SEO is the process of making your website more visible to potential customers who use search engines like Google and Bing. By incorporating keywords and phrases that relate to your product or service, your site is more likely to appear in the top results when someone searches for those terms.

Step 5: Use social media to reach more people

There are several reasons your organization should be active on social media.

First, social media platforms provide an efficient and cost-effective way to reach potential customers. You can also use social media to create valuable relationships with customers and build brand loyalty. Finally, social media platforms offer powerful tools for tracking customer behavior and measuring the success of marketing campaigns.

Which platforms should your business be active on to reach your audience? That goes back to step one, which requires knowing your audience and where they’re spending time.

Step 6: Measure your results and adjust your strategy as needed

Sales teams are well known for using “always be closing” as a rallying cry. Marketing folk put their own spin on it with “always be testing.” This speaks to the rich and valuable insights provided by reviewing the data.

There are a number of different metrics you can use to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns, including website traffic, leads generated, and conversion rate. By tracking these metrics, manufacturing companies can better understand which digital marketing strategies are working and which aren’t. Then, they can adjust the course accordingly.

It’s time to get digital

Is your organization looking to up its digital marketing game? There’s no need to go at it alone, not when there’s a great big world of marketing software and platforms designed to support your digital marketing journey—1,734 such tools, to be precise. From campaign management to marketing analytics to lead generation, these tools have you covered.

You can search, review, and compare many different types of technology, including content management, customer relationship management, and manufacturing. Options abound when it comes to finding software solutions that best meet your organizational needs.

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