Sales and Marketing Blog | Todd Hockenberry

Manufacturing Company Websites Should Be Revenue Engines. Is Yours?

Written by Todd Hockenberry | Mar 15, 2016

If you want to grow your B2B, manufacturing, or industrial company revenue in 2016 the key question to ask is, "Is your website your best marketing asset"?

In the post that started this series, 5 Key Stats & 5 Critical Steps To Hit Your Top Line Targets in 2016, the stat and step relating to overall website strategy is stat #5.

Stat 5: 400% | 500% | 600% - B2B companies with at least 400 website pages generate 4X the leads of sites with less than 100 pages | those that publish 15 new articles/month generate 5X the leads of those that only publish 1 | those with 40 landing pages generate 6X the leads of those with 10 or less

Step 5:  Forget your traditional “website” - instead recognize that your company's digital footprint is its primary revenue growth engine.  Nurture, refine and invest in it accordingly - but only based on sound strategy impacting all points of buying journey

What does building a site that drives leads mean?

Building a site that focuses on driving leads means:

  • Building depth into the static site, meaning lots of pages
  • Creating NEW content on an ongoing basis
  • Developing offers that your target audience wants and then using landing pages to convert visitors to leads

What about SEO?

Many people come to me and ask us to help them with their SEO. The most common SEO goal we hear from clients is that they want to rank higher in searches for key terms, and thus, hopefully, resulting in people clicking through a search. Sounds nice, but I still get the impression sometimes that B2B business owners and decision makers think there is some magic SEO trick that allows 'experts' to move them up the rankings.

The above stats should disavow us of the notion that there is any way other than hard work and creating lots of great content to rank highly on many targeted long tail keywords and drive traffic that converts to leads. What this stat also tells me is that a smaller company can over take larger ones with a deep and committed digital content strategy. Half measures yield mediocre results when it comes to websites.

#1 Building Your Website

Buyers are in charge of the information gathering process, so your approach must be to help them answer the questions they have and give them the information they need when they need it. The only way to do this is to understand your ideal target persona/buyer's journey.

There is no magic trick for understanding your persona. Talk to your customers, talk to your prospects that bought from someone else, interview them and find out how they are searching for information about your product and solution. Listen to them tell you how they buy, how they decide, why they picked your company or not.

The answers you get are the structure of your site content. 

How do you build site content?

There are many ways to build site content and some are obvious:

  • Product listings - the most basic web page is one that has product catalog information. There can be many of these types of pages. We’ve even seen some sites have 1,000's of product pages!
  • Applications - pages describing how your product solves a particular problem. These types of pages typically have an industry and end product focus - for example, one we worked on today was about Laser Marking Serial Numbers on Firearms
  • Solutions/how to/why/what - these types of pages are often like an FAQ page. These are often some of the best pages to rank well for and drive targeted traffic - the data shows that the first company to help a buyer wins the sale the majority of the time. These types of pages are a great way to attract buyers early in the process
  • Case studies - a combination of all three types of pages mentioned - each one is a problem, with a solution, stating actual results that relate to the use of one of your products

There are many steps in a typical B2B buying process and it can take months or years to complete for some buyers. Your content needs to be interesting and relevant to your target prospects all through the process. The more complex and varied your target personas, the more complex and varied your content needs to be.

#2 Blogging

A blog is a web page that is published in a timely manner, that can be easily shared, ranks for targeted and optimized search terms, and demonstrates an ongoing commitment to educating readers. All powerful reasons to commit to blogging.

We have clients that committed to blogging 5 years ago and now drive over 90% of total organic search site traffic to the site through the blog. They also own many keyword sets and dominate the conversation online for the topics their customers care about. Why? Because they were committed to building content on a regular basis that educated the reader. They established credibility and are reaping the leads and sales as a result.

#3 Create Offers That Convert

First and foremost, you need lots of product information, as much in depth technical content as you can create. Once you have your product content built, then move towards creating offers that convert visitors to leads earlier in the buying process. Create problem solving or industry specific content to convert leads that are just beginning the buying journey. These can be white papers, webinars, slide decks, and my favorite, case studies. 

Attract people to your offers using action oriented call to action graphics that lead to landing pages. There is a form on the landing page where the visitor can exchange their contact information for the offer. You now have a lead that you can nurture via email. Build your email list using offers that convert and nurture those leads as they search for answers and ultimately solutions and suppliers.

There are many more types of content but they all typically would fall under one of these areas. Videos should be embedded on web pages and blog posts. Infographics make great blog posts and content to offer. Webinars can be summarized or transcribed into great blog posts. Presentation decks make great offers and blog posts.

Create great content then, like the classic advice for success buying real estate, Promote Promote Promote