Transcript:
Are you a manufacturing or industrial services company? In this video, I’m going to show you exactly how we walk our clients through a marketing strategy in 2019 from start to finish. All right, you’re in manufacturing or industrial services. What that means, and what I mean by that, is that you are using your equipment, your machines, you’re creating a service for other B to B companies. This is not if you’re selling a product. If you’re selling products that are industrial or are more technical, this is not the video for you. We can cover that in a separate video and we’ve got other content for that on our channel. I’m specifically talking to people that are doing machining, plastics, corrugated. You’re doing facility services. You’re doing a service for another company or using your equipment because they don’t have it, and you’re selling that service to them. This is a large majority of our clients at Five Fold Agency, is in this manufacturing and industrial services side of the business. This is the business and industry that I came from in plastics, so that’s how I originally started the agency, and it’s a core competency and focus of ours. It’s a little bit different than any normal B to B agency. There’s a lot of agencies out there that say, “Hey, we do B to B. We can hook up with you guys and give you guys some good marketing strategy and do stuff for you.” But at the end of the day most the time they don’t actually understand what it is that you really do. It’s just words on paper to them. They can’t truly market if they’ve really never sold to it or marketed a ton at scale into that group. So you guys are most likely either selling to other manufacturing services companies or you’re selling to OEMs. You’re going after large companies like Deere and Whirlpool, Electrolux, or people that are doing electronics or consumer goods or things like that. You want to make their stuff for them. If that’s you, this is the way that we break the strategy down. From the initial call when we get on the phone with a potential customer, the first thing that we look at is their website. It’s not so that we can say, “Hey, we need to redo a website to push out the marketing side of it and let this take up to three to four months, or get more money out of you”. Because most the time manufacturing service and industrial service companies don’t have a huge budget for the website. That’s not why we’re doing it. We’re looking at it because websites are not what they used to be years ago, where it’s just validation of what the salesperson is saying. Websites now are used as a tool to educate the person because you’ve got an informed buyer that’s coming to you that’s going to do all of their research before they even reach out to you to really understand the most about you. That’s why the importance behind the website is critical, and we start there first, because if that ship of the website isn’t ready to go out there and sale, we have to fix it before we can really push a ton of marketing effort behind it. So, we start with the website. We’re not going to get into the UX design and how it looks. We’re basically looking at data. We run it through our tools to do an audit. We look to see how much traffic are you getting? How much organic traffic are you getting? What type of experience do people have on there? How old is the website? We’re going to go through all that stuff and basically create an assessment and say, “This is where your website’s at. You might need to redo it, and if you don’t have the budget for it, there’s slight tweaks that you can do to your website to get it performing better at a lesser cost than a complete overhaul, and those things can be done quickly.” Or we may say, “Your website is just complete garbage right now. There’s no point of pushing any marketing dollars towards it and sending traffic towards it. So with that being said, we don’t want to work on anything until you have a budget set to be able to spend on that website.” So that’s the first place that we start, is looking at the website. We’re also, at that same time, going to look at the SEO, the organic search engine optimization. How is your company’s pages being ranked on Google? What type of phrases are you going after? Most the times when people have websites built by agencies that don’t understand the industry, they’re not going after the right search phrases. So they’re going after things that are maybe not relevant, or too vague, or don’t have high search volume behind it. So we’re going to look to see what is your current state of your SEO and just do a quick high-level audit prior to the call, just so I can understand where you guys are at. After we do the SEO audit, then when we’re on the phone call, and we’re going through it with you we’re going to say, “Hey. This is roughly where you’re at.” The next thing I want to know is what are you currently doing with your marketing? What type of budget do you have? What type of resources do you have? A lot of times industrial manufacturing services, the marketing department, the marketing head is just the end of the highest paying sales guy. So you’ve got a VP of sales, and marketing. I’ve held those roles before in the past. Typically, most VPs of sales and marketing do not have a ton of exposure in the marketing world, but they’re handling the marketing because they are the department head. Usually, they don’t have a team that’s under them. Maybe they’ve got one person that’s a coordinator. Maybe they’ve got two people. If it’s a really large services company there might be a team, but for the most part they’re flying solo, or they’re relying on people outside of their company to be able to do their marketing for them. So I’m gonna wanna understand the team and the resources that you have. And it’s important from the standpoint of this. If you have resources there, if you’re currently doing things there that are working, where you have somebody that can do those things, I don’t want you to pay us to do it for you. I would rather utilize those resources and show them the strategy, or tell them things that they need to do that can offset the costs of the agency on a monthly basis. So if you have a marketing coordinator, maybe they’re good with graphics, I’m gonna say, “Hey, can we borrow this person’s time this much a month to have them do the graphics based on our strategy, but not have us charge you for that time? We’re just doing the strategy behind it, and approving the graphics that they make, but they’re gonna manage actually creating them and perfecting them and getting them approved and posting them.” So we’re gonna start with the resources. Once you go after the resources, that starts to shape and build out “What can we do? And what path should we go down?” If you do or don’t have minimum resources then it’s gonna really rely solely on the budget. How much money do you have on a monthly basis to spend on your marketing? At a minimum level, you’re gonna be looking at $3,000 a month, and up from there just to bring in an agency to do some things that are actually going to work. The way that we start is we look at your SEO and your website, and the maintenance behind that. Is your SEO correct? Once it’s optimized, if it’s not correct and it’s not working, then on a monthly basis you have to be doing some sort of tracking and optimization of that. And that’s what we do at the agency level, is we make sure that we’re tracking your position, tracking your competition, coming up with strategies to get you to rank higher faster, and then tracking that ranking on a daily basis through our automation tools and then reviewing it at the end of the month to see how is it working. That’s step one, you want your organic SEO to work for you, because you don’t want to pay Google AdWords campaigns and a Pay-Per-Click campaign for a dollar or two dollars every time somebody clicks, when you’re showing at the top of those search results. Ideally, we want you to show up at the top of those search results right underneath that ad section organically because you’re not being charged for those clicks. So that’s the premise behind why we’re gonna push on SEO from the beginning. The second thing you have to do is the content marketing side. We right the articles for you, we have technical writers, engineers on staff. We have creative writers, as well. We’re gonna write the content for you on a monthly basis, and the way that we break it down is either one, two, three or four articles a month. Typically we try and stick with either two articles a month or four articles a month. So either biweekly or weekly, we’re creating a blog post, we’re creating a whitepaper, because we need some sort of content to push out there to show that you’re a subject matter expert to get your brand awareness out there. So content marketing, extremely important part, so it’s the second pillar at a foundational level of what we need to start with. The next step from there is gonna be the distribution of that. The thing for you guys in manufacturing and industrial services, LinkedIn is gonna be the cheapest, most cost effective way to get a lot of eyes on your contact, and to engage with people from a sales standpoint. We’ve got a whole video on sales prospecting for you guys. We’ll link it up here, and you can check that out and I’ll walk you through exactly how to optimize your LinkedIn profile and then use LinkedIn as a sales prospecting tool so you can start to get some engagement and start to get some ROY out of that effort, and some potential sales. So using LinkedIn as one of the distribution methods at a foundational level, the three pillars, has to happen, and we manage that for you, where we’re going to create your company page, or update your company page, and then manage it on a weekly basis. When we create content, we’re gonna put it onto the company page, we’re gonna push it out from there. We’re gonna make sure that the team and all the client-facing people in sales, marketing or whoever’s on LinkedIn that is engaging with customers or potential customers at any level, is then sharing that out, liking it, commenting, to get it out to their network. The reason behind that is because we want to be able to produce the content and control it, and not have the sales people to have to think of, “What should I post next? What should I link to? What articles are new out there?” So we’re gonna do the work and the heavy lifting for you, all you have to do is do the like, share and comments, and then build your network based on our sales prospecting. The other aspect of that is that we will teach you exactly how to use LinkedIn as a sales tool. With monthly calls, with checking your KPIs, checking your metrics, tracking it down and holding you accountable that we want you to hit these certain levels, and if you don’t hit them, we’re tracking and monitoring, you’re gonna be asked, “What’s going on?”, on every single monthly call. The reason why we’re doing this is because we want to give you the tools for you to be able to do it yourself. We’re gonna track and monitor to make sure that you’re being held accountable, because most of the time people say, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” You’re not used to doing this, it’s not part of your muscle memory, so we’re gonna be there to keep encouraging you and pushing you along, so that way, it doesn’t just get forgotten, because the upper management’s gonna be pretty pissed off if they’re paying for something that you guys aren’t utilizing. So the three pillars are website and SEO maintenance on a monthly basis, then you go into the content creation because you have to create something, and then distribution of that content at the lowest level, it’s gonna be LinkedIn and pushing that out there, and then teaching your sales team what to do with LinkedIn and how to use that as a resource. Going up from there, there’s a lot of different paths you can go down, depending on budget. If the budget is $5,000 to $10,000, $10,000 to $20,000 a month, there’s so many different ways that you can go, so we look at the target demographic and where you’re gonna get the most bang for your buck. The next area to throw into it is gonna be a quarterly content shoot. So the quarterly content shoot that we do is where we jump in and come on-site at your location on a quarterly basis, shoot a ton of video, hours of video, and then what we do is we chop that up into 12 to 14 to 16 different microclips, and then use those weekly through social, put those on your website, so that way we’re just getting video content out there, and then we come back three months later and shoot again on any updates or shoot different footage. The reason for this is because video content’s more engaging than long-form posts these days, either on your website or on social. So we want to have some sort of video content that we’re able to drip out there on a weekly basis to keep people being engaged and give them teasers up until the end of that quarter, and then we come and shoot more. The quarterly content shoot is a great option for people that have something to show. If you’re facility’s not super nice, if it’s not very clean, if there’s really nothing to show there, then it’s not an option. Those are things that we go through with our potential customers and clients on the phone. The next step from there is gonna be getting into some sort of advertising PPC. So you’re either using Google AdWords, you’re using LinkedIn advertising, maybe you’re doing something on Facebook or Instagram that’s very strategic to, depending on what exactly you guys are doing as a service, whether or not those things will work. On the LinkedIn side, we’ve got a whole video on that, that we can link above, about LinkedIn advertising, how it’s more effective a lot of times than Google AdWords. For you guys in manufacturing and industrial services, the issue with Google AdWords is typically they’re not as effective because you don’t understand the search intent behind why the person’s searching. You don’t know the intent, then your ad’s gonna show up, and you’re gonna get typically subpar results. You have to be extremely strategic if you’re doing AdWords. That’s something that we pull out from a retargeting standpoint, or you could do it from a standpoint of new phrases that you’re not ranking for organically. But you have to have an agency like ours that understands if an engineering, purchasing, operations person is typing something into Google, they’re gonna type things in different than somebody that’s looking for a consumer product, or a dentist, or a lawyer, like a lot of these other agencies. Even if these other agencies are B to B, they still have never sold to that group, so they don’t understand that person’s mindset. So we’re very strategic with what we do and don’t allow to come through on those searches to make Google AdWords the most effective as possible. Usually the telltale sign is, if you’re doing Google AdWords right now, go into your campaign, go into Google Analytics, look at your bounce rate on your Google AdWords campaign. A lot of times, it’s gonna be 85, 90% and north from there. If it is up there, then something’s drastically wrong. It’s basically saying only that 10 to 15% of the people that you’re paying to come into your site are going past one page, which is a complete waste of money. That’s were LinkedIn strategically with their advertising, you can target companies, target people at those companies or job functions in an industry, and create a very strategic brand message for them, to then show that to them and only them. It’s a higher cost, but you’re extremely strategic, and then from there, you can get a lot more engagement and it’s gonna be better off. Another area that we’ll pull in is email marketing. Email marketing is not as effective as it used to be, but it is still a strategic play for certain things. Whether or not you’re using the CRM system partnership that we have with SharpSpring, or you’re own email marketing system with HubSpot, Infusionsoft, whoever it is, Zoho, whatever it is that you’re using, we can jump into that CRM system, manage your automation, create the content, create the emails, set them up on schedule, do everything, manage a list, build it out, and then distribute it. Whether it’s monthly, quarterly, weekly, whatever it is that makes sense for your strategy. The last aspect is gonna be the brand collateral. So some of our clients need new pitch text, new brochures, new line cards, things like that. We can do all that internally. We want all the branding to be the same, we want everything to match together, the voice and the path that the company wants to go down from a branding standpoint. Everything matches up, and we create that content for people that need to either do a leave-behind, they’re doing a trade show, or you’re going in to pitch to a new client, we’ll create the pitch text for you, along working with you and make sure that it’s got the graphics, the videos, the things that you want to see so it’s nice and lively and it’s less boring than just a bunch of thousands of words on a screen as you go slide by slide by slide. So the brand collateral’s important, but that’s still a small aspect of it. At the end of the day, whether or not you’re spending 3000 a month, or 30,000 a month, there’s a big difference between those two. A lot of times that comes in from a PPC standpoint or a ton of content or a ton of video. But at the minimum core level, you have to be hitting those main three pillars of doing SEO, doing social media marketing, and using social as a distribution source for your content and creating content. You guys don’t have time to be writing content, you may write five pieces over five months, and then it just stops for a year and a half. That’s where having technical people like myself and the team to be able to create that content for you, we can make it match to exactly what you’re trying to say, and then distributing it from there. And now you’ve got valuable information that you can put in front of those potential customers to entice them to come in. So whether or not you’re working with an agency now, you’re thinking about working with an agency, hopefully if you’re in manufacturing, you’re gonna be working with us. But really look at the experience of those companies have working with your specific niche, because you guys need somebody that understands exactly what it is that you do. We’ve been there before, we’ve got over 50 years of manufacturing marketing and sales experience. We’ve worked in the industry, we know what the struggles are that you guys come through. So therefore, we know how to circumvent those and we’re not gonna be sitting there learning, “What is this? What does that mean? What do you mean you sell to these people? Well what does that person like?” We get it from the get-go, which is gonna mean from the start to the first results is gonna be a lot shorter timeframe than educating people on what it is that you do, and that painstaking process of repeating yourself. So if you guys like this content of me taking you through the 2019 marketing strategy, or the way that we do it here at Five Fold Agency, hit that like button. If you have comments or questions that you want me to dive deeper into, leave them in the comments below, and we will see you on the next one.
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