Manufacturers’ Guide to Social Media
Every business, regardless of industry, needs to reach out to its customer base and potential customer network with relevant and engaging content. The purpose of this content is to attract customers to the brand and enable the company to build a relationship with current and future clients.
If you provide your customers with content they appreciate and find useful, they will begin to notice and like your brand. An effective content marketing strategy will not only help your company to attract customers, but also to keep them and convert leads into sales.
Define your audience
Who are you reaching out to? What are their interests and values? Do some internal or external market research to find out the profile of your potential and current customers.
Once you have a defined audience profile, you will be in a good position to provide your customers with content that is relevant to their needs and preferences.
The journey begins with an online search
Products within the trade manufacturing industry are often high-cost and highly specialised; this invariably means that potential customers will start their journey towards the product through an online search.
This means you can pique your customers’ interest by putting up content that is highly specialised and relevant to their needs. In particular they will be looking for transparent information that educates them on specs and processes. Companies can leverage this opportunity by creating useful spec and process content and use search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques and Google Ad Words to target this content at specific readers.
For the few, not the many
Specialised manufacturing firms generally have a lower number of total customers than more generalised firms. This means that online marketing for manufacturing firms can be highly niche and targeted at a limited number of interested parties.
This allows manufacturing firms the opportunity to put up highly specialised content. Take this opportunity to provide users with highly educative, specialised content that also showcases the company’s safety and innovation credentials. Keep this content engaging by using videos and photos, where possible.Gain their trust
For manufacturing companies, their customers are mostly interested in the quality, innovation and safety of the products. In this case, take the opportunity to use online marketing to provide thought leadership and gain trust by putting out specialised content that transparently offers specs and comparables in an industry that has layers of specifications per product.
One way to gain trust is to transparently show your operations. Why not interview top people in your organisation about processes? Even better, manufacturing companies can show customers how their in-house products are made by video or photo. This content would be engaging, informative and relevant.
Adjust the frequency of posting
It’s important to update your content channels regularly so that you stay on your customer’s radar and are seen as current. However, don’t over do it. You don’t want to irritate your customers by overloading their in-box. Set up a weekly timetable for content updates.
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Make it relevant and useful
If you provide customers with valuable content, they will come to value your brand. Make sure your updates are informative and educate the customers.
Interesting statistics can often be highly shareable. Or perhaps you’ve done some research on the market or you have some new information to share on high tech manufacturing processes or safety processes.
If you share useful content, your customer will feel they have received something of value and your company has the opportunity to showcase its thought leadership and experience. It’s a win-win!
Keep it brief
People are busy. There is also a lot of competition for attention on the web. So keep your posts short and sweet and break up text into blocks or lists where possible. About 500 words should suffice for a blog post.
See how we have helped Gulf Steel Works – a leading manufacturing company in Saudi Arabia to achieve their goal of increasing their online presence, and more!