Technological progress is used to improve internal processes, conquer new markets, and even transform companies’ business models. The industrial sector has integrated digital into its production processes to strengthen its activities and prosper in the context of the health crisis.
The importance of industrial digitalization and its benefits for your company
- Establish your credibility
The industrial sector is a complex area that requires not only, established expertise, but also the ability to demonstrate it. Potential or existing customers want to feel reassured that a company has mastered its field of activity and can respond quickly and efficiently to their needs and issues. This is where digital marketing comes into play, as it can help you to achieve this goal. By using digital marketing techniques such as blogging, publishing case studies, or providing tutorials, your company will be able to build a solid reputation and become an opinion leader in its field.
- Increase lead conversions
Digital strategies, such as automation or email marketing, allow your business to convert more leads. For example, you can consider using automation to send specific emails based on how engaged prospects are on your website.
- Retain loyal customers
From a financial point of view, it is easier to keep an existing customer than to recruit a new one. From this perspective, using digital marketing to create a privileged relationship with your current audience and keep them loyal, is an excellent way to manage your resources and your budget. By being active and encouraging interactions on social media, your brand will be more likely to be recommended and it will also increase its brand awareness.
To build relationships with your B-to-B customers, based on trust and interactivity, you need to ensure regular communication with them. Below are some examples of how you can do this:
- Use contextual messages such as welcome emails, promotion alerts, post-purchase satisfaction surveys, and invitations to private events. This will help your customers to stay up to date with your company news and maintain your relationship with them.
- A newsletter subscription or a loyalty program are also ways in which your company can regularly recontact customers, by sending them targeted offers and personalized information based on their purchase history.
- Show how your offer is beneficial to your customers to build loyalty. You can use blog articles, case studies, or product tutorials for example, which highlight your products and increase your credibility through intelligent content.
Establish and spread brand awareness
With the right digital strategy, you’ll be able to spread your message across a variety of channels, which will help you build your brand awareness. Some of these channels include:
- Social media platforms: Being active on social media platforms is a crucial step to gaining brand awareness because they allow you to build a community around your brand. This community can actively participate in the growth of a brand through engagement actions such as comments, shares, likes, etc. This form of digital marketing can also allow you to publish content that will be valued and shared by your social media community. This will help boost your brand awareness.
- A website: Acting as an “online portfolio” of the company, having a website will not only allow you to present your company to prospects but also integrate blog articles as part of a content marketing strategy. However, having a website is only beneficial for your brand awareness if it is well referenced. Therefore, don’t forget to take into account the optimization of your SEO concerning your target audience to improve your visibility on search engines and increase your brand awareness.
- A Google My Business page: In addition to improving your SEO ranking, having a Google My Business account allows you to inform your potential customers of your geographical location and your opening hours. Your business will be visible on Google Maps, which will attract prospects looking for similar services or products in your area.
The stronger your online presence, the easier it will be for potential customers to find your industrial business.
4 steps that our experts recommend for your digital transformation
- Step 1: The diagnosis
To develop an adequate digital strategy and determine the necessary actions to be taken, it is essential to understand the current digital situation of your company. This will help you to identify new objectives and the means to achieve them through digital transformation. To do this, start by conducting an audit of your strengths and weaknesses and pinpointing what the key challenges and opportunities in your market are, in terms of digitalization. You can also trace the history of previous digital actions, analyze their relevance, and evaluate the return on investment they have had on your company. This will allow you to have an overview of your company’s current situation and identify areas for improvement.
Our experts at Eminence can help you with your strategic and operational audit by making a detailed inventory that will allow you to establish a diagnosis of your brand and set up a solid digital strategy.
- Step 2: Define your strategy
Before integrating digital solutions into your business, you need to set your key objectives. Start by identifying new goals to create a clear strategic roadmap. Next, identify the key drivers’ forces, such as new customer requirements or regulatory changes that digitalization will bring. Finally, it is important to assess the company’s available resources and your expectations.
Bear in mind that the digital transformation of a company must be progressive. This is why we recommend that you plan a calendar that lists the key stages and their implementation time. This will help you to prioritize your actions and ensure a more smooth and efficient transition.
Eminence can help you in this essential phase, which is a fundamental change that can contribute to the success of your company. Do not hesitate to contact us to set up an efficient digital strategy.
- Step 3: Choosing your channels and technologies
Once the objectives have been defined, you can choose the platforms and technologies that will enable you to achieve them. This can then be integrated in an operational and planned way. You need to consider the customer experience and analyze your existing touchpoints, identifying those that offer low satisfaction, to optimize the future processes according to the desired purchase path and correct any problematic touchpoints.
To make sure you are on the right track, you can use a digital agency to help you identify the digital solutions best suited to your goals. Eminence can help you choose the right platforms, help you to develop them where necessary, and integrate them to give you the strongest possible foundation for a successful digital transformation.
- Step 4: Implementing new processes
This last step requires implementing new work processes and replacing long-established ones with new digital solutions.
Throughout a digital transformation, a company must always prioritize the well-being of its customers, i.e. providing them with a pleasant experience, improving and simplifying their experience by making information accessible, and supplying them with quick answers to their problems.
By choosing to implement digital technologies that are adapted to your company’s needs and those of your customers, you can significantly simplify your company’s daily life, improve overall performance and make your customers’ lives easier. Remember to regularly measure the results of your actions to adjust certain settings if necessary.
Our experts can assist you in this mission which requires the implementation of relevant KPIs based on previously defined objectives. If you do not know how to select them, or if you do not have the time or resources to do so, Eminence is here to help you. Our digital experts will do everything they can to help you.
At Eminence, we recommend that you implement a CRM strategy:
To optimize your investments, a CRM is an efficient solution to help you manage your customers and contacts in a fluid manner as well as your exchanges with them. By connecting your CRM to your website, you will be able to pinpoint which of your business offers interests users the most, what are their needs, and what to include in your ads to attract them.
Why do you need a CRM?
First of all, it allows you to centralize all the data related to your company’s activities in one place. Secondly, it simplifies the management, segmentation, and analysis of your data. It collects the most relevant information about your customers and prospects to launch personalized campaigns and send marketing SMS or personalized promotions to them. You can also monitor the results of your actions in real-time, which will help you to manage your internal teams.
Our web developers present 5 basic principles to improve the usability and user experience of your industrial website:
- Your website visitors should be able to navigate your website easily and find the information they are looking for effortlessly. To do this, your interface must be clean, and consistent and should reflect your brand identity. This will allow your prospects to become familiar with your business and take action more easily. For seamless navigation, we also recommend including in the menu items such as home, products/services, about us, our references, contact us, and of course, a blog section that will highlight your expertise. Remember that a website with a structure that is too complicated could make you lose visitors.
- Your website visitors may have questions that are not covered by the content present on your website. In this case, put in place solutions so that they can contact you easily and quickly by providing a phone number, an email address, a contact form, or a chatbot for example.
- Use high-quality images and videos: a well-chosen image can have a much greater impact than words. It is important to not only produce quality content on your website but also to attract the attention of your prospects and customers by ensuring a pleasant browsing experience. To do this, add images and videos that will complement your content and showcase your products while helping your leads in their customer journey.
- Make sure that your site’s loading time is fast: studies show that more than half of the Internet users leave a B-to-B site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This is a factor that will affect your ranking in search results and your ability to convert.
Caterpillar and DOW, are among the industrial giants that have successfully built websites that reflect their professionalism and showcase their products in a high-quality manner.
The Caterpillar website, for example, can be used as a case study to show how and why a high-quality image helps make their site one of the best industrial websites. As you browse the product lines, you’ll notice that the images are surrounded by a large white space. This allows users to focus on the products themselves, rather than being distracted by the quality of the images or any elements surrounding them.
As for the DOW, its website is easy to navigate despite the wide range of products. This is because of the clear definition of their 10 target markets and the corresponding solutions for each one on its homepage. There are case studies in each category to make the information more accessible and to explain the use of products that are sometimes complicated to understand.
Work on your SEO for more visibility
Here are 3 techniques that our SEO experts recommend you use to improve the SEO of your website:
- Optimize your photos and ALT tags
Using photos that showcase your products and achievements is a great way to boost your SEO if used correctly. So be sure to check your photos:
- Are explicit and of high quality
- Have been reduced and compressed before being integrated so as not to slow down the loading time
- Are accurate in their ALT tag description: include a text that describes the image to people who can’t see it
Featured Snippets are summaries of answers to frequently asked questions from Google’s search engine. They appear most often at the top of Google’s search results as a question with a link to the website in question. It has been proven that a result appearing as a Featured Snippet on Google significantly increases the click-through rate to the website.
How to appear in Featured Snippet? It is enough to have quality content. Indeed, Google selects information on the pages of indexed sites to display them in Featured Snippets. You must therefore provide the best possible responses to the queries entered by users so that the Google algorithm identifies your web content as the most relevant to the user.
- Identify backlinks
This tactic consists of identifying any company that has mentioned you on their site or blog, whether it is your name, your products, or blog content, without having integrated a link pointing to your site. From there, you can then contact these companies to ask them to add your website link to their site. This technique is very effective in improving your SEO.
- Focus on your local SEO
Whatever your target area, appearing in the top position in local searches will be beneficial for your SEO.
To position yourself on local queries, we recommend that you:
- Fill in all-important geographical information: Location, region, etc., and insert a Google map on your contact page
- Create and optimize your Google My Business account
- Register on local directories that are related to your activity
PPC campaigns are a must for industrial companies
Here are some tips to get your PPC campaigns off to a good start, if you operate in the industrial sector:
- Start with a campaign on the search network
- Set a limited budget at the beginning to test the market
- Target very specific keywords that correspond to your customers’ needs
Read also:
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- Optimize your ads by orienting them towards your unique selling points – for example, quality, Swiss-made, made to measure, etc.
- Work on your landing pages by detailing your expertise
- Refine your strategy over time using the keywords that generate the most conversions
- Use retargeting ads to focus on Internet users who are already interested in your offers
- Since SEA campaigns are paid and can be expensive in the long run, we recommend that you use them for a limited period, while your SEO is being set up and starts to give convincing results. Especially as SEO is a technique that takes time and requires long-term efforts. It takes at least 6 months before you start seeing results.