If anything ever taught anyone anything, 2020-2021 taught the manufacturing and metalworking lead generation roles to get busier. That’s because many existing bedrock vendor-customer relationships had hiccups, and as a result, revenue suffered and contracts broke down. It didn’t actually have to happen that way.
Stand-by vendors and clients are part of a common-sense business plan. That’s why good marketing for manufacturing and metalworking businesses should always factor them in, but that’s not possible if those businesses don’t have realistic, world-class lead generation from organic SEO and CRM all working in the background to feed the lead maturation funnel.
Does my industrial business really need organic lead generation?
Pandemic-related disruptions in 2020 and 2021 made it clear to most smaller industrial companies the danger of relying on customer retention alone. According to Gartner, “in 2021, 4 out of the top 5 digital marketing objectives relate directly to the goal of new customer acquisition.” That’s a big change from previous years.
Additionally – and more tellingly – Gartner points out that many industrial businesses are still falling behind the digital marketing curve. Can your business afford not to take a cohesive organic lead generation and CRM seriously?
However, there is good news. There are more customers without a partner looking for the missing puzzle piece you now have no fit for. Organic lead generation is how you’ll complete the picture and rebound faster next time.
Internal lead generation is ultimately the only method that is sustainable, year in, year out, rain or shine, pandemic on or pandemic off. That’s because lead generation for manufacturing and metalworking companies is about staying in front of your audience, the customer, 24-7, 365.
Put simply, if you’re not visible in search engines and for voice search, you’re leaving contracts on the table over time due to disruptions you won’t be able to see coming. Recessions, cutbacks, pandemics, and civil disturbances – these all impact your business continuity and make your business vulnerable.
How does lead generation for manufacturing & metalworking companies work?
It all starts with analytics. For those without the felt justification, Google Analytics (GA4) is a good way to make the tracking of all of your key performance indicators easy. You can set up conversions in your GA dashboards and then connect your internal business data to your website via Data Studio, Google’s solution for connecting business intelligence with online marketing data.
Combining the power of GA4 and Data Studio allows you to better track things like offline (and online) marketing promotions, QR check-ins from foot traffic, use IoT label tracking of parts to track arrival speed, and literally anything else affecting your supposedly “offline” business.
Imagine seeing your average cost and profit per part delivered in real-time. Whenever a part arrives at a customer’s place of business, your Data Studio can literally track the part’s arrival and register each in Data Studio. From there, Data Studio, with the cost of the part and the estimated time to make the journey, can calculate your costs against your profits and show the total average estimated gross and net revenue per part. This brings logistics and accounting together by connecting manufacturing costs, shipping costs, and marketing costs, and automating your profit projections by the day, week, month, quarter or year.
Analytics allows every asset (like parts) to become digital. That means you can project costs and profits accurately. It also allows you to project the cost of losing any customer due to another pandemic or other such disruption. This is what marketers meant all along when you thought they were just being cute with that mantra, “digital transformation”. It’s a real transformation of the physical world into its digital equivalent. And having your business lead funnel represented digitally serves lead maturation better than any previous mode of accounting, making sure less and less gets overlooked.
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