Manufacturers are Laggards in Digital Marketing – Why that’s Good News

A new report by Authentia sets out some excellent advice for manufacturing marketers. 

The big takeaway is that manufacturing businesses are laggards in digital marketing. B2B marketers in other industries are leading the way while manufacturers are missing significant opportunities to close more business.

 

 

Jon DiPietro is the main author of the report.  He says manufacturers suck (my word, not his) in the basics of web design, content marketing, social media and search engine marketing.  The good news is that if this reminds you of your company, there are big gains to be made if you are an early adopter to embrace these changes.

To create the report, Jon (and his team, I hope), assessed 100 websites in the manufacturing industry against B2B benchmarks.  Although Jon focused on a specific niche of manufacturers for this report (Control System Integrators), you’ll find that the points he makes apply to a wide audience of manufacturers. 

Here are 3 big takeaways, although I encourage you to download and read the full 2015 Control System Integrators Digital Marketing Benchmark Report:

 

1. Manufacturer web sites are out of date

Having a content management system for your web site makes it easy to add content such as blogs.  48% of the manufacturer web sites reviewed did not have such a system, so marketers likely have to ask IT every time they need to make a change.  So of course, updates rarely happen. 

And forget about mobile.  79% of the sites they analyzed weren’t useable from a mobile device.  79%!  Check your traffic stats and you’ll see that a lot of your traffic is coming from mobile.  This is pretty important to fix.

If you don’t know how your site looks on a smartphone, Google has a good mobile-friendly assessment tool.

 

 

2. Manufacturers are slow to take up the content marketing trend

65% of web sites surveyed did not have a blog, so I guess it follows that 88% of them don’t have any social sharing buttons.  That stat is also consistent with 67% of them not listing social media accounts.  I know the CEO’s of most manufacturers don’t think that their customers use social media or mobile phones, but that doesn’t mean they are right.   

 

3. Web sites have no clear way to engage visitors

Many of our customers have implemented a marketing automation tool like Marketo, Hubspot or Eloqua.  However, in the case of the 100 sites visited on this survey, the Authentia team were able to find that integration on only 2% of the sites.  Marketing automation is a really big opportunity to advance your sales.  Further, the report highlights that 95% of  sites failed to use landing pages with a clear call to action.  For those of you interested in how to get conversions, check out this post on the anatomy of a landing page.  

 

Digital marketing strategy all starts with web site design

I’ve written many times on the importance of web site design.  Even though ENGINEERING.com is in the business of promoting manufacturing marketing solutions, our clients won’t get the results they expect until they address these core deficiencies. 

Kudos to the Authentia team for pulling this together.

 

John