Today we have a guest post from Derek Singleton from Software Advice, a company that helps companies pick the right software whether it’s for an application or industry. Derek has been a guest blogger before and it’s always good to get someone else’s insights. Enjoy.

Graphic courtesy of: Thomas Industrial Network, Industrial Purchasing Barometer 

The industrial buying market is undergoing changes. An industry that once relied purely on traditional marketing to generate sales leads is now moving online. Survey results released by the Thomas Industrial Network recently found that 9 out of 10 industrial buyers research and evaluate their purchases online today.

As more industrial buying activity moves online, manufacturers will need to focus on building their online presence. In order to make the most of the increase in online activity, manufacturers need to create a website that meets buyer expectations at each step of the purchasing cycle:

1. Discovery - Site visitors are just starting their research process and are trying to find companies that make what they need.

2. Research – Visitors are looking for information on product specs, operations procedures and materials used.

3. Sourcing – Individuals are ready to see detailed pricing and want schematics to ensure that your product works with what they’re building.

4. Procurement – This will usually happen offline.

Beyond modeling a website that guides visitors through the sales cycle, there are four other areas manufacturers should focus on to improve their websites.

• Show Off Your Facility & Processes - It’s important to use your website to show off what differentiates you from the competition. If you have a clean, modern looking facility, then you should show it off with pictures or a video tour. If you’ve received awards or other accolades, let visitors know about it.

• Create a Product  Catalog – The product catalog is a great way to provide visitors with an easy way to navigate the products you make. It shouldn’t, however, simply be an electronic version of a print catalog. In the online world, buyers expect  to be able to compare multiple products side-by-side. Your website should allow for this so visitors can narrow their options quickly.

• Provide Detailed Product Specs and Schematics - Beyond product comparisons, buyers these days want to see detailed information on each product. It’s essential that photographs, detailed measurements, product tolerances, and schematics are provided for each product so they can move further along  the sourcing process. Not providing this information can result in the visitor leaving your website.

• Create Downloadable CAD Files - A final element to include in your website is the downloadable CAD file. Providing visitors with access to these files is a great way to speed up a purchase as it allows visitors to determine with greater precision whether your product meets their needs.

Naturally, content is only part of the equation. This content needs to be coupled with calls to action (CTAs) to convert visitors into leads. One critical CTA that works well for manufacturers is the request for more information. By balancing a website with the right content and CTAs, manufacturers can generate more leads online.

To see a few examples of how these web elements are being put to use on manufacturer websites, visit Software Advice, a site that reviews manufacturing software. You can find more detailed information at: Manufacturers, Listen Up: 5 Tips to Convert Your Web Traffic.

LinkedIn 277% More Effective for Lead Generation Than Facebook and Twitter.

In a study conducted by Hubspot, LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).

200 million leads were generated on LinkedIn last year, according to their Advertising Chief, Jim Lister.

LinkedIn is an important social media platform for new business that helps you to:

• Re-establish older connections with past colleagues and clients.
• Find new connections and seek referrals.
• Request and share recommendations.
• Maintain top-of-mind awareness with prospects through status updates.
• Gather the right kind of intelligence to make better targeting decisions.
• Find and follow client and prospective clients using LinkedIn’s advanced search features. You can find people or companies in your geographic location, or within a particular industry or niche.

LinkedIn has been the “dark horse” of the social media platforms. This is partly because it is a difficult platform to master and networking isn’t easy. But LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, is stepping up improvements.

LinkedIn attracts dedicated users who are serious about business. Here are 12 LinkedIn improvements that will help you connect:

1. More than two million businesses with company pages are now allowed to post status updates to their followers. Watch for prospect’s company status updates and engage with them.
2. Targeted updates enable you to target your company’s status updates to specific followers so they can deliver the most relevant content to the most appropriate audiences.
3. To help facilitate conversations, a new polling feature has been added to LinkedIn Groups that’s designed to get a quick read on an issue.
4. Users can now create a custom group, very similar to a regular group, except you’ll be able to customize a space on the right side of the page. You can add video, integrate your blog, Twitter feeds or other RSS feeds. You can also easily add a poll, from which you can ask your group members questions.
5. An option available with a premium account is the ability to send InMails, or private emails through the LinkedIn network. Whether you know a  person or not, you can contact anyone on the LinkedIn network, even if you don’t know them.
6. New Group Search helps you to find the right conversation faster among the 1.2 million groups.
7. The upgraded People You May Know feature makes it even easier to find and connect with people in your network.
8. LinkedIn Alumni makes it easier for you to tap into this important personal network and review relevant associations.
9. LinkedIn’s Follow Company button can now be added to their websites, making it easier for any consumer to begin following companies of interest.
10. Your LinkedIn Profile now puts more emphasis on Skills and Expertise. This means you can showcase your abilities to easily connect with people who have similar skills or with companies looking for specific expertise.
11. A new tab on your page called Follower Statistics, will add a new layer of reporting to the Page Statistics.
12. You can now embed a YouTube video on your companies overview page as well as on each individual service page.

Eric Willis follows my blog and is a manufacturer of fasteners in the UK. Eric works as a distribution manager at EJOT UK providing high tension custom fasteners to the aerospace and defense market. EJOT’s global distribution network makes it one of the largest fastener suppliers based in Europe.

He’d like to share his insights on how to stay ahead of the game.

How to Stay Ahead of the Game in the Fastener World

The volatile and unpredictable economy we live in today has wreaked havoc not only for consumers but also for businesses and offices in all markets and industries. The global recession has brought about certain impacts and effects that have rattled businesses to their knees and has made business stability seem like an utter dream.

In the fastener manufacturing market, the level of competition is high and continues to escalate in rampant proportions. It looks as if new manufacturers and suppliers of fasteners are established every day. Unfortunately, the rates of consumers and prospective buyers looking for these materials and supplies have not significantly increased throughout the course of time. This has made the level of competition fiercer than ever.

So what do you do? In the mind of a true businessman, staying ahead of competitors are of paramount concern, one that should be above all else in your list of priorities as a business executive or owner. Staying ahead of the game in the world of fastener manufacturing and distribution is something one cannot simply plan overnight even for the versed and experienced owner or director. To stay ahead and ensure that traffic flows come your way, meticulously planning and perfectly executing the plan is of key essence, and can make or break your business.

For people who know little or have no familiarity or knowledge at all regarding the market or industry of manufacturing fasteners, you won’t likely think of the difficulty owners face when competing with each other. Making sure your business is always competitively operating in multinational markets is also very difficult with lots of variables outside of your control. With the ubiquity of outsourcing and the access of global resources in today’s modern day and age, the manufacturing world is actually in a consistent struggle with rivals.

Here are 3 tips and guidelines on how you can add a competitive edge on your game in the vast and “dog-eat-dog” world of manufacturing, in this case manufacturing of fasteners.

First, lower the expenses of your business. In a simpler and more comprehensible context, if you can make the fasteners while consuming fewer funds for the same quality and quantity as compared with rivals, you’ll be able to provide more savings and discounts to your consumers and tilt the game to your advantage. Several of the most effective means of lowering expenditures involve tactics like outsourced manufacturing of the product, correctly forecasting to allow demand-based manufacturing, eliminating all delays in prefabricated parts and creating shared utilities. When provided with respective applicability to your facility, these techniques may yield a substantial benefit over competitors who opt not to play strategically.

Secondly, understand the standards and demands of your clients. Avoid leaving any worries or doubts in your customer’s mind when they opt to work with you in the future. Meet your client’s needs and demands by rendering them with the fastener supplies they need quicker and cheaper as compared with rivals.

Thirdly, find or create a unique selling point. These could be large brand awareness campaigns through supplying high-profile events such as F1 cars, Prototype Aeroplanes or Extreme engineering designs. Brand awareness in a saturated market can be the difference between stagnated growth and true development of a business.

I’ve always been a big supporter of promoting manufacturing and tradesmen jobs. I recently came across a post from a client of ours, PMPA (Precision Machined Products Association). Miles Free, their Director of Industry Research and Technology, writes their blog, Speaking of Precision and I wanted to share his post.

The reality is you can’t be all things to all people. Pick a side, draw a line in the sand. Your company will be better for it.

Content marketing over the last few years has become the big buzz word and is often associated with social media. While it can be used to foster social media relationships, content marketing goes way beyond that. As a matter of a fact, it defines who you are and what you stand for.

Years ago you had limited ways to communicate your value proposition, not so today. Today specialists not generalists (no matter what field) are the preferred choice when folks are looking for something and they have a multitude of ways to get information about your company. And people like to be associated with leaders.

Let me ask you a question. If you think this assumption is correct, what do you or your company stand for? Have you chosen a niche? Are you considered the leading expert in it? If not, you’d better do it soon or you may not be around in 10 years. So how are you going to define and get the word out about your specialty? Content marketing.

By creating good content and sharing it, you can establish yourself as the thought leader in your niche. You can attract and retain customers by creating and curating valuable and compelling content on a consistent basis.

Ten years ago before anyone heard of social media, companies still stood for something. I believe you’ve heard of IBM or Apple? You knew one was known for main frames and the other for PCs. Today when you think of either brand, what do you think of…computers or other things? IBM may still make main frames, but they got their butt kicked in PCs and are known more now for their consulting services. Apple was defined by the PC, but not today. When you think of Apple, you think phone, tablet and soon TV.

The point is, both of these companies reinvented themselves and used content marketing to help spread the word in different ways. IBM took advantage of both traditional and social media methods to communicate their position. Apple, on the other hand, didn’t rely on social media directly, but worked the social media system by getting great content out to bloggers and others on the social network to create the buzz for them.

What are you doing to spread the word? Are you using content marketing?

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Here’s a few other posts you might find interesting:

How Are You Managing Your Content Marketing?

Four B-to-B Marketing Efforts That Can Improve Your Results

Several years ago, marketing would generate leads for various sources and pass them onto sales for follow-up. Then one day someone from the C suite asked how much new business are we getting from our promotional efforts? Marketing said we developed X amount of leads and Sales would say they were all crap. Obviously the finger-pointing wasn’t going to solve the question of how much new business are we getting.

Thus started the process of lead management, qualification, nurturing and at some point turning it over to sales with a little more history behind the leads than there were several years ago. Russ Hill from Ultimate Leads calls it the “Transition Zone.” It is the place in time where marketing hands off the lead they so carefully nurtured to sales to close the loop. But in order to do it successfully, you must have a process  that everyone is in tune with, and sales needs to make sure to keep info on that lead current in your lead database so we know when a new customer has arrived, from where and what they bought.

A good follow-up marketing system should have three attributes:
1. It should be systematic.
2. It should generate consistent, predictable results.
3. It should require minimal physical interaction to make it run.

What are you doing to ensure you’re getting the most out of your leads?

If you like this post, you might want to read:

Where Are Your New Business Prospects in the Selling Cycle?

How Many Calls Does it Take to Make a Sale?

Does everyone within your organization understand your different stages in the selling cycle? Most sales funnels were set up for developing traditional leads. A question you must ask yourself is whether social media leads fit into your existing process and if so where? As a rule, social media leads take longer to convert because they are engaging  you earlier in the process.

Nurturing social leads needs to be handled differently.This will include decision-making content designed to answer questions, overcome objections and provide opportunities that arise during the purchasing process.

I recently read a good post by Nichole Kelly in Social Media Examiner, 5 Tips for Moving Social Media Leads Into the Sales Funnel that I thought might be of interest to you. She makes useful points from understanding the sales funnel to optimizing the path to conversion and explains why social media leads need to be nurtured differently.

What do you think? Have you successfully converted social media fans and followers into revenue? Are you still trying to figure out how to do this?

In theory, it’s a place where manufacturers and their distribution counterparts come together via a format of speed dating where the manufacturer requests meetings with distributors (both existing customers and potentials). Like anything else, there are no shows for appointments. The booth program is a two-day affair and while the traffic was light on the first day, it was almost non-existent the second day.

If I was a distributor and could talk to as many suppliers as I could in a period of a few days, I would think they would want to take advantage of it. The manufacturers, as in most associations, foot the bills. They have to bring in product, booths and their associated expenses. What’s most disturbing is that the ratio of manufacturers to distributors is probably 10 to 1.

I don’t have the answer and I’m not trying to pick on ISA. STAFDA, NAED, NAHAD and many more face the same dilemma. There’s got to be a better way in a shorter period of time to make the most out of these meetings. Back in the day, these meetings were a place to showcase new products and programs, but with internet and all the other tools we have, I would hope at least your current customers would know about anything new.

I do recall that the fall meetings in Chicago for a day and a half at the airport were both efficient and successful. I believe it was due in part because the distributors were in the booth and you did your speed dating, but only the roles were reversed. NAED does this at their regional meetings, and as far as I can tell, the manufacturers like the format.

Any suggestions on how we can get these distributor/supplier get togethers to be better for all parties involved?