Small business owners often have little money for marketing or promotions. So, they must spend what little they have smartly to maximize their return on investment (ROI). Are your marketing efforts yielding good returns? If not, you should consider using industrial marketing to boost your sales.
Industrial marketing can help you secure large orders for your products or services and grow your business.
Before we dive into how you can adopt industrial marketing for your business, let’s first discuss what it is.
What is industrial marketing?
Industrial marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on selling products or services to other businesses rather than selling to individual customers.
Let’s say, for an example, your small business offers cleaning supplies that include sponges and scourers, yellow dusters/microfibre cloths, glass polishing cloths, cleaning brushes, mops and buckets, protective gloves, etc. And you sell these products to individual customers and businesses like:
- Schools
- Offices
- Hospitals
As businesses place large orders, the process from first pitch to closing sale is often complex and involves more than one decision-maker. So, business to consumer (B2C) marketing tactics may not be as effective in winning over these buyers.
Industrial marketing can help you sell larger orders of your cleaning products to schools, offices, hospitals or any other business that requires cleaning supplies.
How to adopt industrial marketing for your business
Photo: Remy Gieling on Unsplash
Industrial marketing can get your businesses noticed and help it grow. Here are five steps to increase the success of your industrial marketing efforts:
1- Identify ideal-fit clients
Industrial marketing requires a different approach, as you need to sell to businesses that often have:
- More than one decision-maker
- Lengthy internal process of narrowing down suppliers before buying products/services
To ensure success of your industrial marketing campaigns, you need to know your ideal customers thoroughly. Only then can you make plans to better find and sell to them.
Following are some questions that can help you to determine your ideal-fit account:
- Why do they buy the products or services that you offer?
- How many steps are involved in their buying process?
- Who are the decision-makers?
- What common questions might they ask before making the decision to buy?
- What are the problems they often encounter during the purchase/delivery process?
- What authority does each decision-maker hold in making the decision?
You could also prepare a customer empathy map to know what your customers deal with in their day-to-day work lives. Doing so will help you connect with them on an emotional level.
Once, you have created ideal-fit accounts, you should work towards setting goals for your industrial marketing campaign.
2- Make S.M.A.R.T. goals
So you know what types of business professionals you should be reaching out to. Now comes an important part — setting goals. Every goal you set should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
If your overall industrial marketing goal is to increase your website traffic, then you’ll want to define exactly what that means. You might wish to increase site traffic to:
- Build awareness of your new business
- Urge potential business customers to submit a request for quote
You need to set specific goals such as exactly how many leads you want to generate through your website to achieve your business objective. Read more about how to create SMART goals here.
3- Create or update your marketing materials
So far, you have identified your ideal customer and you have set S.M.A.R.T. goals for your industrial marketing. Now, it is time to create or update your marketing assets.
If you’re already selling to individual customers, you probably have some marketing materials.
- Flyers
- Leaflets
- eBooks
- Web landing pages
Brainstorm with your team on ways to use these marketing materials to achieve industrial marketing goals. You may need to adjust your materials here and there to make them work for people who are likely to buy many units at once.
You may also need to create new marketing materials (online and offline) to cater to the companies/businesses you want to sell your products/services to.
Make sure that the materials address all the possible questions/queries your buyers could have.
Your online presence matters a lot, as most decision-makers thoroughly research potential suppliers before making a purchase. If you don’t have a coordinated digital presence, you may lose the race before it’s even begun.
To get noticed by potential buyers:
- Get a business website (or update the one you have to speak to business customers)
- Be active on social media
- Take part in online forums relevant to your business niche.
With GoDaddy Online Starter Bundle, any small business owner can easily take their business online in less than 10 minutes for 3 Rs per day.
4- Make a plan to bring in leads
After creating or updating your marketing materials for a business reader, you are ready to start generating leads. A lead is a likely customer who is interested in your product or service.
But how will you find them?
There are many methods you can use to gather leads for your business. As more and more businesses are favoring digital means, it is imperative that you focus more on online lead-generation strategies.
Here are some effective yet inexpensive online lead generation strategies:
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing
Email marketing is a preferred method for many, as it delivers handsome ROI with a minimum of cost. What’s more, you don’t need tons of experience to start email marketing.
GoDaddy Email Marketing is a tool that handles everything from placing an email signup form on your website to actually creating and sending business emails. It has an:
- Easy editor
- Big gallery of high-quality stock images
- Reports that tell you which emails get the best response
To generate quick leads, you can explore paid search engine ads or social media ads.
Related: How to use PPC ads to bring in leads
5- Analyze your industrial marketing strategy
In the ever-changing business landscape, you need to be willing to change in order to continuously win accounts.
You can do this by analyzing your marketing strategies from time to time and making changes to improve the success rate. Therefore, you must attach a key performance indicator (KPI) to each of your goals.
Each business is different and so is the customer acquisition plan. You will know what works best for your business only by experimenting over time.
Conclusion
Industrial marketing is an effective tool to grow a business, as it helps them secure big purchase orders.
Follow the above-mentioned tips while implementing industrial marketing strategy to maximize the success of your efforts.
