Making a business case for investing in a comprehensive marketing campaign to skeptical, ROI-minded, quant-driven, C-level marketers in manufacturing and industrial companies goes far beyond making an intuitive case. For quantitatively inclined senior team members, here are five key ROI metrics that we have used to justify their investment in manufacturing marketing:
1. Increased Brand Awareness: We track and create a trend line of number of times the brand name surfaces and is clicked on search engine results pages using Google search console data. Our SEO/Inbound clients should expect this to grow upwards year-over-year.The non-branded to branded organic traffic ratio should rise over time. For most of our clients this ratio begins around 20/80 or 30/70 and rises all the way up to 60/40 or 70/30. Occasionally, it rises up to 80/20 and 90/10. We’ll monitor organic search volume over time by measuring the organic traffic as a percentage of overall website traffic trended over time. We expect this to grow upward year-over-year for all our clients.
2. Reduced Time to Sale: Great marketing surrounds and engages the prospective buyers at every stage of the decision funnel. It accelerates sales by building brand awareness and early brand preference during the education/awareness stage, reinforcing the brand during the consideration stage, and providing brand reassurance during the decisioning phase. As a result of these efforts, our marketing clients can expect to reduce their sales cycles.
3. Growth in Inquiries, RFQ’s, Downloads and Webinar Signups: Our industrial marketing clients have always enjoyed quantifiable increase in inquiries and RFQs. Our website clients whom we have re-packaged as solutions providers have seen the thickness of their RFQ’s increase in size. Our manufacturing marketing clients can also expect to see an increase in PDF downloads and event signups.
4. Increased Revenue: Great marketing increases sales. It has created order backlogs for our industrial clients, whether they are an e-commerce client or RFQ-based. For the clients we’ve packaged as solutions providers, they have all enjoyed growth in their average order size.
5. Increased Keyword Rankings: For our clients whose campaigns include SEO/Inbound efforts, we upload our Keyword Guide and all the keywords we are optimizing to secure Google page one rankings into our Keyword Tracking tool. We monitor this weekly to measure the average rankings, weekly gains and losses. These invariably grow dramatically for all of them.
Great marketing transforms a manufacturer, liberating new prosperity and realizing destiny. The lowest ROI we have delivered is 5X, and the highest a whopping 100X.
Contact us if you are seeking a smart manufacturing marketing agency which can help you join the elite group of manufacturers and industrial companies growing their company’s share of mind, voice and market using our services.
With strained budgets, weakened endowments and the anticipated demographic cliff the college bound undergraduates are beginning to shrink. Colleges are developing strategies for winning an outsized share of a shrinking undergraduate market.
Our higher education marketing and enrollment clients have started asking us to prepare a playbook for successfully recruiting and growing undergraduate student enrollment. In increasing enrollment for undergraduate programs for the past 25 years for numerous colleges and universities, we have learned two things: First, students can’t buy your programs or buy-into your university unless they can find you; Second, you can’t bore students into enrolling in your university. To succeed, universities must invest in first impressions, and deploy a unique balance of the marketing air-game, boots-on-the-ground game and follow-up contact strategies.
ASSESS THE SITUATION
Appraise the college’s situation by immersing yourself in the college data and touch points:
Asses your brand. Are you a local brand, regional brand, state brand, super-regional brand or a national brand. Your brand elasticity will determine how far from your campus locations you can realistically recruit from. A strong brand platform will minimize your melt and transfer rates.
Evaluate your undergraduate enrollment data to understand the demographics and geographic reach. Study admissions funnel data. Which part of the funnel is facing the biggest loss and melt? Study your alumni data to understand the pockets of goodwill that could be potential harvesting grounds.
Know your signature programs, portfolio programs, and remaining programs. Know programs that are oversubscribed, undersubscribed and at-risk. Why? Because you won’t be able to spread your budgets evenly across all programs. You must play favorites and you’ll have to create smart portfolio groupings.
Assess your website and perform an SEO audit. Leads from your website will out-convert the paid leads by 3-folds. Google page 1 is destiny.
Benchmark cross-app competitors. Know who is ahead of you and who is behind you.
Define right-fit students. These are the kind of students you want more of.
Know your referral rate. Referrals produce some of the best quality leads. The best colleges graduate happy students who become the largest source of future students. Satisfied graduates bring trust and credibility which helps prospects cut through the clutter of choices and marketing.
Understand what your prospects value the most about the institution (brand, outcomes, peers, alumni,, faculty thought leadership, etc.). Don’t operate blindly.
Allocate competitive marketing budgets. Most non-profit colleges and universities are investing between 2% and 5% of their total revenue on marketing, when they ought to be investing at least 10%. Small and medium sized colleges are increasingly competing against a growing club of for-profit colleges and public universities that are investing more than 20% of their revenue or greater than $100M in marketing.
Perform SWOT. Face reality head-on.
ACTIVATE MARKETING “AIR GAME”
WEBSITE: THE ULTIMATE CONVERSION MACHINE
Your website is one of the most important touch points for undergraduate prospects because it is the #1 lead and application generation tool for undergraduate programs. You’ll be judged and evaluated by its quality and beauty.
Inform it by market research insights. Let website strategy guide the development of information architecture, content, design and development.
Invest in high-fidelity academic program pages. Program pages, what we call “money pages” on a college website, are where many college decisions are made and college preferences are created. Even though the colleges are asking families to pony up fees that are close to the price of expensive cars, it’s rare to find the level of romance and presentation that even economy car companies put into their entry-level model pages. Instead of settling with bland program pages packed with facts, the VPs of Enrollment Marketing must create program pages that romance prospects and their families. They must feature stories of enrolled students, faculty and labs, facilities, studios, and centers of excellence where the students’ minds will be shaped and skills will be developed. They must paint pictures of exciting opportunities that await them after graduation and offer stories of alumni as demonstrable proof of their program’s distinction.
Make it beautiful. Romance prospects. Merchandise hope.
Make it search engine friendly. Inform it with a Keyword Lexicon. Bake best practices in search engine optimization (SEO) into all aspects of it. Ensure that your academic program pages, faculty and the university magazine stories are all ranked on Google page one.
Spotlight enrolled students, alumni and alumni chapters in the institutional website, viewbook, and social media. If students can’t see others like themselves there, they simply won’t show up. They also rely heavily on word-of-mouth from friends. Craft brand messaging and content that is inclusive of people of different races, faiths and countries.
Prominently feature institutional reputation points because students use them as short-cuts and international students value them even more than the US students.
Feature proof points of your commitment to various student profiles. For instance, international recruitment need to see other international students, international alumni and international faculty, the office of international students, interfaith chapels, host family programs, international ambassadors, etc. Similarly African American and Hispanic students don’t wish to stand out like sore thumbs and want to know if the college has the support infrastructure for them.
Create customized admissions, financial aid and scholarships sections for US, veterans, international students and transfer students that address their unique needs.
Be prepared to create an admissions microsite. If your design template and CMS constraints don’t let you elevate the website user experience, be prepared to create a new admissions microsites.
Track website performance. Carefully track prospect journey and conversion performance. Adjust it until it starts performing optimally.
PAID ADVERTISING: HUNT LIKE SHARKS. DON’T FEED LIKE WHALES.
Search, Social and Media Advertising paid platforms are all powered by algorithms that maximize their own profits with little regard for a marketer’s investments. To offset the algorithm’s greedy tendency, use sensible campaign management techniques to tune, optimize and micro-manage various aspects of the campaigns.
Deploy new paid advertising methodologies based on what the right-fit students value, micro-segments, look-alikes, A/B testing, geo-targeting, machine learning, big-data algorithms and affinity groups.
Use the latest best practices to create high-converting digital ad creative. Run A/B tests to feed the champs and starve the chumps.
Direct prospects to brand-infused, high-fidelity, story landing pages. Infuse brand, ROI, cogent argument construction, differentiators, calls-to-action, ROI stats and facts into the creative. Again, run A/B tests with copy and images to feed the winners and starve the losers.
Choose the ad platforms wisely. Not all paid channels perform equally. Google generates solid leads for most pre-professional undergraduate degrees. Undergraduate students convert best on Instagram and YouTube, but not on Snapchat and Tik Tok. Parents can be reached best on Facebook.
Carefully track prospect journey and campaign performance so you can determine the right keywords, the right messaging, the right platforms, and the right landing pages. More importantly, so you can answer the pivotal question: where should you invest your precious marketing dollars in the next 12 months.
Use sensible campaign management techniques such as budget optimization, bid management, keyword management, audience optimization and judicious management of algorithmic recommendations.
ACTIVATE INBOUND/SEO MARKETING: GET FOUND ON GOOGLE/BING PAGE ONE.
Mobilize search engine optimization (SEO) and your content marketing engine to dominate search engines. Remember four things. First, research shows that when colleges “get found” via organic Google page one results, prospects trust them more. Google page one organic results command over 90% of click share, and generate close to two-thirds of inquiries. Organic inquiries tend to form long-term relationships with the universities and they tend to melt away at a reduced rate. Second, leads generated from Google organic rankings tend to be like-minded and outperform paid advertising leads by three-folds. Third, the best prospects prefer to “discover” the college of their choice through “accidental finds” on Google page one and word-of-mouth on social media. Fourth, SEO marketing is a long game. It takes several months to achieve local and regional rankings, and often a year or more to achieve national and international rankings.
Develop smart foundational SEO. Establish a multi-year rankings plan for securing Google/Bing page one rankings.
Start by creating a Keyword Lexicon with keyword clusters, frequently asked questions, and natural language queries. Ensure it include keyword buckets for academic programs, thought leadership, brand, geographic, decisioning, and reputation.
Optimize all your undergraduate academic program pages. Ensure that the information that appears on search engine results is persuasive, aspirational and inviting.
Because rankings weaken over time and search engines reward fresh content, marketers must create a continuous stream of high quality, trusted and relevant content (such as articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, white papers, thought leadership articles, social posts, quizzes, games, etc.) and ignite it via promotion and conversation-starters to encourage peer-to-peer sharing. We call this the inverted admissions funnel strategy, which attracts and converts like-minded prospects.
Monitor your search engine rankings and traffic to identify which pieces of content are performing well and adjust your emphasis accordingly.
CONDUCT EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
Email marketing is most effective with house lists,, and as joint marketing campaign with related niche organizations; purchased lists convert poorly. Carefully track prospect journey and campaign performance.
COMMUNICATE WITH INFLUENCERS
Instead of making a shortlist of colleges on their own, Gen-Z’s are heavily influenced by the opinions of their social network of peers, teachers, college counselors, principals, parents and friends.
Instead of investing most of their marketing dollars on high school seniors and juniors, the VPs of Enrollment should target a mix of students, parents, teachers, college counselors in high schools, and principals. This creates a stereophonic set of messages that surround and engage a prospect with what’s distinctive about a college.
INFLUENCE RANKING AND RATING AGENCIES
Although colleges have an ambivalent relationship with college rankings, prospective students tend to gravitate towards the best ranked colleges they can afford to attend. Smart colleges routinely influence these ratings by creating committees that proactively affect ranking factors such as peer perception, student satisfaction, student placement rates, and salary data.
Each of these paid, earned and owned media strategies are good alone, but better together.
MOBILIZE BOOTS ON THE “GROUND GAME”
US STUDENTS
Recruit Student Ambassadors. Ask them to share their positive experiences and insights with prospective students. Recruit the ambassadors to take over social media accounts for the college. Ask them to welcome new students and their families.
Facilitate Student and Family Visits and Tours. College visits are moments of truth. Face-to-face interactions during college visits, alumni outreach, and admitted student days improve the number of high-quality leads and admissions yield. Students remember a college that reaches out to them in a caring, personal and organized manner. Successful colleges work very hard in casting and directing volunteers, tour guides, work study and junior staff — ensuring the talking points, presentations, touch points and tour details are all curated and orchestrated perfectly. God is in the details.
Befriend High Schools and Community Colleges. The more the number of high schools you visit, college fairs you participate in, school principals and teachers you meet, college counselors you befriend, community colleges you build partnerships with, the higher your success rate will be.
Offer Pre-College Programs and Summer Camps. These are some of the most effective feeders for future enrollment.
Attend Special Events. Identify events where talented youth are congregating and attend them. e.g. STEM programs would benefit from attending annual events of organizations like Girls who code and First Robotics.
Create Joint Programs with High Schools. Enable high school students complete college level courses and offer them admissions based on their performance in those courses.
Create, Cultivate and Fortify Corporate Relationships for Internships, Coops and Job Placement. Above everything else, outcomes and job placement are one of the top concerns of students and their families. By facilitating corporate placements, colleges help students realize a return on their investment by helping them gain practical experience, develop job-specific skills and secure quality job opportunities. Become known as a gateway to corporate America.
Cultivate Strong Relationship with Surrounding Communities. The goodwill generated will pay off handsomely.
INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS
Start an International Student Ambassador Program. Hire the ambassadors to create and oversee international social media properties for the college. Ask them to welcome new international students and their families. Connect them to local host families who welcome international students into their homes and families.
Hold international student webinar information sessions. The basic blocking and tackling of the ground game begins with webinars. Since like attracts like, bring appropriate international faculty, staff, students and alumni to these webinars. The meetings and interactions with faculty, students and alumni provide prospective international students with the information and experiences they need to determine if a college is the right-fit for their academic and personal goals. Prospects who attend these events tend to apply and enroll at a much higher rate than those who show up by other means.
Ask international faculty and program directors to visit countries of strategic interest. “To increase effectiveness, Involve alumni in the cities they are visiting” recommends Ed Barr, my first business client who now teaches communications at Carnegie Mellon. This not only increases cultural understanding but also builds relationships that become feeders.
Form international partnerships with schools in other countries. Nurture relationships with reliable college counselors, principals and program chairs. Wholesale student streams provide a solid foundation upon which a university can build retail one-on-one recruitment.
Create and run summer ESL and cultural immersion programs. In addition to generating new revenue, they will build your reputation for global engagement, and attract more international students and faculty.
Promote your college via state consortia like StudyNewYork, StudyTexas.edu, etc. These consortia, designed to foster economic development at the state level, routinely travel overseas to promote the member schools in educational fairs.
Create, cultivate and fortify corporate relationships for internships, coops and job placement. International students invest significant time and resources in their education abroad. By facilitating corporate placements, colleges help students realize a return on their investment by helping them gain practical experience, develop job-specific skills and secure quality job opportunities. Become known as a gateway to corporate America.
DEPLOY “FOLLOW-UP” CONTACT STRATEGIES
All your marketing investments will be wasted unless you build a solid follow-up system for inquiries and applications.
Follow-up with inquiries on a timely basis. Respond quickly. Keep it human. Recruit friends and colleagues to become secret shoppers for your university — and ask them about their experience.
Deploy a personalized contact strategy for every stage of the admissions funnel to maximize yield. Know what prospects and influencers need at every stage of the admissions funnel, and meet their needs. Pay as much attention to admission yield communications and follow-up processes as you do to lead-generation and lead-nurturing communications. Offset reduced contact with stealth applicants by stepping up the game at each touch point. Ask faculty and program directors to personally follow up with high-value leads, not just accepted students. When faculty and program chairs follow up personally with quality prospects/applicants and probe them about their motivations, aspirations and ambitions, it becomes a force multiplier: it surprises them and builds brand affinity. Moreover, when the insights gathered from these conversations are fed back to marketing, the messaging becomes even more effective.
Deploy a unique contact strategy for applications to prevent melt. The application is the new lead. Treat admitted students with the same care as you treat leads. Deploy drip campaigns, accepted student days, early orientation, and welcome reception.
Remember two things. First, a broken inquiry and application follow-up process reflects poorly on the entire brand. Second, don’t let automation get in the way of personalized and timely follow-up because there are no short-cuts for old-fashioned, human-centered relationship building.
In the past 30 years, Elliance has deployed SEO strategies for more than 100 colleges, universities and higher education institutions in service of growing their enrollment, endowment and reputation.
Why have we insisted on recommending SEO to our higher education marketing clients? For two reasons.
First, because Google/Bing page 1 is destiny. Trusted page one organic rankings and high visibility for your social media content equate to owning the world’s hottest real estate. 90% of users never go beyond page 1 of search results. Organic rankings (i.e. the top 10 natural search results) are clicked 9-folds more, trusted more, and convert three-folds better than paid ads.
Second, being found on page 1 is the best means for finding, getting, keeping and growing right-fit students, faculty, and staff as well as nurturing relationships with alumni, foundations corporate partners and media.
We recommend our clients begin the SEO journey by crafting an intentional plan powered by a Keyword Lexicon that contains clusters of keywords and phrases spanning academic programs, brand ideals, and areas of thought leadership, innovation and intellectual capital. Categories in the lexicon include academic program keywords, brand positioning keywords, reputation keywords, decisioning keywords, and location keywords.
Here are the nine effective strategies:
1. Academic Programs SEO Optimization We have not found a more dependable and reliable way to ensure predictable enrollment growth than securing Google page one rankings for a college’s academic programs. Give priority to signature programs and program portfolios.
2. University Magazine SEO Optimization A PDF, ISSUU or flipbook version of an alumni magazine is not a digital magazine. They are walled gardens that prevent the Google bot from crawling, indexing and ranking each story. True digital magazines are an interactive hub where each individual story can be read, interacted with, optimized for Google rankings, promoted and shared. Read more about the benefits of digital university magazines.
3. Faculty Experts SEO Optimization Optimize all faculty profiles, and their areas of research to secure Google/Bing page one rankings. Prioritize rock star faculty if you have to pick and choose due to resource constraints. Writers and reporters in the media are always looking for subject matter experts on search engines. Let them find your thought leaders.
4. Faculty Research SEO Optimization Optimize all institutional areas of research, and individual research projects and papers to secure Google/Bing page one rankings. Prioritize your stalwarts if you have to pick and choose due to resource constraints. Peers, corporations, foundations and government agencies are always looking for subject matter expertise on search engines. Let them discover your thought leadership.
5. Academic, Presidential and Admissions Blog SEO Optimization Institutions should decide which type of blog would serve them best: presidential blogs, thought leadership blogs, advice blogs, academic blog or admissions blogs. Launch the right type of blogs for your institution.
Create a readership that engages with your passion for delivering thought leadership, practical, valuable and advice-oriented content related to your academic programs and fields of study. Each blog post should be conceived to win a specific keyword or phrase.
Tell stories. Leverage news-jacking when appropriate. Act as a thought leader. Educate prospective students, alumni, corporations and community organizations. Quote other authoritative peers and partner brands who’ll lend your institution credibility. Write blog posts with commensurate fidelity, which is less than that of an academic program page or a news item. Tie it back to your academic programs, research labs and centers of excellence. Build topic authority by creating a series of small blog posts instead of packing everything into one long one. Make your posts sharable and share the blog post on your social channels.
6. Social Media SEO Optimization Optimize all your social channels to secure Google/Bing page one rankings. Make them beautiful. Engage visitors. Think of your social posts as invitations to explore deeper stories. Because search engine bots ranking algorithms take social media into consideration, infuse keywords from your Keyword Lexicon into your social posts.
7. YouTube SEO Optimization YouTube is the number two search engine in the world after Google. It’s heavily used heavily by boomers, Gen-Xers, Millennials, and Gen-Zers. YouTube videos are routinely ranked and appear on search engine result pages. Start by making your YouTube page beautiful and SEO-optimize the starting page. Next, develop a rational structure for your YouTube channel with meaningful playlists and featured videos. Then use your Keyword Lexicon to optimize each video for a keyword or phrase, and develop a plan to produce new videos to fill ranking gaps.
8. Community Relations SEO Optimization Establishing positive relationships with the local and professional communities fosters support for the institution resulting in increased event attendance, research collaborations, student enrollment, giving, mentoring, internships, job placement and navigating local regulations. Optimize all your community relations programs so your institution can be found by various audiences on Google/Bing.
9. Overall Website SEO Optimization Identify the right groups of pages on your sitemap for enrollment, endowment and reputation ranking gains. These could include academic program pages, research pages, institutional pages, story pages and more. Next, SEO-optimize them with intentionality.
In the past 30 years, Elliance has deployed SEO strategies for more than 100 manufacturers and industrial companies in service of growing their leads, sales and capacity utilization.
Why have we insisted on recommending SEO to our clients? For two reasons.
First, because Google/Bing page 1 is destiny. Trusted page one organic rankings and high visibility for your social media content equate to owning the world’s hottest real estate. 93% of industrial buying begins with on online searches. 90% of users never go beyond page 1 of search results. Organic rankings (i.e. the top 10 natural search results) are clicked 9-folds more, trusted more, and convert three-folds better than paid ads.
Second, being found on page one is the best means for finding, getting, keeping and growing customers and talent.
We recommend our clients begin the SEO journey by crafting an intentional plan powered by a Keyword Lexicon that contains clusters of keywords and phrases spanning products and services, brand ideals, and areas of thought leadership, innovation and intellectual capital. Categories in the lexicon include products and services keywords, brand positioning keywords, reputation keywords, decisioning keywords, and location keywords.
Here are the nine effective strategies:
1. Products and Services SEO Optimization Optimize for keywords of your core products and services along with variations across the customer journey including words like “case studies”, “best”, “top”, “FAQs” and other use cases. Make sure you optimize keywords that novice and pro buyers, specifiers and influencers type in. Also ensure that you optimize for combination keywords with products and services for various markets you serve.
2. Catalog and e-Commerce SEO Optimization Every product page is a potential entry door to your manufacturing company. Make them information rich and complete. Optimize for all categories and all products for novice and pro buyers, specifiers and influencers. Again, optimize for variations used across the customer journey. Ensure that you optimize for combination keywords with products serving various markets. Since there can be thousands of pages involved, use a combination of customized meta-data for key products and formula-based for the remaining ones. Do follow SEO best practices such as creating search-engine friendly URLs, availing social shares, etc.
3. Talent Recruitment SEO Optimization Every job opening is a door into your website. Every one of your pages is an opportunity to elevate your company in Google search rankings. Look at the Careers and Job Listing pages through the lens of smart SEO practices like optimizing your code, “baking” keywords into your job listing pages, and spreading them with social media share buttons. Ensure your company’s values are not a secret. They should only be lived, but they should also be celebrated and expressed — The ways your values shape your operations, corporate giving, volunteering, board participation, and the work of your foundation ought to come alive in your website, your social media posts, your media relations and your blog. Optimize all of it for search and like-minded, right-fit talent will find you before they find your competitor.
4. Blog SEO Optimization Create a readership that engages with your passion for delivering practical, valuable and advice-oriented content related to your products, services and industries served. Each blog post should be conceived to win a specific keyword or phrase.
Tell stories. Leverage news-jacking when appropriate. Act as a trusted product expert. Educate prospective buyers, specifiers and influencers. Quote other authoritative peers and partner brands who’ll lend you credibility. Write blog posts with commensurate fidelity, which is less than that of an academic program page or a news item. Tie it back to the products, services and industries you serve. Build topic authority by creating a series of small blog posts instead of packing everything into one long one. Make your posts sharable and share the blog post on your social channels.
5. YouTube SEO Optimization YouTube is the number two search engine in the world after Google, consumed by boomers, Gen-Xers, Millennials, and Gen-Zers. YouTube videos are routinely ranked and appear on search engine result pages. Start by making your YouTube page beautiful and SEO-optimize the starting page. Next, develop a rational structure for your YouTube channel with meaningful playlists and featured videos. Then use your Keyword Lexicon to optimize each video for a keyword or phrase, and produce new videos to fill keyword gaps.
6. Knowledge Center SEO Optimization Your knowledge center with its collection of product brochures, white papers, media collections, infographics and more is another critical library of assets begging to be optimized. First, build a dynamic knowledge center with an architecture that is SEO-optimized. Next, optimize each digital asset to maximize SEO gains.
7. News Releases SEO Optimization The news releases section is often overlooked as a source of SEO rankings gains. Each old news release is an optimizable digital asset. Each new news release should be baked in with a hive of keywords picked from your SEO Keyword Lexicon.
8. Case Studies SEO Optimization At the decision point in a customer journey, the case studies are what prospective buyers, specifiers and influencers use to make that final brand preference. Ensure that your case studies are perfectly optimized for Google/Bing page one rankings.
9. User Reviews We live in the age of short-cuts, ratings and rankings. We collaborate with our manufacturing clients to ensure they manage and guard their online rankings, which are considered a ranking factor by search engines.
Contact us if you are seeking a smart manufacturing marketing agency which can help you join the elite group of manufacturers and industrial companies growing their company’s share of mind, voice and market using our SEO services.
The surest way for manufacturers and industrial companies to grow their share of voice and market is by improving their search engine (SEO) rankings and visibility. Manufacturers pursue this because they know that Google page one is a pathway to business prosperity.
SEO or “search engine optimization” is a set of techniques manufacturing and industrial company marketers and their agencies deploy to improve their natural or organic website rankings on Google, Bing and other international search engines. More on these techniques here. This should equip you with a Keyword Mapping Strategy, Keyword Guide, Content Plan, Editorial Calendar, Link Building Plan, Site Tuning Plan and initial Benchmarks.
Once you start deploying these SEO techniques either yourself or with assistance from a partner SEO agency, keep a few things in mind. Remember that securing Google page one rankings is a marathon and not a sprint. Keep an eye out on Search Algorithm updates that can affect your rankings – sometimes very dramatically. Monitor competitors because they aren’t asleep. Watch keyword trends because like the rest of English language, they too evolve over time. Be mindful of seasonality and cycles because every industry and sector has its own.
Your efforts should start improving your brand’s search visibility. This begs the question: how do you know if your website visibility in improving or not?
How To Measure Improvements in Brand Visibility
At Elliance, we use five measures to know if a manufacturing brand visibility is improving or not:
Review Google Search Console Data: We track and create a trend line of number of times the brand name surfaces and is clicked on search engine results pages. For all our SEO clients, this grows upwards year-over-year.
Monitor Rankings in Keyword Tracking Tool: We upload our Keyword Guide and all the keywords we are optimizing to secure Google page one rankings into our Keyword Tracking tool. We monitor this weekly to measure the average rankings, weekly gains and losses.
Monitor Organic Search Volume: We measure the organic traffic as a percentage of overall website traffic and trend it over time. It grows upward year-over-year for all our clients.
Monitor Non-Branded vs. Branded Organic Traffic Ratio: This should rise over time. For most of our clients this ratio begins with 20/80 or 30/70 and rises all the way up to 60/40 or 70/30. Occasionally, this rises up to 80/20 and 90/10.
Measure Increases in Organic Leads, RFQ’s, e-Commerce Transactions, Downloads, Webinar Signups, etc.: This is ultimately where the rubber meets the road. These metrics should trend upwards as you invest in SEO.
Contact us if you are seeking a smart manufacturing marketing agency which can help you join the elite group of manufacturers and industrial companies growing their company’s share of mind, voice and market using our SEO services.
Remember the internet was supposed to be the great equalizer? Even though we are located in Pittsburgh, we’ve attracted and served a national and international client base because we took the time and effort to market ourselves by using SEO on ourselves. In our 25 year history, we’ve served over 250 clients most of whom found us from our Google page one rankings.
How did we serve all these clients? Over the phone with occasional travel in the early days, and recently with Goto Meeting, Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft teams. Here are the SEO services we offer to manufacturers and industrial companies:
SEO Audit Services
MEET AND EXCEED INDUSTRY BEST SEO PRACTICES
A high-performing website persuades buyers and influences search engine bots so your website is ranked on Google and Bing. Our SEO audit will assess the health of your website in twelve dimensions: site performance, URL structure, copy, keywords, user experience, conversion architecture, site coding, social signals, links, location, indexing and blog.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
PAGE 1 WINS
Location is destiny. Trusted page one organic rankings and high visibility for your social media content equate to owning the world’s hottest real estate. Elliance started offering SEO services back in 1994. We artfully orchestrate content, code, optimization and channels to deliver right-fit prospects via first page organic rankings – regionally, nationwide and in international markets.
Content Marketing
HIGH FIDELITY. BRAND-INSPIRED. KEYWORD-POWERED.
Fresh content is the lifeblood of successful rankings. However, creating great content that ranks on page one of search engines is a labor of love. It takes an investigative mind to discover brand proofs, an imaginative mind to create persuasive content, and an SEO mind that understands the workings of the Google bot to piece it all together.
Mobile and Voice Search
UNFAIR SHARE FROM TIGHT SPACES
Mobile users bring hyper-local needs and seek spontaneous solutions. Because more than half of the searches are now voice activated, mobile search requires a unique approach to content creation, site coding and submissions. Elliance search marketers secure page one rankings in these make-or-break tight spaces and nano interactions.
There is an art and science to running a SEM and paid advertising campaign for manufacturers and industrial companies. With all online advertising platforms increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence and machine learning, gone are the days of total manual adjustments and management. Talented paid marketers now deftly manage the AI, and algorithm powered ad platforms. As a digital marketing agency, we have adapted to the changes happening in the industry but the fundamentals of creating content that will resonate with our clients’ target audience remains the same.
Depending on budgets, SEM or paid advertising services include a combination of the following:
Google and Bing paid advertising including PPC and Display
Paid social advertising
Retargeting advertising
Video advertising
Trade media advertising
They operate in an ecosystem that looks something like:
Here are some best practices which we follow to run high performing, top converting paid media campaigns for all our manufacturing and industrial clients:
Start with a Smart Plan
Beginnings matter. How you start will determine where you’ll finish. Before you begin, immerse yourself and develop a meticulous plan:
Define Buyer Personas: Create personas and profiles for both tactical and strategic buyers, specifiers, influencers and purchasing teams.
Interview Rainmakers: They know the needs, motivations, behaviors and hot buttons of tactical and strategic buyers, specifiers, influencers and purchasing teams.
Complete Keyword Research: Use a combination of data-driven third party tools, past campaigns and intuition to craft the keywords that you need to claim and own. Use negative keywords to eliminate waste.
Shape Keyword Match & Bidding Strategy: Advertising platforms offer numerous types of keyword match types and bidding strategies. Leverage agency experience to begin with a sensible initial strategy.
Decide on Location Targeting: Fish where the fish are.
Develop A/B Strategy: Devise A/B tests for copy, ad creative and locations. Get ready to feed the champs and starve the chumps.
Develop a CRM Integration Plan: Make lead form integration, inquiry form testing, testing gated content pathways, e-commerce order placement an integral part of your planning process.
Devise an Analytics Integration Plan: Ensure that your Analytics package is integrated, and custom campaign dashboards are created and tested.
Define Lead Nurturing and Lead Follow-up Plans: You don’t want to waste your precious advertising budgets without outlining the lead-nurturing and follow-up plans for inquires, request for quotes, and e-commerce orders.
Create High-Impact Destination/Landing Pages
Make each destination/landing page unique. Aim to amplify brand distinctions and showcase the most salient features of products and services we are marketing. Here are the key elements that create high-impact landing pages for our clients:
Clear and Concise Argument Construction: We construct arguments with persuasion architecture using the science of influence which advocates use of reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, consensus, likability and social proof.
More Proofs & Customer Successes: Nothing persuades skeptical prospective buyers better than stories of, testimonials from and product reviews by satisfied customers.
Third-Party Credibility Enhancers: Overcome the skepticism of risk-averse buyers by prominently featuring objective third-party endorsements.
Strong Calls-to-Actions: Make it easy for buyers to take the next step by including clear call-to-action buttons. Make the call-to-action buttons sticky so they are never out of buyer’s sight.
Simplified Forms: Use simple inquiry forms with as few fields as possible so that prospective buyers don’t hesitate to provide their information. A/B test your way to optimal placement of your inquiry forms.
Destination/Landing Page A/B Testing: Test variations of headlines, copy, messaging, images, calls to action, form fields and form placement. This ensures that your destination/landing page reaches your right-fit buyers, allows you to learn from their behavior and reveals the best possible way to persuade them.
Craft High-Performance Digital Ad Creative
Knowing the client’s brand, the target audience and the goal of the campaign helps us shape a unique strategy for each client. There are several factors that we take into consideration as we develop ad creative for each client campaign:
Use Authentic Photos/Videos: As all paid marketing platforms have become more and more visual, using the right photo/video is exceedingly important for creating the right ad. The use of high-quality photos/videos also helps us develop a more authentic communications strategy.
Stand Out From the Competition With Attention-Grabbing Design: There are only three reactions to a piece of design: no, yes or WOW! Wow is one to aim for.
Write Clear and Concise Copy: Great copy is rhythmic, resonant and persuasive. Write copy that sells.
Highlight Your Uniqueness: Lean into your inherent differential.
Bake Calls-to-actions: There is no sale unless you ask for the business.
Use Consistent Messaging on All Platforms: Surround and engage your prospective buyers with consistent, stereophonic and symphonic messaging.
A/B Test Ad Creative: Try fast. Test fast. Fail fast. A/B test different sets of ads — videos, photos, copy and other creative elements — so you understand the messages that best resonate with your audiences. Feed the winners, starve the losers.
Activate Conversion Tracking
It’s vital to know which channels are converting the best. To know that:
Devise a Rational Conversion Tracking System: A more rational system will make it easy for you to know which ad channels, which ad variations, and which destination/landing page variations are performing the best. Avoid ad-hoc’ing conversion tracking.
Encode Ads with UTM Parameters: Carry them forward to the conversion point and flag conversions appropriately. A/B testing will reveal the best performing ads and channels.
Track Destination/Landing Page Performance This will enable you to identify which A/B destination/landing page variation is performing the best and where bottlenecks exist on your destination/landing pages. Act decisively once you have sufficient data.
Specifying Monetary Values to Conversions: When possible, specify monetary value to various conversions.
Test the tracking system from end-to-end to ensure it’s working as planned and there aren’t any leaky buckets.
Manage Paid Campaign & Optimizations Smartly and Judiciously
Search, Social and Media Advertising paid platforms are all powered by algorithms that maximize their own profits with little regard for a marketer’s investments. To offset the algorithm’s greedy tendency, Elliance uses sensible campaign management techniques to tune, optimize and micro-manage various aspects of the campaigns.
Budget Optimization: Managing a budget to get the most results out of your investment is an important part of running a successful paid campaign. The day-to-day optimization tactics should maximize your budget and campaign performance.
Bid Management: With AI playing a big part in paid campaigns, providing the right bidding signals to the algorithm becomes crucial to run a successful campaign. Bidding signals include bid adjustments by devices, locations, time of day, day of the week, ad type, audiences and many more. Without judicious bid management, the algorithm will always steer towards maximizing profits for the platform at your expense.
Keyword Management: Continuously update your keyword list to filter out non-relevant searches through negative keywords. This will keep the campaign on target and your ads showing to the right-fit searchers. This will also eliminate waste in your precious marketing investments.
Audience Optimization: Regularly monitoring your audience profiles and demographics to make sure you’re getting conversions from the right audience can help to keep the campaign showing to your right-fit audience. Again, to maximize return on investment, leave no stone unturned. God is indeed in the details.
Managing Algorithmic Recommendations: The advertising platforms will routinely recommend changes to your campaigns. Instead of blindly accepting these recommendations (most of which lean towards maximization of their own profitability), filter them through the lens of your strategic objectives, accepting the ones that align and discarding the ones that don’t.
Report Campaign Performance
The discipline of regular reporting keeps everyone honest and focused on the mission. Report on at least the following:
Number of leads, e-commerce orders and sign-ups all trended over time by channel. Include a discussion about their quality.
Traffic to destination/landing pages, trended over time.
Best converting geographies, devices, channels, time of the day, time of the week, and keywords for paid traffic and conversions.
Destination/landing page performance including identification of bottlenecks
Results of A/B tests for ads and destination/landing page variations.
Next steps including new A/B tests, destination/landing page adaptations, and more.
All the SEM and paid advertising efforts will amount to nothing without rapid evolution of your campaigns and effectively following-up on leads, fulfilling e-commerce orders and nurturing prospective buyers. Meet weekly, biweekly or monthly to ensure all the processes are working, and you are measuring and optimizing your strategies and tactics. At the end of 6 to 12 months, your campaign should not look anywhere close to where you started. It should be humming like a well-oiled machine.
Contact us if you are seeking a smart manufacturing marketing agency which can help you join the elite group of manufacturers growing their company’s share of mind, voice and market.
As a leading SEO Agency for colleges, universities and higher education institutions, we are frequently asked to share our best practices. This is part of a series of posts to explain how SEO audit can serve their interests.
SEO or “search engine optimization” is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on Google, Bing and other international search engines.
Institutions that pursue and achieve top organic or natural Google and Bing rankings prosper and thrive. There are good reasons for this. Organic rankings are more trusted, more clicked and out-convert paid advertising leads three-fold. Being found on page 1 is the best means for finding, getting, keeping and growing right-fit students, faculty, and staff as well as nurturing relationships with alumni, foundations corporate partners and media.
When serving higher education institutions, we begin their SEO journey by conducting a twelve-point SEO audit to assess the following:
1. Website Performance Metrics Audit We begin by testing site load speed, mobile/desktop performance, secure certificate and domain name analysis. We know that these are all Google and Bing ranking factors.
2. Website URL Structure Audit We analyze the URL structure to ensure it is rational, descriptive and hierarchical. A good URL structure will accelerate attainment of stronger rankings and simplify analysis of website performance in Google analytics.
For international search rankings, we ensure country-specific domains or or language-specific sites are being leveraged.
3. Website Copy and Content Audit Next, we analyze website copy, especially academic programs copy, to ensure it is persuasive for prospects, other stakeholders and for Google and Bing bots. We ensure it is infused with appropriate keywords and keyword derivatives.
For international search rankings, we ensure that translated copy exists in country-specific languages.
4. Keyword Audit Then we evaluate keywords on all website pages. We look for alignment between the page copy and keywords. We also look for and flag keyword stuffing, an illicit SEO technique in which keywords are loaded into a web page’s meta tags, visible content, or link anchor text in an attempt to gain an unfair ranking advantage. We are aware that at best, search engines disregard keyword stuffing and, at worst, penalize a website if it’s packed with too much, irrelevant or unrelated content.
5. User Experience Audit Since Google and Bing bots reward websites with superior user experience, information architecture and page architecture – for buyers and channel partners alike – we evaluate it carefully.
6. Conversion Architecture Audit We are aware that a college website is its #1 recruiter. Therefore we ensure that it is efficiently constructed to maximize lead generation, foster applications, and access thought-leadership content. We ensure that It also motivates its alumni, partners and community stakeholders to take the next steps.
7. SEO Coding Audit Successful websites are built with pristine HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which are instructions to browsers to determine characteristics of web page elements such as text size, position of elements on the page, etc. Furthermore, they meet ADA WCAG 2.2 standards dictate accessibility compliance for various audiences. We ensure that the university websites are constructed with best practices because Google and Bing both reward them and penalize websites that aren’t.
8. Social Signals Audit Effective websites use social sharing buttons and open-graph (OG) tags that facilitate content sharing which is a Google, Bing and international ranking factor. We ensure that they are omnipresent.
9. Internal and External Links Audit
While it’s true that internal site-links and in-bound links are the backbone of Google’s ranking algorithm, outbound links also play an important role. We ensure only highest quality links exist and itemize poor quality links for subsequent link-pruning.
10. Locations Audit
We ensure that locations signals are embedded for the geographies colleges serve.
11. Indexing Audit
We check for site indexing issues using tools like Google Search Console and validate that critical pages are all indexed.
12. Blog Audit
Since blogs are one of the most effective means of securing and lifting Google and Bing page one rankings, we audit their categories, tags and content to reveal areas of improvement.
Armed with the audit, marketers at colleges, universities and higher education institutions are ready to do the hard work of crafting a forward leaning keyword strategy.
This guide was written to help the manufacturers and industrial companies with modest marketing budgets to leverage SEO to out-smart and out-compete the deep pocketed Goliaths without outspending them. We call them small giants. As one of the leading manufacturing marketing agencies, we learned the SEO strategies and tactics presented here from serving over 150 manufacturers who were small giants in their respective categories.
What is SEO?
SEOor “search engine optimization” is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on Google, Bing and other international search engines.
Why Manufacturers and Industrial Companies are Deploying SEO?
Manufacturers that pursue and achieve top organic or natural Google and Bing rankings prosper and thrive. There are many reasons for this. A few are listed below:
Fortifying brand reputation
Attracting and retaining talent
Improving capacity utilization
Reducing sales cycles
Retaining, growing and cross-selling to existing customers
Securing new customers
Growing strategic buyers while embracing tactical buyers
Opening new markets without increasing headcount
In short, being found on page one is the best means for finding, getting, keeping and growing customers and talent.
What are SEO Ranking Factors?
SEO is a set of techniques marketers employ to improve your website rankings on Google, Bing, and other international search engines. Five types of factors affect rankings:
URL factors: Use symbolic and phrase tokens, not numbers. Use international domains for country-specific content.
On-page factors: Use meta-data and infuse keywords into copy.
Off-page factors: Secure inbound links from reputable websites to your website.
Social factors: Foster conversations and content sharing on social media.
Local factors: Embed location and country signals for your target regions.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Because rankings weaken over time and search engines reward fresh content, marketers must create a continuous stream of high quality, trusted and relevant content (such as articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, white papers, thought leadership articles, social posts, quizzes, games, etc.) and ignite it via promotion and conversation-starters to encourage peer-to-peer sharing. Thus the label SEO has evolved into SEO/inbound/content marketing.
Inbound marketing creates a hub of value and trust. As this foundation is established, the cost to build upon it naturally drops. This means a very strong ROI over time for an inbound marketing focused approach.
Metaphorically speaking, an inbound marketing strategy is simply the act of gathering combustible firewood and igniting it.
Know That SEO/Inbound/Content is a Long Game
It takes several months to achieve local and regional rankings, and a year or more to achieve national and international rankings. Manufacturing marketers who have the patience and determination to achieve Google rankings create an enduring, rising tide of rankings and are able to reduce their paid marketing spend as SEO rankings are achieved.
Paid advertising and SEO/Inbound/Content marketing are good alone, better together.
The following strategies have proven to achieve business objectives of manufacturers and industrial companies:
1. Establish a Multi-Year Attack Plan
Implementing effective SEO for industrial companies requires a solid keyword strategy has at least three elements:
The right mix of keywords focused on revenue, reputation and thought leadership goals.
The right situational analysis of your competitor keywords and their rankings. Know who’s sleeping, who’s awake, who’s ahead, who’s behind, and who’s the 800 pound gorilla.
The right time horizon to achieve local, regional, national and international rankings. Develop a plan that goes after the lowest hanging fruit first (local and regional rankings), then harder-to-achieve national rankings, and finally the hardest-to-achieve international and reputation rankings. Slow and steady wins the race.
2. Create a Keyword Lexicon
Industrial companies use third party keyword tools, comb paid advertising data, audit content archives, mine sales history data, and review market research data to develop a Keyword Guide.
When optimizing for highly-competitive terms, strategically clustering related phrases around the main keyword can cause a halo effect in the SERPs. Remember to incorporate keyword clusters. For example, for a pioneering logistics management company that wished to “own” the phrase “logistics” in addition to “logistics software”, we created several hives of keywords using a clustering strategy:
For their software division, claiming rankings for “logistics management software” keywords required the use of long-tail keyword strategy. We’ve discovered that buyers drill down from lower-converting, short, general keywords to longer, 3- or 4-word phrases that are more likely to convert a prospective buyer.
When preparing a keyword guide, ensure you include both long-tail keywords and high-traffic phrases.
Since searcher behavior has evolved from keyword era, to keyword cluster era, to natural language era and has now entered the epoch of voice search, ensure that keyword clusters, frequently asked questions, colloquialisms and “near me” keywords are all represented in your keyword selection.
Finalize the Keyword Guide into the following categories:
Product Keywords
Brand Keywords
Geographic Keywords
Decisioning Keywords
Reputation Keywords
Map some of your keywords to unique pages of your website map.
Know that prospects use different clusters of keywords at each phase of the decision funnel. e.g. they’ll use reputation keywords during the awareness phase, category keywords during the consideration phase and branded keywords during the preference/purchase phase and thought-leadership keywords during the purchase decision phase.
3. Make Your Website Responsive, Secure and Fast
Google, Bing and international search engines reward responsive websites – ones that auto-adjust gracefully on smartphones, tablets or desktops. Google also ranks websites higher that load fast and are running in secure mode.
4. Create Content for Countries of Interest
Build language-specific or country-specific microsites to target prospects from specific countries. Build microsites for large countries (e.g. China), and build language-specific websites for country clusters (Latin America).
Apply SEO best practices to the country-specific microsites for country-customized Google and Bing search engines – as well as country-specific search engines such as Baidu for Chinese, Yandex for Russia, etc.
5. Optimize for Locations and Geographies
The geo-targeting search strategy you decide to use will impact your overall SEO campaign. Embedding location signals into your website and content will help rank it in those geographies.
6. Build Quality Site Links
Link Baiting is used to get many quality inbound links pointed to your site. Through great content or some humorous hooks, create a viral marketing effect using this technique.
7. Manage Social Signals
Google, Bing and international search engine bots eavesdrop on social conversations to rank their sites. Creating share-worthy content and enabling sharing so it gets passed around is a sure way to improve your search engine rankings.
8. Create Fresh Content to Secure and Sustain Top Rankings for Important Keywords
Since Google, Bing and international search engines reward websites with fresh content, develop a content strategy to create buckets of new content (microsites, blogs, magazines, etc.) for various parts of the sales funnel. Inform all content with the Keyword Lexicon.
Create and publish unique content as follows:
Understand prospective buyers and buyer behavior
Interview subject matter experts (SME’s) and industry experts to create thought leadership content and white papers
Conduct original research with fresh insights to secure your position as an industry leader
Interview process team members to create educational and how-to content for various use cases
Interview loyal customers to create customer interviews and case studies
Create premium content tailored for specific customer segments
Education content for tactical buyers
Thought leadership content for strategic buyers
Story or cause-related content for building brand reputation
Newsjacking content to tie the brand with current issues
Fresh content may take several forms.
The more competitive a keyword, the more high-fidelity the content (infographics, videos, quizzes, etc.) you’ll have to create to secure and sustain page 1 rankings.
Now you need to develop a plan for international content and future content.
9. Implement On-page and On-site Factors
When it comes to SEO, there are certain elements that need to be in place for all manufacturing websites. Are your 301 redirects in place? Is the robots.txt file authored to allow adequate crawling? Is your XML sitemap ready for search engine crawlers? This infographic depicts a handy checklist that will help get you through any implementation of SEO for manufacturing companies.
10. Measure Impact of SEO Efforts & ROI
Evaluate snapshots and trends for the following metrics:
Percentage of traffic from search engines (ought to be 60-70%)
Percentage of inquiries, visits and applications attributable to organic search (organic out-performs paid by 3X)
Brand visibility on search engines (should trend upwards)
Branded vs. non-branded traffic (a healthy ratio is 40/60 but 30/70 is preferable)
To quantify the SEO return-on-investment, connect the dots between SEO efforts and conversions, deploy marketing automation software like HubSpot or Pardot.
In serving over 150 manufacturers and industrial companies, we have not found a more dependable and reliable way to ensure predictable revenue growth than securing Google page one rankings for products and services, thought leadership, and brand ideals. The prospect buyers who convert by “discovering” the manufacturing company on Google are relational, and go on to become brand ambassadors and long-term donors.
If you are an industrial marketer, contact us if you are seeking a smart manufacturing marketing agency which can help you join the elite group of manufacturers growing their company’s share of mind, voice and market.
UNC Charlotte is North Carolina’s urban research university that transforms individuals, communities and industries through access to affordable education at undergraduate, graduate and professional levels.
They reached out to Elliance needing help with redesigning the academics section of their website and increasing visibility for their institution in North Carolina.
Website Redesign Strategy: Academics & College Pages
We redesigned their top level academic pages with two goals: to give a full-throated articulation of their institutional might and to infuse keywords so UNC Charlotte would get ranked on Google page 1 across the state of North Carolina. We achieved both.
Here is a glimpse of the redesigned academics page:
UNC Charlotte is the fastest growing and third largest university in North Carolina. The Academics page became the place to show off the seven colleges, their strengths and offerings, which include 171 majors, 65 master’s degrees and 24 doctoral degrees.
Each of the college pages was redesigned to showcase the strength of the college highlighting accreditation, degrees offered, location benefits, career growth potential, employment opportunities, and distinctions. All of which are potential factors that each student will consider in order to make a college decision.
We also highlighted third party proof points to showcase the credibility of the institution.
Here is a glimpse of the redesigned college pages:
Website SEO Strategy: Academics and College Pages
Once these pages were redesigned our next task was to bake in SEO thinking in the page structure, copy and coding.
One of the main challenges the client wanted to address was to allow the college pages to rank for any programmatic keywords being searched for in North Carolina. Ultimately, the goal was to get more traffic to the academic section of the website.
Before the website pages were redesigned we did a keyword benchmark to see where these pages were ranking on Google search results. No surprise but we didn’t find them ranking in the top 10 pages on Google.
Once the new academic and college pages went live, they received more than 100 page 1 rankings and more than 100 page 2 rankings. The organic traffic percentage to these pages grew to almost double the percentage of the organic traffic coming to the overall website.
Here are some screenshots of where the new college pages are ranking currently:
