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:
This SEO guide was written to help under-resourced, small to medium colleges, universities and higher education institutions who can’t compete in the marketing arms race and therefore need to out-wit and out-smart the deep-pocketed Goliaths. We call them small giants. As one of the leading higher education marketing SEO agencies, we learned the strategies and tactics presented here from serving numerous small giants of higher education. We salute them.
What is SEO?
SEO or “search engine optimization” is a set of techniques higher education marketers deploy to improve their institutions’s natural or organic website rankings on Google, Bing and other international search engines.
Why Colleges and Universities Embrace Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Colleges and universities that pursue and achieve top organic or natural Google rankings prosper and thrive. There are many reasons for this. A few are listed below:
Prospective audiences trust organic rankings more and click on them more.
Leads generated from organic rankings out-convert paid advertising leads three-fold.
The best prospective students prefer to “discover” the college of their choice through “accidental finds” on Google page one and via word-of-mouth on social media and influencers.
Universities grow enrollment, improve yield, and reduce melt with organic rankings.
Colleges raise more money by securing thought leadership rankings on search engines.
Higher education institutions ranked higher on search engines gain higher rankings with agencies like the US News, Financial Times, Business Week and others.
Colleges ranked higher on search engines secure more partnerships with foundations, and more relationships with more major donors.
In summary, 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.
What are SEO Ranking Factors?
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.
Because Google rewards 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.
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. Higher education 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 grow undergraduate, graduate, online, adult and international student enrollment:
1. Establish a Multi-Year Attack Plan
Take the long view. 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
Craft a Keyword Lexicon that contains clusters of keywords and phrases spanning your academic programs, brand ideals, and areas of thought leadership, innovation and intellectual capital. Laying claim to the keywords begins with an intentional plan. Categories in the lexicon should include academic program keywords, brand positioning keywords, reputation keywords, decisioning keywords, and location keywords.
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.
3. Make Your Website Responsive, Secure and Fast
Google rewards responsive websites – ones that auto-adjust gracefully on smartphones, tablets or desktops. Google also ranks higher websites that load fast and are running in secure mode.
4. Build Quality Site Links
Use link baiting to secure quality inbound links pointing back to your website. Create and leverage great thought leadership content and jointly promote it with partners.
5. Infuse SEO into All Existing Digital Assets
Embed SEO smarts, tactics and strategies into the architecture, design, copy and programming of your prospecting, research, university magazine, centers of excellence and corporate relations websites.
Because Google serves up a mix of copy, images, videos, maps and tabular data on a search results page, make sure you optimize copy, images, videos, PDF’s, tables, links, and meta-data on every website page. Search engine bots also review assets on social media channels, so ensure these assets are also optimized.
6. Create Fresh Content to Secure and Sustain Top Rankings for Important Keywords
Because Google rewards websites with fresh content, develop a content strategy to create new content (microsites, blogs, magazine articles, etc.) for various parts of the decision funnel. Inform all content with the Keyword Lexicon.
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.
7. Embrace Voice Search
We have entered a new era of “natural language”, “sentence based” and “question based” search with the advent of voice-activated search on mobile phones (like Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa) and gadgets like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and others. Since 50% of searches are now voice driven, take the following steps:
Get responsive. Speed it up. If your college website isn’t responsive yet (i.e. auto-adjusts gracefully to all devices), make it responsive, ensuring it’s fast, fully SEO-optimized and running in secure mode.
Write colloquially. Since people won’t change their speaking habits for the computer, write new content using everyday vernacular.
Write page summaries. Write short, persuasive, 29-word page summaries above the screen fold on long-form pages. These summaries act as pop-up snippets served up by voice searches on mobile devices and home gadgets; they also appear as answer boxes on desktop search results.
Build social shares. Run social share campaigns because the more shared the page is on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and other social channels, the more likely it’ll surface on voice search.
Think globally. Act locally. Since more than 20% of searches are local, add phrases such as ‘near me’ into your copy, especially if your college is a local or regional brand.
Rank high on desktop and mobile search. It’ll automatically increase the chances of your website ranking high on voice search.
8. Monitor and Protect Keyword Rankings
Measure keyword rankings and competitors periodically. Respond to encroachment with counter-moves on an as-needed basis.
9. Measure Impact of SEO Efforts
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)
10. Measure ROI with Marketing Automation Software
To quantify the SEO return-on-investment, connecting the dots between SEO efforts and conversions, deploy marketing automation software like HubSpot or Pardot.
In serving over 100 colleges and universities, 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, thought leadership, and brand ideals. The students who enroll by “discovering” the college on Google are relational, and go on to become brand ambassadors and long-term donors.
Done well, these steps grow student recruitment, reassure parents, engage lifelong learners and invite working professionals to up-skill and become more prosperous.
Today, more than any other touch point, a website is the digital soul of a manufacturing organization. All roads lead to it. As one of the leading manufacturing website design and experience design agencies, Elliance has been delivering prosperity with websites for regional, national and global manufacturers for the past 30 years. If we had to distill the sentiments of customers using websites of successful manufacturers, it would boil down to three simple statements: It’s easy to use; I like using it; and I trust it.
Our arsenal of best practices for manufacturing website design and redesign includes:
1. Begin with the End in Mind: What Business Problem are you Trying to Solve?
Listed below are nine revenue, reputation and ranking challenges that your website should be able to help you solve:
Secure new buyers
Open new markets without increasing headcount
Retain, grow and cross-sell to existing customers
Grow strategic buyers while embracing tactical buyers
Improve capacity utilization
Reduce sales cycle
Fortify brand reputation
Attract and retain talent
Dominate Google/Bing page one
Above all, defend your core business while liberating new prosperity.
2. Make it Beautiful and Engineer it with Precision
Strategy is invisible. Good design makes it visible. Milton Glaser, the iconic designer, once said “There are only three reactions to a piece of design: no, yes or WOW! Wow is one to aim for.” We couldn’t agree more. Create a beautiful website with contemporary aesthetics. Refresh it every three to five years so it reflects the most current aesthetic.
Engineers love precision. The website design should not only be professional, but it must convey balance, precision and trust.
3. Keep it Human and Convey Expertise
Great manufacturers always remember that prospects, buyers, users, ambassadors and loyalists are real people, with real needs, wants, motivations and ambitions. They never forget that they are in the business of making the lives of their customers easier and helping them realize their ambitions. Be empathetic. Treat customers like human beings. Keep your website experience human.
At the same time, convey expertise, reliability and quality.
3. Make it Mobile-First, Desktop-Friendly & Responsive
Given that more than half of website traffic now comes from mobile devices, build a responsive site that is mobile first. Ensure that third party embeds such as forms, apps and videos are equally mobile-friendly.
The other half of your website users are experiencing it on laptops and desktops. Make sure it scales gracefully on computers with varying screen sizes.
Most importantly, build a responsive website i.e. a single website that automatically adjusts to various viewing devices. This is mission-critical because it’ll influence the Google bot to rank your website higher on search engines.
4. Delight Prospects and Buyers. Make it Useful and Easy-to-use.
You can’t bore people into buying from you. Create a user experience that is persuasive, delightful and conversion-friendly. Recognize that customers, not your company, are the real heroes of the story. Make sure that the needs of the right-fit customers come first. Infuse persuasion architecture at every level. Make it easy for buyers to do business with you.
Here are some smart features worth providing for your smart engineering-minded buyers:
Product catalog and services – as a quick reference to your offerings
Custom solutions – to facilitate higher-margin, complex sales
Project galleries – to showcase your solutions in action
Markets served – to reduce their risk of buying from you
Customer stories, testimonials and third-party validations – to reduce their risk of buying from you
Auto-complete site search – to give quickest path to your products and services
Faceted search – to show depth and breadth of product (and service) offerings
Configurators – to engage your buyers
Resource center – to provide convenient access to all your brochures and spec sheets
Blog – to convey product and thought leadership
Customer portal – to enable customers to find answers to routine questions about their past purchase history, warrantees, add-ons, and a whole lot more
Multi-language support – to facilitate international and multilingual buyers
5. Make it Google/Bing Friendly
If people can’t find you — your company, your products, and your services — they can’t buy you. Google/Bing page 1 is destiny. 90% of users never go beyond page 1 of search results. Organic rankings (i.e. the top 10 natural search results) are clicked more, trusted more, and convert three-folds better than paid ads.
Begin a website project with a Keyword Lexicon that contains clusters of keywords and phrases spanning your products and services, plus areas of thought leadership, innovation and intellectual capital.
Bake SEO thinking into every phase of website development: strategy, architecture, copy, design and development. Create buckets for fresh content (blogs, magazines, news, feeds, etc.) which Google/Bing will reward with stronger rankings.
Apply the website SEO checklist. Write distinct, SEO-friendly page titles. Activate a Robots.txt file. Generate and submit a search engine XML sitemap file. Enable and use the 404 error handling page. Create a sitemap page. Map 301 redirects.
7. Power With Smart CMS Technology
Depending on website requirements, the size of your organization, your need for flexibility and internationalization, availability of in-house technology talent and budgets, you must pick a proprietary, open source or commercial grade CMS that best suits your needs. Ensure it is thoroughly SEO-friendly and plays well with other software components such as analytics, marketing automation software, CRM software, tracking tools, and more.
8. Host it Right
Because websites are mission-critical, people are impatient and Google penalizes slow websites with lower rankings, hosting matters a lot. Ensure your website is hosted securely on a high-speed Tier-1 environment with weekly software and security patches.
9. Sustain With a Content Governance Framework
Because content is the lifeblood of great websites, brands and Google rankings, three things are needed to manage a healthy content ecosystem: people, processes and frameworks. Key components of a content ecosystem include a Keyword Lexicon, Brand Guide, Web Style Guide, and Content Governance Guide. These must be managed periodically, rationally and systematically. They must cultivate the content habit.
10. Measure Website Effectiveness and ROI
Upstream ROI metrics include growth in demand, achievement of thought leadership, and increase in brand value. Keep an eye on downstream metrics also such as bounce rates, conversion rates, time on site, growth in organic traffic, content popularity, expansion in reach, and more. Establish regular meetings to measure ROI.
Over the past 30 years, we have built over 500 websites. We’ve seen website projects become catalysts for organizational transformation. We’ve used deft diplomacy to align internal stakeholders. We’ve brought strategic smarts to create new inflection points helping clients realize their organizational destiny. Every website redesign energized the entire organization. If you choose to work with us, expect nothing less.
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 with great websites.
The Elliance higher education marketing practice has grown enrollment, endowment and reputation for over 100 colleges and universities including 10 medical schools and healthcare institutions in all 4 major medical traditions o western medicine.
Included below are a few samples of our agency work we have enjoyed delivering for each medical tradition:
O S T E O P A T H I C M E D I C I N E
Transforming Lives. Transforming Generations.
University of the Incarnate Word (UIW), a leading Hispanic-serving institution, owes its existence to the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, a congregation from France that responded to urgent public health and education needs in South Texas following the U.S. Civil War.
San Antonio and South Texas face severe shortages of culturally competent health professionals — primary care doctors, optometrists, pharmacists, physical therapists and nurses. That shortage, along with entrenched socioeconomic disadvantages, combine to produce a 20-year life span discrepancy between wealthy and poor San Antonio zip codes. UIW seeks to fill the talent gaps through its five health professions schools, and to draw national and global financial support to further education and clinical outreach.
With a new president at the helm and an energized cabinet, UIW wanted to transition from a decade-long expansion agenda to a deeper set of commitments — to students, partners and the communities it served, in the United States and across the border in Mexico.
UIW partnered with Elliance to rebrand and reposition the institution. One-on-one interviews with core faculty revealed a strong but largely unfulfilled desire to return to core mission principles — particularly the celebration and defense of human dignity. First, we developed a new brand, brand position and voice that united disparate audiences and reconnected them to their 150-year-old mission. Next, we developed a coherent design system to redesign the institutional and five new health profession school websites. These sites help UIW recruit prospective students, galvanize alumni and major gift donors, and serve patients through a variety of clinics and community outreach programs.
This is how Elliance summed up UIW’s reason for being: The University of the Incarnate Word is preparing a new generation of health professionals. Beyond state-of-the-art training and facilities for osteopathic medicine, optometry, pharmacy, physical therapy and nursing, they offer a different kind of invitation and welcome. For only when students learn to speak the kind word, and be fully present in the communities they serve, can they manifest the gift of healing for those in need.
After the website launch, all health profession schools are enjoying a healthy growth. The fiercely competitive School of Osteopathic Medicine enrollment is growing by 20% with incoming students with ever higher MCAT scores and science GPA scores. The rebranding and website efforts facilitated securing the largest academic gift in UIW’s history.
A L L O P A T H I C M E D I C I N E
Person to Person (P2P)
Our work with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine aimed to improve second-look yield, especially among older, non-traditional prospects open to the call to be part of a “different school of medicine.”
New digital and print collateral underscored the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s commitment — to be unwavering in attention and care to the healing of patients and the development of medical students.
While research and technology remained a vital part of the story, the remarkable advances in modern medical science did not erase a larger truth — we’ve really only just begun to understand the human body and the human person within.
After the launch of the P2P initiative, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine began shaping the incoming classes with game-changing cohorts of integrative, human-centered and community-minded medical students.
Sometimes it really is brain surgery
Our work for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center department of minimally invasive neurosurgery recognizes the pioneering advances that offer hope to patients with complex brain and spine disorders, without overlooking the lives involved.
Equalizing this emotional-rational dynamic when communicating to patients and families in a heightened state of urgency requires a nuanced touch.
At the brand level, Elliance balanced the gravitas of the UPMC institutional brand identity/authority, with the personality-driven character of the surgical team.
At the design level, the balance required merging visually dominant animation sequences, with complementary candid photography. At the content level, we struck a balance between the medical data and emotional patient profiles.
Within the first month after launch, Google page one rankings, site traffic, and physician referrals increased significantly — powered by SEO tagging of 200+ conditions and surgical approaches. UPMC officials have described the site as “setting a new standard” for one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers.
C H I R O P R A C T I C M E D I C I N E
Winning prospects and patients together
Our work for New York Chiropractic College, recently renamed to Northeast College of Health Sciences, sought to elevate both a non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical response to a national pain crisis, and attract a high-quality and more mature group of prospects for a three-year professional degree.
Elliance established a brand position, Pursue Perfect Form, that spoke simultaneously — with some inflection — to patients, prospective students and the larger profession.
Pursue Perfect Form, as a brand line, set out to inspire prospective chiropractors and also affirm the care needs and primacy of the patient. It challenges chiropractors to come down from any assumed authority and meet patients on their terms — restoring trust and agency as the bedrock of conservative care.
Far more than chasing ideals, Pursue Perfect Form reminds chiropractors that they treat people across ages and stages, and address a whole life, not a binary (perfect/imperfect) body.
The rebranding and website redesign efforts led to breaking the college’s historic enrollment ceiling by 40%.
N A T U R O P A T H I C M E D I C I N E
Reclaiming agency
Our work for Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine & Health Sciences (SCNM), recently renamed to Sonoran University of Health Sciences, brought a new level of science and evidence to the case for preventative natural medicine, and began to anticipate a future where NDs, MDs, and ODs find complementary roles that always benefit the patient.
When SCNM talks about patients taking responsibility for their own health, about nutrition and lifestyle as medicine, about doctors as facilitators and about the body’s own potential for self-healing, they’re suggesting a return of agency to the individual patient.
In a health care world of persistent uncertainty about costs, insurance and access to care, SCNM recognizes that individual doctors — of all kinds — are also asking how they regain a sense of agency and preserve their own professional well-being.
To speak of this reclamation of agency plainly and simply, SCNM tries to guide naturopathic medicine into the full light of examination, transparency and acceptance. The potential of each medical relationship — across a spectrum of care — should lead to the best possible patient outcomes.
And those patients and stories are simply inspiring. They heal with adoption of whole food plant based diet, regular exercise and breathing exercise regimen. They heal with acupuncture. They heal with homeopathic medicine. They heal with pharmacotherapies. They heal with varieties of naturopathic therapeutics.
Beginnings matter. How you start will determine where you’ll finish. Experience tells us that great beginnings matter for these reasons:
a clear purpose calms the winds of change
seeing (our future) becomes believing
strong messages invite loyalists
trust takes root
Most Schools of Medicine feel competitive pressure from two sides — with the entrenched elite top schools attracting game-changing private donations, and ambitious emergent schools aggressively pursuing prospective students.
As the trend line in medical school applications rises and falls, and as the makeup of future classes moves decisively toward more female and far more diverse applicants, the level of integration required between strategic planning and strategic communication becomes more crucial, and the potential rewards greater.
Your claim to greatness can come on many fronts — research, global reach, intellectual capital, and clinical partnerships. These can provide a solid bedrock for a more assertive reach and push across the digital ecosystem. Only by claiming this will the School of Medicine secure the share of message, mind and market needed to distinguish its next hundred years.
The number and variety of decisions, opportunities and challenges that come with assuming leadership of a major medical school require a steady hand. Below, we’ve put together 10 strategic considerations for your first 100 days to help you navigate from analysis to synthesis.
1. Strategic Planning
What mix of analytical insights, high-level metrics, broad directional focus and emotion-stirring goals (ambitions) will galvanize faculty, partners and prospects — and tap unrealized energies and potential within the School of Medicine?
2. Brand
How do we mature our understanding of and grow our aptitude with brand — visual and voice — so that internal teams can communicate with both broad and fine brush strokes, and inspire the School of Medicine community to act more as one, bound by a newfound sense of shared purpose?
3. Reputation
How do we empower the School of Medicine teams — communications, development, alumni, recruitment, corporate/government relations — to transcend outdated silo thinking and embrace the integrated nature of reputation-building in the age of digital channels and content?
4. Enrollment
How do we look beyond broad measures — school and program enrollment trends — and arrive at a more granular and precise assessment of our ability to achieve predictable and reliable enrollments for the School of Medicine? How do we attract and shape a robust class of motivated and diverse students? How do we respond to demographic trends that’ll impact future enrollments?
5. Research/Content/Publishing
How do we bring a “content is destiny” perspective to the School of Medicine, and turn all publishing — academic, research, alumni, public — into a reputation-building, Google-dominating, cooperative enterprise that powers enrollment, reputation and fundraising? How do we learn to curate for ubiquity — rather than publishing in silos?
6. Institutional Collaboration
How do we position the School of Medicine within the larger University system? How do we tap into the potential for current undergraduates and graduate students to bring awareness to their networks, including many potential future medical students?
7. Program Development
How do we bring a greater understanding of Generation Z’s wants, needs, and expectations to the School of Medicine’s academic, student support, global study, clinical and community engagement programs? What programs drive brand, revenue, reputation — and in what proportions? What opportunities exist for corporate partners and donors to coalesce around signature program (capital-building) initiatives?
8. Medicine, Data and Technology
How do we better position the School of Medicine within a larger conversation about the integrated nature of medicine, data, and emerging technologies (machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, engineering)? How do we better communicate with prospective medical students who currently see their aptitudes, interests and career trajectory on the periphery of the life sciences?
9. Donor Relations
How do we build a culture of shared beliefs and purpose across the School of Medicine (advisory boards, key corporate partners, alumni leaders and emerging stakeholders)? How do we balance annual and long-term fund-raising priorities? Can we inspire others to create next-generation alumni activities and constituent relations programs, and train the School of Medicine thought leaders and more visible/influential representatives?
10. Legacy
While it takes considerable confidence and charisma to succeed as the Dean of a medical school, ultimately the qualities of humility and curiosity become the defining features of the most effective leaders. How do I lead and communicate so that others join me in the greater ambition of building something larger and more lasting than ourselves? How do we come together so that attention shines not on ourselves, but on what we create and contribute?
As a leading SEO Agency for manufacturing and industrial companies, we are frequently asked to share our best practices. This is part 2 of a series of posts to explain how SEO works for manufacturing companies.
SEO or “search engine optimization” is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on Google, Bing and other international search engines.
Manufacturers 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 one is the best means for finding, getting, keeping and growing customers and talent.
Smart marketers at leading manufacturing companies begin their SEO journey by conducting a twelve-point SEO audit to assess the following:
1. Website Performance Metrics Audit They begin by testing site load speed, mobile/desktop performance, secure certificate and domain name analysis. They know that these are all Google and Bing ranking factors.
2. Website URL Structure Audit Leading manufacturing company marketers ensure that the URL structure 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, they ensure country-specific domains or or language-specific sites are being leveraged.
3. Website Copy and Content Audit The successful industrial companies know that the website copy must persuade prospective buyers, reassure current customers and inform/influence Google and Bing bots. It must also be infused with appropriate keywords and keyword derivatives.
For international search rankings, they ensure that translated copy exists in country-specific languages.
4. Keyword Audit The premier manufacturing company marketers evaluate keywords on all website pages. They detect 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. They 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 Chief manufacturing company marketers are aware that Google and Bing bots reward websites with superior user experience, information architecture and page architecture – for buyers and channel partners alike. They evaluate it carefully.
6. Conversion Architecture Audit The principal industrial companies are aware that if a website is a manufacturer’s #1 salesperson, it must be efficiently constructed to maximize lead and e-commerce order generation, signing up for newsletters and webinars, accessing thought-leadership content behind registration walls. And if the website is a manufacturer’s service extension, it must efficiently steer customers to after-sales service and knowledge base portals. It must also serve all channel partners with efficiency and grace.
7. SEO Coding Audit The manufacturing company marketing leaders know that websites are built with 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, ADA WCAG 2.1 standards dictate accessibility compliance for various audiences. They know that websites must be constructed with best practices because Google and Bing both reward them and penalize websites that don’t.
8. Social Signals Audit The chief manufacturing company marketers know that presence of social sharing buttons and open-graph (OG) tags facilitates content sharing which is a Google, Bing and international ranking factor. They ensure that they are present.
9. Internal and External Links Audit
The smart industrial company marketers know that 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. They ensure only highest quality links exist and itemize poor quality links for subsequent link-pruning.
10. Locations Audit
Smart manufacturing companies serving certain geographies embed locations signals for those geographies into its website copy.
11. Indexing Audit
Successful manufacturers check for site indexing issues using tools like Google Search Console and verify that critical pages are all indexed.
12. Blog Audit
The effective manufacturing company marketers are aware that blogs are one of the most effective means of securing and lifting Google and Bing page one rankings. They audit its categories, tags and content to reveal areas of improvement.
Armed with the audit, marketers at manufacturing companies are ready to do the hard work of crafting a keyword strategy.
If you are a busy manufacturing company marketer seeking a smart manufacturing marketing agency which can offload your work and help you join the elite group of manufacturers growing their company’s share of mind, voice and market, please contact us.
As a leading manufacturing SEO agency, we are frequently asked to share our best practices. This is part 1 of a series of posts to explain how SEO works for manufacturers.
SEO or “search engine optimization” is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on Google, Bing and other international search engines.
Manufacturers that pursue and achieve top organic or natural Google and Bing rankings prosper and thrive. There is a good reason for this. Organic rankings are more trusted, more clicked and out-convert paid advertising leads three-fold.
Creating an effective manufacturing SEO strategy requires research, planning, and ongoing refinement. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you develop a robust manufacturing SEO strategy:
First, shape your SEO strategy around your goals
For an industrial company, a solid keyword strategy has at least three elements:
The right mix of keywords focused around your 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.
The right keywords that span the entire decision funnel. 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.
Next, conduct keyword research
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 buckets:
Product Keywords
Brand Keywords
Geographic Keywords
Decisioning Keywords
Reputation Keywords
Map some of your keywords to unique pages of your website map.
Develop a website optimization plan
Develop a plan of action to update your meta-tags, site copy and site links to perfection. Ensure the content experience remains hierarchical, rational and persuasive.
Now create a content plan for countries of interest
Develop a plan for creating language-specific or country-specific microsites to target prospects from specific countries. Develop microsites for large countries (e.g. China), and build language-specific websites for country clusters (Latin America).
Plan on applying 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 China, Yandex for Russia, etc.
Lastly, create a plan for creating fresh inbound content
Because Google’s algorithm rewards fresh content, creating high-fidelity fresh content is another crucial leg of inbound/content marketers that helps manufacturers “get found” via search engines, word-of-mouth and the sharing of content. Inbound marketing involves the continuous creation of relevant and high quality content, such as PR2.0 assets, articles, social posts, blog posts, videos, infographics, white papers and thought leadership events, and igniting that content through promotion and conversation-starters to encourage peer-to-peer sharing.
Your content plan should carefully curate it and distribute it through channels you control (your “owned” media, such as your website and social networks) and the channels you don’t control (the social media of people/organizations in your network), where your content strategists should spark conversations. Carefully managing the content you own allows you to influence the content you “earn” and reputation you build. Search engine rankings and social connections (“likes,” “shares,” etc.) are among the most trusted endorsements online today. Managing your content and your interactions carefully allows you to maximize your success in SEO and the social world. Finally, advanced analytic approaches allow you to improve your understanding of the content and communications your prospects value.
Create an editorial calendar for fresh inbound content with the following buckets:
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
Map a cluster of keywords to the new content you create.
You are now ready to implement this SEO Strategy. Begin.
I hope you found this guide helpful. 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.
Investing in SEO for manufacturers and industrial companies generates more qualified leads, opens new markets and liberates new revenue. 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. To paraphrase Guy Kawasaki, if you have more money than brains, you should focus on paid advertising, but if you have more brains than money, you should focus on SEO marketing. As one of the leading manufacturing marketing agencies, we learned the strategies and tactics presented here from serving numerous manufacturers who were small giants in their respective categories. We thrive on seeing them prosper and we celebrate their success.
Table of Contents:
I. SEO Basics for Manufacturers
What is SEO?
What are SEO Ranking Factors?
What is Inbound Marketing?
Know That SEO/Inbound/Content is a Long Game
II. Eight Reasons Why Manufacturing and Industrial Marketers Are Deploying SEO
III. The 3 R’s of Manufacturing Prosperity
Revenue
Reputation
Rankings
IV. Ten Elements of an SEO Audit
V. Formulating a Keyword Strategy for Industrial Companies
Shape Your SEO Strategy
Conduct Keyword Research
Create Fresh Inbound Content Strategy
VI. SEO Implementation Guidelines and Tips for Manufacturing Companies
Implement On-Page Factors
Make Your Website Responsive, Secure and Fast
Build Quality Inbound Links
Manage Social Signals
Optimize for Locations and Geographies
Create Fresh Content to Secure and Sustain Top Rankings for Important Keywords
VII. Monitoring of Keywords and SEO Performance for Manufacturers
VIII. Adapt to Changes in SEO Algorithms
I. SEO Basics for Manufacturers
What is SEO?
SEOor “search engine optimization” is the process of improving your website rankings and visibility on Google, Bing and other international search engines.
Manufacturers that pursue and achieve top organic or natural Google and Bing rankings prosper and thrive. There is a good reason for this. Organic rankings are more trusted, more clicked and out-convert paid advertising leads three-fold. The best prospective buyers prefer to “discover” the manufacturers of their choice through “accidental finds” on Google and Bing page one and via word-of-mouth on social media and influencers.
What are SEO Ranking Factors?
Five factors affect search engine 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.
II. Eight Reasons Why Manufacturing and Industrial Marketers are Deploying SEO
In serving more than one hundred manufacturers in our thirty year history, we have helped our clients overcome the following eight business challenges with SEO.
Fortifying Brand Reputation
Branding allows manufacturers to charge a premium and for financial markets to value them higher. Smart manufacturers infuse the brand in every touch point and optimize each digital asset for Google rankings. They project thought-leadership and communicate their environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards and corporate social responsibility (CSR) credentials.
Attracting and Retaining Talent
All manufacturers are challenged by a national talent shortage to fill the new jobs they’re creating. Instead of relying on tired, old ways, smart manufacturing marketers are engaged in Recruitment 3.0 which demands a better digital strategy that grabs the attention of the most talented people out there. One that doesn’t commoditize businesses by constantly putting them side by side with everybody else looking to fill seemingly look-alike roles. One that articulates and celebrates the company’s values to match the needs of values-based Gen-Z and Millennials. One that SEO-optimizes each job in the careers and job listing pages so it can surface on Google page one.
Improving Capacity Utilization
Capacity utilization is one of the underpinnings of manufacturers that is maximized with predictable demand generation. SEO liberates new business better than any other marketing tactic.
Reducing Sales Cycle
Even though manufacturers know that their buyers make decisions based on their budgetary cycles, they invest in streamlining and trimming the buying cycle by educating tactical buyers and reassuring prospective buyers with thought leadership content.
Retaining, Growing and Cross-Selling to Existing Customers
Because it takes up to five times more resources to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, successful manufacturers project thought leadership and confirmation to buyers of past purchase decisions.
Securing New Customers
By dominating national and international search engines and social media, manufacturers secure:
new customers from global markets
new customers who are not aware of the company
new customers seeking second source suppliers
new customers disappointed by a bad experience with competitive suppliers
Growing Strategic Buyers. Embracing Tactical Buyers. Manufacturers attract and convert high-margin strategic buyers with thought leadership content; in tandem, they convert tactical and transitional buyers with educational content.
Opening New Markets without Increasing Headcount
Smart manufacturers open new markets by securing top search engine rankings, growing their international presence in global markets, and being discovered by strategic partners in new markets.
In short, Google/Bing page one rankings are the best means for finding, getting, keeping and growing customers and talent.
III. The 3 R’s of Manufacturing Prosperity: Revenue, Reputation and Rankings
The primary goal of manufacturing marketing is to grow rankings, reputation and revenue for manufacturers. Even though most manufacturers are investing between 2% to 5% of their revenue on marketing, the most aggressive manufacturers are investing close to 10% of their revenue on marketing. Of course not all of the marketing budget is allocated for SEO marketing, but between 30% to 50% goes towards this all-important tactic.
1. Revenue Amongst manufacturers, revenue can flow from three primary sources: direct sales; distributor, resellers and agent sales; and OEM’s. Revenue can also come from various market segments.
SEO marketers deploy a unique set of strategies to liberate sales from one or more of these channels and segments. While the existing products generate a lion share of revenue, new products are launched and routinely added into the product mix.
2. Reputation All great manufacturing marketers engage in branding to position their companies as suppliers of consequence. They curate, orchestrate and elevate their content strategy to deftly manage their corporate destiny with stories, case studies, videos and infographics on websites and social media channels. They maximize their content productivity and amplify their thought leadership with SEO Keyword Lexicons and best search engine optimization practices. They widen their content reach beyond their customers to new customers and influencers. They carefully manage their reputation within the communities they operate in.
3. Rankings Successful manufacturers understand that they must influence the twin third party and Google (plus Bing and more) rankings. They understand the factors that weigh into each ranking and proactively influence those factors with talented team members and agency partners.
IV. Ten Elements of an SEO Audit
To begin the SEO journey, smart manufacturers conduct an SEO audit to assess the following:
1. Website Performance Metrics Audit Begin by testing site load speed, mobile/desktop performance, secure certificate and domain name analysis. These are all Google and Bing ranking factors.
2. Website URL Structure Audit 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, ensure country-specific domains are being leveraged.
3. Website Copy and Content Audit Optimizing website copy and incorporating relevant keywords is a fundamental aspect of successful SEO for manufacturers. The website copy must persuade prospective buyers, reassure current customers and inform/influence Google and Bing bots. It must also be infused with appropriate keywords and keyword derivatives.
For international search rankings, ensure translated copy exists in country-specific languages.
4. Keyword Audit Evaluate keywords on all website pages. Detect 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. At best, search engines disregard them and, at worst, penalize a website if it’s packed with too much, irrelevant or unrelated content.
5. User Experience Audit Google and Bing bots reward websites with superior user experience, information architecture and page architecture – for buyers and channel partners alike. Evaluate it carefully.
6. Conversion Architecture Audit If a website is a manufacturer’s #1 salesperson, it must be efficiently constructed to maximize lead and e-commerce order generation, signing up for newsletters and webinars, accessing thought-leadership content behind registration walls. And if the website is a manufacturer’s service extension, it must efficiently steer customers to after-sales service and knowledge base portals. It must also serve all channel partners with efficiency and grace.
7. SEO Coding Audit Websites are built with 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, ADA WCAG 2.1 standards dictate accessibility compliance for various audiences. Websites must be constructed with best practices because Google and Bing both reward them and penalize websites that don’t.
8. Social Signals Audit Presence of social sharing buttons and open-graph (OG) tags facilitate content sharing which is a Google, Bing and international ranking factor. Ensure they are present.
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. Ensure only highest quality links exist and itemize poor quality links for subsequent link-pruning.
10. Blog Audit
Blogs are one of the most effective means of securing and lifting Google and Bing page one rankings. An audit of its categories, tags and content audit will reveal areas of improvement.
Armed with the audit, the industrial marketer is ready to do the hard work of crafting a keyword strategy.
V. Formulating a Keyword Strategy for Industrial Companies
First, shape your SEO strategy around your goals
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. Begin by choosing the right set of keywords from the get-go.
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.
The right keywords that span the entire decision funnel. 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.
Next, conduct keyword research
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 buckets:
Product Keywords
Brand Keywords
Geographic Keywords
Decisioning Keywords
Reputation Keywords
Map some of your keywords to unique pages of your website map.
Now you need to develop a plan for international content and future content.
Then 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.
Lastly, create a fresh inbound content strategy
Because Google’s algorithm rewards fresh content, creating high-fidelity fresh content is the third crucial leg of inbound/content marketers that helps manufacturers “get found” via search engines, word-of-mouth and the sharing of content. Inbound marketing involves the continuous creation of relevant and high quality content, such as PR2.0 assets, articles, social posts, blog posts, videos, infographics, white papers and thought leadership events, and igniting that content through promotion and conversation-starters to encourage peer-to-peer sharing.
Carefully curated content is distributed through channels you control (your “owned” media, such as your website and social networks) and the channels you don’t control (the social media of people/organizations in your network), where our content strategists spark conversations on your behalf. Carefully managing the content you own allows you to influence the content you “earn” and reputation you build. Search engine rankings and social connections (“likes,” “shares,” etc.) are among the most trusted endorsements online today. Managing your content and your interactions carefully allows you to maximize your success in SEO and the social world. Finally, advanced analytic approaches allow you to improve your understanding of the content and communications your prospects value.
Create an editorial calendar for fresh inbound content with the following buckets:
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
VI. SEO Implementation Guidelines and Tips for Manufacturing Companies
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
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. 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
Fresh content may take several forms.
The more competitive a keyword, the more high-fidelity content (infographics, videos, quizzes, etc.) you’ll have to create to secure and sustain page 1 rankings.
VII. Monitoring of Keywords and SEO Performance for Manufacturers
To quantify the return-on-investment, manufacturers must connect the dots between SEO efforts and conversions. Activate Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Integrate marketing automation software like HubSpot or Pardot in your website, blog and content channels.
Some of the SEO metrics that manufacturers must continuously measure are:
Brand impressions
Traffic/Organic traffic including quality, sources, locations and devices
Keyword rankings
Branded vs. non-branded keywords
Page popularity
Leads, sales and customer service requests that originated from search engines
Measure keyword rankings and monitor competitors periodically. Respond to encroachment with counter-moves on an as-needed basis.
VIII. Adapt to Changes in SEO Algorithms
Industrial marketers must realize that getting on page 1 is not a one-and-done game. Since Google, Bing and international search engine algorithms change periodically, the strategies for securing page 1 positions must be adapted regularly.
For instance, to give you a sense of the big changes in Google’s algorithm and the ranking factors in the last decade, we have created a simplified chart below:
The search terms people type in the Google search box have changed dramatically too, and can be understood in four distinct epochs: the keyword era, keyword cluster era, natural language era and now the voice era. Voice activated searches now account for more than half of all searches. Manufacturing marketers must ensure that keyword clusters, frequently asked questions, colloquialisms and “near me” keywords are all represented in their keyword selection.
I hope you found this guide helpful. 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.
In serving more than one hundred manufacturers in our thirty year history, our agency has developed a repertoire of best practices in manufacturing marketing. To commemorate the manufacturing month, we’re sharing them with you:
1. Invest in Branding: The best manufacturers distinguish themselves and liberate profits by building powerful brands, becoming thought leaders and aligning themselves with causes that matter to them. They play to win.
2. Celebrate Heroes: Manufacturers are increasingly challenged by a national talent shortage for the new jobs they’re creating. They are also losing an entire generation of baby boomer buyers who are being replaced by Gen-X, Millennials and Gen-Z. To offset these macro-trends, smart manufacturers are celebrating the talent of their workforce and their best customers alike.
3. Marketing, Sales and Customer Experience Alignment: Successful manufacturers ensure that not only their earned, owned and paid media align, but their marketing, sales and customers experience mutually enhance each other.
4. Produce High-Fidelity Content: Top manufacturers maximize their content productivity by creating a SEO Keyword Lexicon, infusing keywords into all new content they produce including blog posts, white papers, videos, infographics, webinars and social media. They turn their content into force multipliers which facilitates revenue growth without increasing headcount.
5. Recruit and Retain Talent: The best manufacturers SEO-optimize the career sections of their own websites and their social media to directly recruit talent instead of letting them lean on job sites.
6. Leverage Marketing Technology: High-performance manufacturers run an integrated marketing ecosystem with responsive websites, marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
7. Fund Marketing to Strategic Buyers: In addition to marketing transactional buyers, leading manufacturers surround and engage higher-margin strategic buyers with Google and Bing page one rankings, AI-powered targeting and A/B testing. They invest close to 10% of their revenue in marketing to right-fit prospects. Their investment in digital marketing eclipses what they spend in traditional media.
We hope these best practices get your gears turning.
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.
There is an art and science to running a paid advertising campaign. With all online advertising platforms increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence and machine learning, gone are the days of manual adjustments and management.
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.
Here are some best practices which we follow to run high performing, top converting paid media campaigns for all our clients:
Creating Impactful Paid Landing Pages
Each landing page that we create for a client is unique. Our purpose with each client’s landing page is to use distinct elements that showcase the individuality of the brand and highlight its best features. Along with using unique elements for each landing page, there are common features which consistently work well in attracting and engaging the right target audience. Here are some landing page elements which help us create unique and impactful landing pages for our clients:
Clear and Concise Argument Construction: The argument construction for each landing page depends on the client’s situation and target audience. A one size fits all approach does not work. Each landing page, based on the client’s situation will develop a different argument to make a case for the client. Highlighting the uniqueness about the client will set them apart from their competition and show their target audience that they’re the right fit for each other.
Strong Calls to Actions: Providing a clear intent as to what you want the prospect or buyer to do is an extremely important feature of each landing page. Many of the pages we create are lead generation landing pages, so we include a clear “Request Info” button to make it easy for the prospect or buyer to fill out the client-specific request information form. Each landing page provides call to action buttons at the top which persistently follow as you scroll down the page so they are never out of sight for the user.
Simple Forms: The form used on the landing page depends on where your target audience is in the marketing funnel. But, a rule of thumb is to use simple forms with as few fields as possible so that the prospect doesn’t hesitate to provide that information. On lead generation landing pages, a simple form asking for basic information like name and email helps get the essential information to begin communication with the prospect. Testing out where the placement of the form will work best is a good idea as each situation will be different.
Proofs & Success Stories: Showing success stories of how customers have benefited from a client’s product, service or offerings helps to convince others. This could include showing customer reviews or including their story on how they benefited from the product. This will allow potential customers to visualize the benefits that they can glean from the same product. This becomes a really important aspect of our landing pages to show a product’s real benefits to potential customers.
Landing Page A/B Testing: Testing headlines, copy, messaging, images, calls to action, form fields and placements can all help your landing page continuously reach your audience and allow you to learn from their behavior how best to communicate with them.
Creating High-Converting Digital Ad Creative
Keeping the client’s brand in mind, the target audience and the goal of the campaign helps us come up with a one-of-a-kind strategy for each client. There are several factors that we take into consideration as we develop ad creative for each client campaign.
Use authentic photography: As all paid marketing platforms have become more and more visual, using the right image is exceedingly important to creating the right ad. The use of high-quality images from the actual client helps us develop a more authentic look and feel.
Stand out from the competition with eye-catching design: With the increase in advertisers online, it becomes imperative to stand out from others. One thing that can help you distinguish yourself from the competition is to select images, copy and design elements which will make your ads memorable and your brand stand out from the crowd.
Write clear and concise copy: Today’s target audiences have limited bandwidth and attention spans. It’s best to quickly get your audience’s attention and provide your offer than to write long ads which will not show after a limited number of characters.
Highlight your uniqueness: What is one thing that is unique about you? Use your ad creative to bring attention to that factor. It will set you apart even further from your competition.
Add calls to actions: Depending on what type of campaign you’re running and where your prospect is in the funnel, calls to action will differ.
Run consistent messaging on all platforms: If you are using multiple platforms for your campaigns, you would want to keep using consistent messaging across all platforms. This way your consistent message will reach customers no matter which platform they use.
A/B test ad creatives: A/B testing different sets of ads, whether it is videos, images, copy and other creative elements in ads will help you understand which message resonates with your audiences better. As a result, you can tighten your messaging and talk directly to your prospective customers.
Paid Campaign Management & Optimization
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. Our day-to-day optimization tactics allow us to get the most out of the budget that we have to maximize performance for the client.
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 the expense of our clients.
Keyword management: Continuously updating your keyword list to filter out non-relevant searches through negative keywords will keep the campaign on target and your ads showing in front of the right searchers. This eliminates waste of our client’s 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, when it comes to maximizing return on investment for our clients, we leave no stone unturned. God is indeed in the details.
Managing Algorithmic Recommendations: The advertising platforms routinely recommend changes to the client campaigns. Instead of blindly accepting these recommendations (most of which lean towards maximization of their own profitability), we filter them through the lens of each client’s strategic objectives, accepting the ones that align and discarding the ones that don’t.
Elliance, an SEM and paid advertising agency, brings prosperity to clients through digital campaign management services to grow your brand’s share of mind, voice and market. View our work with various clients and consider partnering with us.
