So you’ve got a website that’s generating leads for your business, but converting them into customers is proving to be challenging? Perhaps you need to nurture those leads along using some kind of customer relationship management (CRM) program to help turn them into sales. First, make sure you have all the essentials in place, then use those as a basis for implementing such great customer service that your prospects won’t have any question about coming to your for their products. 
Marketing Essentials
Website: The most important inbound marketing tool you can have is a good website. When we say “good” we don’t necessarily mean one that looks pretty and has all sorts of bells and whistles. Sure, it’s important that your site is attractive to visitors, is well-planned and has simple-yet-intuitive navigation. What we mean, though, is one that makes use of the major best practices in website design such as headers and tags and more critically, one that is optimized for search engines through the use of well-researched keywords and phrases.
Blog: The next best thing to have to increase your number of solid leads is a blog. This is vital for fulfilling the search engines’ requirement for an ongoing stream of fresh content on your website. Besides, blogging regularly will help you build a reputation as an expert in your industry, which will benefit your sales efforts.
Video Marketing: Making videos is a great way to help prospective customers understand the processes you use and the benefits of purchasing your products instead of your competitors’. The use of video online has taken off in the past year to the point that YouTube alone reports 100 hours of video content is uploaded by users every hour. Some of the things you can make videos about are:
- Demonstrating how your products are manufactured
- Showcasing the safety protocols followed by your workers
- Conducting video interviews with satisfied clients
- Introducing the members of your team, from management through to your workers
Once you have all these essentials in place, you can add strong calls to action to get readers to connect with you and provide contact details for more information. That gives you the basis for your lead nurturing and customer service campaigns.
Managing Customer Relationships
Stage 2 of developing customers for your manufacturing business is to show your prospects the kind of service they can expect to get from you. To successfully do this, you will need to use tools created for the purpose. Two types of applications you can use are:
- An automated lead-nurturing program, and
- A customer relationship management (CRM) program
The first is typically used to draw in your prospect and convert them to being a customer, and the second is used to retain them and turn them into a source of repeat business if possible. Both of these work equally well in the B2B and B2C environments, particularly if your major client base consists of small and medium sized businesses. In these companies, the people making buying decisions are usually senior, departmental or purchasing managers, so they are individuals in spite of the fact they’re buying for a company.
Lead Nurturing: These programs work by following your prospect through the various stages of the buying process, based on data collected. For example, your reader provides an email address in response to a call to action on blog about a particular product. The system records this and sends more information about that product to him. Depending on whether he reads the email or not, the program moves him to the next stage of nurturing, which involves sending additional information at a later date. At a specific time, you’ll receive an alert that it’s time to make personal contact, by which point your prospect has been in contact with you several times—but it’s all automated.
Customer Relationship Management: It costs much more to develop new customers than it does to retain old ones and get repeat business, so managing your relationship with existing clients is a viable and cost-effective way to make sales. By giving you ready access to information such as former sales data, keeping track of who your customers are and why they came to you in the first place, you can fulfil their needs and create a sense of trust and dependability. This makes it possible for your sales people to focus on finding new business, not taking care of existing clients.
It’s one thing to have leads for your manufacturing business, but another thing entirely to turn those leads into profitable customers. The good news is there are tools that can help you do just that, so make them part of your inbound marketing strategy for 2014.
*Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
