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67% of marketers working in the manufacturing industry use website traffic as their key metric for monitoring digital marketing success. This was the statistic found by the Content Marketing Institute in 2015 in their latest ‘B2B Manufacturing Content Marketing’ eBook.
In the report, ‘website traffic’ was the top metric used by manufacturing marketers with ‘sales’ and ‘sales lead quality’ second and third on the list respectively. However, as you will know, increasing your website traffic is easier said than done.To ensure you’re doing as much as you can to reach your goals for the new financial year, take a look and implement the following tactics to begin attracting more traffic to your website.
Optimise your website
Ensuring your website is fully optimised for search engines should be the first point of call to increase traffic. Take a look at both the meta title and meta descriptions of all your pages to ensure they contain keywords, but also relate to the content on the page. Make sure the content on each page adds value and has no mistakes either. As well as trying to impress Google’s algorithm, remember to impress the potential customer who will read the page too.
Add blogs and articles
Adding blogs or articles to your website gives your manufacturing company a better chance of being found on Google and other search engines. Blogging best-practice specifies that you should write articles that answer a question or solution that your typical buyer may have.
Why? Well, if your buyer then searches for a solution to their problem, hey presto your blog should rise to the top of the Google rankings. The more blogs you rank highly for, the more website traffic you will get.
Utilise social media more
The same report by the Content Marketing Institute found that most manufacturing marketers used LinkedIn (89%) over any other social media platforms. While Twitter and Facebook still has a place in your digital marketing strategy, social media collectively can help to drive new traffic to your website.
Frequent posts across all platforms with links to your website can increase traffic, but don't bore your followers with sales messages: With the new blogs that you’ve written, you will never be short of relevant and informative things to promote on social media.
Emails and Newsletters
Emails and Newsletters are very common in the manufacturing industry, but they are often misused or not sent on a regular basis. If targeted correctly at your database of contacts (not a purchased list,) emails can not only get contacts to your website, thus increasing traffic, but also re-engage old customers who may be looking to purchase again. With an attractive email subject header, useful content and a link to a relevant landing page, prepare to see an uplift in web visitors this month.
Referrals
An organic way of growing your website traffic is by getting referrals from other sites. Instead of just targeting listing sites such as ‘Yell’, see if you can get links from influential industry websites such as Industry Week or The Manufacturer. The best way to do this is to produce some newsworthy or educational content: As well getting a better Google ranking by securing such referrals, these content-based links to your website bring better-qualified visitors, and hopefully better sales too.
Next step – generate more leads
While generating more website traffic will help you achieve your goal, the next natural step is to try and turn these extra visitors into more business leads. In the free Katapult eBook Sales & marketing strategies for manufacturers, Katapult’s Digital Marketing Director talks about how any manufacturing firm can implement an effective sales and marketing strategy to grow their sales pipeline. Find out more and download your free copy of the Sales & marketing eBook today.
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