5 Success Drivers for Building a Killer Relationship with Your Manufacturing Marketing Partner

In the three years that Paperless Parts Manufacturing Marketing Solutions has been working with shops in the manufacturing industry, we have learned a great deal about what makes our clients’ marketing efforts successful.

While each of our clients is unique, the overarching goals are the same: increase organic traffic to their website, increase website pageviews, increase RFQs, build their contact list and connections, and ultimately help to grow their business.

Our clients consistently see success in all of these areas, but oftentimes the main driver behind the success is the shop owner’s level of engagement. So it got us thinking…What exactly makes some shops see results more quickly than others? We’re sharing five activities that successful clients do to boost the impact of their marketing efforts.

Top 5 Marketing Success Drivers

1. Owner Derived Content Topics: Preparation is Key

There are countless manufacturing marketing agencies out there that will do some research, gather content, and produce blogs, newsletters, and other publications on behalf of their clients. But the real success driver is making sure the shop owner’s voice is leading the way.

So what does that mean? It means that our team does NOT come up with the topics and just send them over the fence to the client. This would create not only scalability issues for our business (having clients with identical topics) but you lose the pain points and successes that specific shops are encountering with their own set of customers and prospects. Highlighting the successes and pain points is critical to writing not only unique content, but engaging content that will pull in the shop’s specific audience. Bringing well-thought-out, prepared topics to the table results in more authentic and robust content, which increases prospect and customer engagement.

2. Keep it Customer-Focused

Our team will provide prompts to get our clients’ wheels turning on customer-centric topics. Shop owners have repeatedly expressed how helpful this is in ensuring their content is customer-focused and relevant to their unique experiences. It is easy for job shop owners to be drawn into discussions about “insider topics:” content that is much more appealing for other shop owners to read. But those subjects miss the mark when trying to connect with prospects and customers. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes: what questions are they consistently asking during the quoting process? What challenges are they constantly facing when bridging the gap between design and manufacturing? Those are your blog topics!

3. Develop a Marketing Mindset

Shop owners are pulled in countless directions. We get it; we recognize that marketing efforts slide down the priority list from time to time. However, clients who keep marketing on their minds will amplify their results. Here’s how to stay on track:

• Make a note if you think of a strong topic while in the middle of something else. It might be while having a conversation with a customer, your estimating team, or even shop floor personnel. The best topics come out of real interactions.
• Remember to take photos of parts BEFORE they ship out (or assign the task to someone else). Images dramatically enhance your social and website content.
• Keep your marketing team in the loop between scheduled meetings and share any happenings that would be timely to add to the workflow. Things like new equipment purchases, sq. foot additions, or employee outings/cookouts are important for us to stay on top of.
• Ask customers for reviews and testimonials. This content will be leveraged across social and on the website to help build trust and make your shop stand out in search engine results.

4. Share Content

Our role at Paperless Parts Manufacturing Marketing Solutions is not only to create content that is individualized, targeted, and valuable to your business, but also to publish that content on your website and drive traffic via email marketing and social media channels.

Clients can enhance these efforts by leveraging the content in a variety of ways: We encourage our clients to share the social media posts on their business pages from their own personal pages and invite their connections to follow their business. A growing audience makes a big impact on social platforms like LinkedIn by increasing impressions on posts and expanding reach.

Manufacturing marketing content can prove valuable during the sales process when owners share helpful content that demonstrates their expertise and in turn educates their potential customers. Sharing useful information with both existing and potential customers builds trust and strengthens relationships.

5. Engage in the Relationship

Every successful relationship takes real effort on both sides. Our goal is to build a strong partnership with our clients and that requires engagement from everyone involved. Shop owners who recognize the value of their unique input consistently produce valuable content that customers and prospects want to read! While our team is well versed in manufacturing terminology and processes, we rely on our client’s voices to communicate their own experiences and perspective.

Is Marketing a Right Fit for your Shop?

Do you want to scale your shop? Do you want to open up lines of communication with customers and prospects? Can you commit to the 5 success drivers? Then yes!

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Anne Marie Tracey is a Marketing Deployment Specialist at Paperless Parts. She brings extensive experience in both the public and private sector, content creation, deployment, social media, website design, and strategic communications. Anne Marie works with manufacturers every day to create engaging content and leverage best practices to retain customers and attract more business.