How Manufacturers Can Upsell With Digital Marketing?

So, the manufacturing industry is seeing stagnation. It’s not exactly news anymore.

However, as our latest industry report outlines, this stagnation and general ‘doom and gloom’ attitude regarding the present state of the manufacturing industry is, well, subject to a fair amount of hysteria.

Yes, the UK has shifted its focus from traditional heavy manufacturing sectors. Yes, it’s made little contribution to the UK’s economic growth in 2015. And yes, it’s an unpredictable time.

How_Manufacturers_Can_Upsell_With_Digital_Marketing.jpg

But it’s also a time that, as the EEF concurs, promises a bright future and whole host of opportunities for those willing to invest accordingly in R&D and research-driven marketing.

See, the present state means those who play it safe are no longer destined to be the ones that succeed in today’s fragile economic climate – you need to grab every opportunity to capture market share, carve out a competitive advantage, and attract new clients.

But you also need to maximise revenue from existing clients.

With this in mind, we thought we’d share our top 3 tips for upselling to your existing clients via tried and tested digital marketing activities. So let’s get started.

Tailored, Timely Content

It seems we can’t publish a blog these days without mentioning content. But there’s a good reason for this, content is the vehicle that drives Inbound Marketing and it’s now an undeniably effective and dominant force in the modern marketing mix.

However, many neglect to realise that content is a powerful upselling tool for existing clients. See, just as you might develop content aimed at addressing your ideal audience’s’ pain points and bringing them to you, you can employ the same approach to give yourself the leverage to upsell to your existing clients.

It’s all about research.

Your clients are still prospects, prospects with their own evolving challenges and pain points. By staying one step ahead of the market trends through research, you can begin creating content that provides solutions to problems your clients didn’t even know existed yet. Not only will this make you appear an even more credible authority in your field, it will position you well for introducing a new product or service that solves the problem.

Smart Calls-to-Action

If you’re utilising content correctly, you’ll experience a steady flow of prospective and existing clients to your website and content. And this means they’ll be exposed to numerous calls-to-action.

In the world of content and Inbound, call-to-action (CTA) buttons are particularly important. Their job is to direct readers toward landing pages so that they can access something of value (such as a guide or other content) in exchange for data and details. As a result, the effectiveness of CTA buttons lies in the relevance of the offer they’re directing to, and this is why you need to use smart CTAs.

Smart CTAs are CTAs that change depending on the past behaviour of the visitor. For instance, let’s say one of your clients visits your site, having already downloaded a research piece from you. In such a situation, a CTA linking to the same research piece they’ve already seen is a wasted opportunity at best, and frustrating for the client at worst.

With every CTA comes an opportunity to direct an interested party to something that is going to move them closer to a purchase decision. Therefore, by using the wrong CTA, you’re missing out on a chance to show existing clients other products, services and added value you can provide. What a waste.

Based on criteria you can define yourself, smart CTAs allow you to make sure that you hit the right reader with the right content at the right time. In order to do this through a single, holistic platform, take a look at HubSpot.
Technical Guides and Videos

As we’ve mentioned, buyer’s guides, instruction manuals and other technical content are a goldmine when it comes to engaging existing and prospective clients. Coupled with contact forms, these forms of ‘premium content’ are also extremely effective for data collection purposes.

More importantly however, they’re an ideal opportunity for you to demonstrate your in-depth technical knowledge to existing clients. After all, there are some things that cannot be sufficiently explained in a meeting. They’re also particularly effective for introducing your existing clients to other branches of your service offering. After all, existing client or not, no-one is receptive to the hard sell – by creating insightful technical content, you can infer and demonstrate the added value you’ll provide, instead of shouting about it.

A Word of Advice…

Remember, for the methods outlined in this blog to be truly effective, they need to be informed by the right research. Content for content’s sake is easy to spot and won’t do you any favours.

You can’t afford to adopt a haphazard approach if you’re going to outperform the manufacturing market.

You have no choice but to provide value and build all your marketing communications around client pain points, anything less is just a waste of your marketing resources.

So, to help you get started with your own upselling and marketing processes, we’ve created an in-depth guide to the present state of the manufacturing industry. If you’d like to access leading insight into the threats and opportunities you’ll face, and how to make the most of them, simply download the guide by clicking the button below.