89% of organizations use digital marketing to enable marketing efforts, but only 5% measure and scale digital marketing on a regular basis.
In the early days of the internet, some decades ago, very few manufacturing companies dedicated their resources to online marketing. This resulted in a scenario where manufacturers who enabled digital marketing had a better reach to their customers than those who did not.
However, hundreds, if not thousands of players are present in the market and all of them are vying for a chance to get the pie. Hence it is crucial to be on top of the digital marketing game. Here are some prime challenges faced by the industrial manufacturing sector, and how Extended reality helps overcome them.
Building an Email Contact List
In any industry, email-based marketing offers the highest return on investment. In the industrial manufacturing sector particularly, other manufacturers or retailers who will purchase the product often subscribe to relevant email lists as they are constantly on the lookout for new and efficient products. While email marketing is fairly simple and straightforward, building an email contact list is not.
XR makes this process much easier by just making the process of being on a contact list that much more interesting. Just imagine, if a manufacturer sent you an AR-enabled email that let you try on different components virtually, wouldn’t you be more tempted to open that mail, than open a static one?
Addressing the Entire Sales Funnel
In the past B2B buyers only relied on the internet to get some initial information. However, this is absolutely insufficient in today’s world where customers complete literally complete over 70% of the sales funnel online before talking to a salesperson. Most customers are fairly sure (at least 50%) where they talk to a customer service personnel. Therefore, organizations should appear in search engines, create awareness, help the potential customer evaluate the product and ultimately even connect the potential customer to the salesperson through online channels.
From attracting customers to offering troubleshooting, AR addresses the entire sales funnel in a logical, piecewise approach. Be it the employees or customers, the entire sales or product journey can simply be made more interactive, efficient, and less redundant through AR.
The SEO Game
71% of B2B product searches begin with Google.
In today’s world, everyone gets information easily and is looking for updated information. Hence it is crucial that you update your website and social media on a regular basis. Many organizations fail to update the information they provide to the world as they are innately focussing on creating a product. Hence, it is extremely important that organizations allocate resources and focus on the marketing, sales, and product aspects of the business.
Extended Reality provides organizations the chance to get noticed more often, and for longer periods of time. This, in turn, increases the visibility and other metrics of the organization and catapults it to better page rankings.
Quality Lead Management
Leads come from different quarters and should be approached in different ways. All leads surely are created differently and should have different marketing and conversion strategies. For example, if someone fills out a subscription form or an email subscription list, they are considered to be a lead. This lead, though, a qualified lead is much weaker than a lead generated through someone looking to buy a product after watching a demonstration. Hence, prioritizing and managing these leads, and setting up systems to handle them. Not setting up proper lead management systems and assigning weightage to leads is the leading challenge behind digital marketing for the manufacturing industry.
XR provides manufacturers a chance to make themselves stand out from the crowd and engage the audience in a meaningful way that they get brand affinity and become qualified leads. With options to gain customer analytics, such as what do they look at, what did they most devote their time to, XR also gives valuable data to enhance the marketing efforts and even product development. XR also integrates with Customer Resource Management(CRM) Software, making it the prime choice for organizations.
The Bottom Line
45% of companies do not have a set digital marketing strategy despite needing one.
Having a digital marketing plan in mind to cater to the aforementioned channels is the solution to making digital marketing work for B2B Industrial Manufacturing organizations. Constantly updating, evolving, and growing with the trends is the solution to growth.
AR in marketing has helped increase brand awareness by more than 70% for several organizations which in turn increased the website traffic by 122%. Furthermore, because XR is highly interactive, it increases the lead conversion rate by more than 30%. The personalization aspect of XR makes it the perfect marketing tool for Industrial manufacturing.
Industrial Marketing is not providing the expected results because there is too much noise. Everyone has a website and everyone is trying to get the attention of the target buyers. Hence it has become highly difficult and expensive to gain the attention of the buyers. Only when we get the attention, we could then impress them, entice them to provide their email address, and incorporate them into the sales funnel.
References:
- https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/digital-strategy-development/b2b-insights-help-get-ahead-competition-infographic/
- https://financesonline.com/digital-marketing-statistics/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/solrogers/2019/10/08/should-brands-invest-in-xr-advertising/?sh=648060b31912
