Every business needs to make sales, and manufacturing businesses are no different. However, it can be difficult to know where to start. Lead generation is somewhat different for manufacturers, as they are not often targeting end consumers. Instead, the vast majority of the 250,000 manufacturers in the United States have to target each other and companies abroad.
What Is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is simply the process of creating interest in your product. Typically, it refers to sales leads, as these are the most profitable for manufacturing businesses. However, it can also refer to list-building leads or informational leads.
Why Is It Important?
Sales. Your business requires sales, and lead generation can help you target those interested in your product.
How Has Lead Generation Changed?
Potential clients and customers are constantly bombarded with advertisements. Because of that, you must take a different approach when implementing lead generation strategies. It’s not enough to simply represent your company. Instead, you need to portray yourself as the customer’s representative. Advocate for your customer, and solve pain points. Whereas before you may have been using mass advertising aimed at general demographics; now, you’re looking at one-to-one targeting and creating continuous relationships through multiple channels.
Why Not Word-of-Mouth Advertising?
Word-of-mouth is useful, but it is limited. You can’t control the message as well, and you can’t be sure that your target audience will even hear the message. Online lead generation helps you target specific audiences who are interested in your products.
Creating Your Facebook Adverts
Creating Facebook ads involves selecting an appropriate photo, creating a short headline, and creating a short piece of text of no more than 90 characters that describes your business. The idea is to get people to click on your advert, nothing more. For that reason, it’s useful to create two examples of each for a total of eight possible combinations, and then experiment with those combinations. Facebook allows you to check your click-through rate, so you can see which ads perform better. Let them run for a week and remove any adverts that have a click-through rate of less than one percent or cost more than a dollar per click.
Select Your Target
You need to select your target audience, and Facebook is very good at finding out what people do for a living. You can select people who work for specific employers or have specific jobs (“buyer” is often a good one). In addition, you can select your target industry, which could be manufacturing in general, or a specific market like agriculture or farming. You can also choose whether to narrow down by age, gender or location. Typically, these aren’t significant to manufacturing businesses unless you’re targeting a specific end consumer. Instead, you’re often looking at buyers and entrepreneurs who wish to use your product with theirs.
Create a Landing Page
Your website needs to be focused on creating the perfect environment in which to generate sales, and the homepage is not a good place to do this. Alternatively, you can create a specific landing page that your advert leads to. This ensures the customer’s focus is retained and that everything on that page is geared toward selling your product. In addition, you can have multiple pages for different kinds of customers. Similarly, you can see what works by having different pages focused on different demographics.
Include a Form
A reasonably detailed form helps to gain personal information from the potential lead who has clicked on your ad, and it also eliminates those who are just looking without intending to buy. The more information you have, the easier it is to close the deal. And the more detail a person is willing to include, the more likely he is to be invested in buying the product.
Set-up Retargeting
Retargeting simply means advertising to people who originally visited your site but didn’t fill in the form. To do this, simply use the Facebook Pixel option and create a new advert. The target audience will see the advert for the next six months. Select the website traffic option and select anyone who visits specific pages on your website. You don’t want to target those who quickly look at the homepage, but you might want to target visitors who look at specific product pages.
Overall, these methods help generate leads, which you can turn into sales for your business. By targeting the right consumer, you can advertise your products and services effectively without incurring undue cost and without having to filter through thousands of low-quality leads.
