If you think about it, manufacturing companies aren’t generally known for their social media marketing. Often, that’s reserved for consumer brands who create fun, engaging viral marketing campaigns. Because of this, manufacturers can be hesitant to join in. Marketers might feel like social media marketing isn’t relevant to their industry, be unsure that their audiences would show up and engage with their B2B content marketing efforts, or may just not know where to start when it comes to posting.
While it may seem like a challenge for manufacturers to engage their audiences on social media, creating an effective social media marketing strategy is definitely worthwhile. In this blog, we’ll review why social media marketing is vital for manufacturing companies, what the best platforms for B2B social media marketing are, and discover some of the ways you can use social media marketing for manufacturing companies to your advantage.
Why Is a Social Media Marketing Strategy Important for Manufacturing Companies?
Without an established strategy, manufacturing companies are more likely to end up posting on social media without any rhyme or reason, which won’t do anything beneficial for customer engagement. Let’s explore some of the main benefits an effective social media marketing strategy can provide:
1. Increase Brand Awareness
Social media makes it easy to connect with your audience and increase brand awareness. Manufacturing companies can market their company, products, and services on social media to a larger audience than ever before, allowing them to increase awareness of their brand.
And if your audience finds value in what you post (which should be a core focus of any effective social media strategy), they’ll be even more likely to share it with others, increasing your reach and brand awareness even further.
2. Engage with Customers
Social media also makes it easy to engage with customers. It gives potential customers the opportunity to ask questions and learn about your company and products, and current customers the ability to solve issues when they arise and share their opinions. It may sound daunting to open your company up to those types of conversations, but social also provides you with a unique opportunity—the ability to address issues in real-time and learn from customer feedback and opinions.
You can then use these insights to better your products and services and improve customer service, which will only benefit your business in the long run.
3. Build a Larger Following
Because social media provides the opportunity to market your company and its products and services to a larger audience, it’s a great tool for growing your company’s following. The larger your audience gets and the more people you reach with each post, the more qualified leads you’ll receive, which will ultimately increase your revenue.
4. Drive Traffic to Your Website
Every time you post to your social media accounts, you create a new opportunity to encourage your audience to visit your website and learn more about your company and what makes you unique. Don’t let these opportunities fall by the wayside, because they can drive valuable traffic to your website which can result in qualified leads, conversions, and even customers.
Another great way to drive traffic to your website on social media is by including customized calls-to-action (CTAs) on each post to drive traffic to specific pages. Want to increase blog views or encourage users to get a quote on a product or service? You can do it all with a custom CTA.
What Are the Best Platforms for B2B Social Media Marketing?
Each social media platform caters to a different audience and not grasping this can seriously impact the success of your social media marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at the best social media platforms for industrial B2B marketing:
For manufacturers and other B2B companies, no platform creates as much opportunity as LinkedIn. In 2020, 40 percent of U.S. internet users aged 46 to 55 years used LinkedIn, which makes sense because it’s widely recognized as a professional platform. Not taking advantage of this platform means losing out on a large potential audience that is more likely than any other platform to understand and engage with your content.
If you’re not sure where to start, sharing relevant industry content is a good first step in your LinkedIn marketing strategy to get noticed and start positioning yourself as a thought leader. Additionally, encouraging employee participation on LinkedIn can reap big rewards, as it gives employees an opportunity to connect with other professionals in your industry and build relationships.
As the largest social media platform, Facebook is often the first choice for businesses looking to get started with their social media marketing plan. While Facebook may not provide much value in the way of lead generation, it can still be a great tool for promoting your company and culture. It provides a unique opportunity to demonstrate your company’s human side and make connections as a result.
Twitter is a great starting point for manufacturing companies looking to grow their audience and build a following. It’s known for being a resource for relevant industry news, making it a great channel to adopt if you do wish to position your company as an industry thought leader on multiple channels.
And as you continue to grow your audience and gain more followers, you can begin to share original content and encourage users to visit your website for more—generating even more traffic and leads.
Learn More about Marketing Your Manufacturing Company
We hope that after reading this blog post, it’s apparent why a social media marketing strategy is vital for manufacturing companies. There are many other benefits, too, but increasing brand awareness, engaging with customers, and driving more traffic to your website certainly never hurt!
If you’re still having a hard time wrapping your head around how to effectively market your manufacturing company, Sagefrog can help! Get in touch with us to learn about our integrated marketing program.
