How to Increase Brand Awareness for Manufacturing Companies

87% of manufacturing marketers cite increasing brand awareness as a major marketing objective for the year 2015, ranking it in as the number one marketing goal for manufacturing companies this year. Here are 5 tips that will get you closer to achieving this top goal for your company:

1) Build a Content Strategy: Content is King, whether you’re selling cosmetics or heavy machinery. There are several reasons for this, but they all essentially boil down to SEO. Search engines crawl your pages to determine their relevance and value to users. The more content you have related to your business and industry, the more likely you are to be considered of interest to internet users searching your keywords. Simply being a content mill isn’t going to help you though. Qualities such as the reading level and length of your content can impact your rankings, since the goal of search engines is to ensure that the search results they return are actually valuable to searchers. This means that you can’t just pump out content in volume. You need a strategy that includes key word research and quality content creation. Content doesn’t just refer to text. Video, audio, images, and all media are considered content and should be strategically worked into your content creation plans. Blogging is important too, but we’ll get to that. Without question, your search engine rankings impact awareness of your brand and content impacts your search engine rankings. So, if A equals B and B equals C…I think you get it.

2) Use Social Media For Promotion: It doesn’t stop at having content. You have to promote it and get it out there to be seen, shared, and mentioned. Social engagement is garnered by frequent postings and interaction with followers. Social campaigns such as contests can really encourage a lot of interaction. Simply having and maintaining social media accounts is a good start and will come with benefits to your brand.

3) Get Blogging: If you think blogging is not for the manufacturing industry, think again. Blogging is an important part of your content strategy, as it improves SEO, establishes thought leadership, educates your potential customers, and nurtures leads. A good maxim of online marketing in the current climate is “Give first and sell second.” Internet users are looking for value in the form of information before they commit to spending money with a company. Blogs are a great way to provide this value and “give first.”

4) Don’t Shy Away from Paid Ads Online: Sponsored social posts on Facebook offer advanced targeting criteria and advertising to both those who’ve liked your page, and to their Facebook friends as well. That results in a greater, more highly targeted reach. Paid advertising options on LinkedIn are also worth considering since that’s likely to be where your audience is. Be strategic about LinkedIn advertising by promoting your strongest and highest quality content like videos, product promotions, and white papers. Finally, if you do have that caliber of content, use PPC advertising to give it an extra push.

5) Track your Progress: Brand awareness can be hard to track, but if you’ve implemented the previous 4 tips, you’ll have some data coming in. Social brand mentions and followers are indicators of awareness. Building content will give you interaction analytics including clicks, visits, traffic sources, and sometimes even search terms used. PPC interactions can be tracked as well. While brand awareness isn’t generally the most measurable performance indicator, it becomes more quantified when you implement some measurable tactics to achieve it.

If your manufacturing company is struggling with how to increase brand awareness, implement the suggestions above and watch your reach grow.