Marketing Tactics You Can Use to Grow Your Business in 2019

marketing tactics

Marketing tactics make for a double-edged sword.

One the one hand, the right marketing tactic can help you grow your business. On the other hand, marketing tactics can become a waste of time. So how do you choose the right one?

In today’s guide, we’re going to walk you through different marketing tactics to help you grow your business, but before we do that, keep this important lesson in mind.

The #1 Marketing Tactic of them All

Imagine you’re seven years old.

You just got a new bike with no training wheels.

Instead of letting you ride, fall on your face, and repeat the process until you learn how to ride, your parents give you a training manual called “How to Ride a Bike.”

It has perfect instructions. The guide breaks down the physics of riding a bike with mathematical equations about balance. It tells you how to grip the handles, gain momentum, and maintain balance. There are graphics and illustrations walking you through every step of riding the bike.

You read the manual cover to cover, taking notes, and discuss the process of riding the bike with your parents in detail.

After all of this, you know how to ride a bike, but you don’t know how to ride a bike. The only way to learn how to ride a bike is to ride one. The only way to see if certain marketing tactics work is to try them. That’s why we created a list with many options. You can choose a tactic, try it, and see if it works.

If the tactic does work, double-down. If it doesn’t work for your business, try something new. Also, don’t blame the tactic itself. Many entrepreneurs mistakenly believe that if one strategy doesn’t work, all strategies are bad.

This cynical mindset kills creativity, marketing, and ultimately profits.

Either try the tactics out for yourself or work with a smart agency to handle it for you.

Ready for the tips.

Stick with us…

Run a Content Marketing Campaign for a Year

Content marketing and SEO are the lifeblood for many businesses.

These strategies work if you give them enough time.

As you can see from this chart via Ahrefs, your website pages may need to age a little bit before they rank well on Google.

Some other benefits of giving your campaign time to grow are:

  • Insights – You can’t get good data on where your traffic is coming from, which keyword selection works best, or whether you’re creating the right content. When you can compare data quarter over quarter and year over year, you get a birds’ eye view that helps you make better content marketing decisions.
  • Branding – Brands are becoming more important to SEO. Google trusts brands more because they’re an easy way to vet the quality of information. Brands take time to build. One of the best ways to build a brand is through smart content marketing, but it requires patience to pull off.
  • Certainty – Often, business owners quit on SEO before they know whether or not it’s working. This impatience causes failure and wastes time and money.

Create an Interesting Hook to Get People to Engage

Getting attention is hard in 2019.

Getting people to take the action you want is even harder.

People are getting jaded. They’ve signed up for the email list, gotten the white papers, and end up ignoring marketing messages.

There are some fun and unique ways to get people to engage and take the action you want like signing up to your e-mail list.

Lead Quizzes

Lead quizzes are a fun and interactive way to get people to join your list. You provide a quiz based on your niche and give them the answer in exchange for your e-mail list:

Lead quiz example

Prize Wheels

Prize wheels let users ‘spin’ for a chance to win a prize you offer. To claim the prize, you have to provide an e-mail in exchange:

Prize wheel example

Giveaways

Done correctly, giveaways can build your list fast. In this case study for giveaways, WishPond displays 24 different Facebook Ad giveaways with unique offers, copy, and images:

Facebook Ad Giveaway example

 

Twist the Knife

Customers often buy products to alleviate pain and solve problems, that’s where the Problem, Agitation, Solution (P.A.S) formula comes in.

  • First, you spell out the problem they’re having.
  • Next, you make the problem worse by elaborating on the consequences of it.
  • Last, you offer your product as a solution

Here’s a great example:

pas formula

Courtesy of Copy Hackers by Ramit Sethi

Get the Most From Your E-Mail Blasts

Here’s a simple marketing tactic you can use to boost the open rate and clicks for the e-mail newsletters you send out.

What tactic, you ask? Resend your message to people who didn’t open it the first time. Wait a few days, change the subject line, and send the exact same message. Look at this example from my personal blog through my Converkit dashboard:

resend to unopens example

Spruce Up Your About Page

If we had a dollar for every boring and bland business page that uses copy that starts out like “We started our company 30 years ago from a garage in Wichita, KS […].” we could retire from having an agency.

This speaks to one of the biggest marketing mistakes businesses make. Your website and about page aren’t for you, they’re for your customers. Yes, feel free to tell your company story, but also answer the question “What’s in it for me?”

Your about page is a great place to talk about the benefits of your product or service. Take a look at this example from the about page of my writing coach website:

about page example

I open the page by talking directly to the reader. I even sprinkle some PAS formula in there as well (see if you can spot it).

As an added bonus, it’s smart to add a call to action to your about page, too:

about page call to action

Ad Upsells and Downsells to Your E-Commerce Store

Upsells work great because they engage a customer who’s already bought something. Someone who buys something from you is more likely to buy again. Adding an upsell to the checkout process of your e-commerce store can help you get extra sales.

It speaks to the thinking “I already want the product I bought. Why wouldn’t I want this extra cool added upgrade or special tool?”

upsell example

Example via E-Consultancy

If they don’t opt for your upsell offer, add a downsell offer, a discounted version of your upsell:

downsell example

Example Via Umesh P

Redesign Your Website

Redesigning your website can give your brand new life.

Haven’t an outdated website with a bad user experience is bad for your brand.

It’s also bad for your search engine performance, because search engines use user signals like load speed, mobile responsiveness, and dwell time as part of their algorithm.

Re-designing and re-building your website solves these problems and gives your brand a new look at the same time.

website redesign example

Via Elcor Consruction – A site redesign client of ours

 

SEO Question of the Day: Which Kind of Hits Does Google Analytics Track?

Which kinds of hits does Google Analytics track

Which kinds of hits does Google Analytics track?

This is a simple question on the3 surface that has many different answers.

Google Analytics is a software created by Google to track different user metrics on your website. Many marketers and business owners don’t use GA to their full benefits. Doing so can give you insights you can use to grow your traffic, build your brand, and leapfrog your competition.

If you want to talk one on one with one of our SEO experts about analytics tracking, reach out to us below:




If you’re looking for an in-depth answer to the question  “Which kinds of hits does Google Analytics track?” Keep reading.

Google Analytics Explained

The Google Analytics tool has a menu you can use to look for different metrics about your website traffic.

This is just one of the sections you can use in the tool to get useful data.

You can go into quite a bit of depth into how Google Analytics works, but for today, we’ll focus on the most important and easiest to understand metrics.

Google Analytics Acquisition Channels

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic measures people who visit your website directly by entering a page on your website into a browser. Quick example, if you shop on Amazon, you give Amazon a direct visit when you type in amazon.com.

The question is, what do you do with this data and how can you use it to improve your traffic?

When looking at direct traffic, here are some things to consider:

  • Watch growth over time – If your direct traffic is growing over time, it could mean that your brand recognition is growing. The more you promote your business, the more people will come back to your website because they already know your brand.
  • Understand your business – If you are a company that does not have repeat business, this metric might be less useful than it would be for a business that relies on brand recognition for repeat business.
  • Watch relationships – You can analyze whether or not the organic traffic you receive from Google keeps pace with your direct traffic. If it does, it means your site isn’t just attracting search traffic, but converting it into repeat visits.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic is one of the top measurements you can use to judge the success of your SEO campaign. While you can’t predict the future, it’s safe to say you want your organic traffic to grow over time. You can analyze organic search traffic in many ways.

Here are some of our best recommendations:

  • Geography – If you run a local business or a service area business, you can track which region of the country your search traffic is coming from.
  • Top pages – In Google search console, you can check which pages receive the most organic traffic and which keywords they rank for. You can use this information to improve your website pages, which will increase your overall organic search traffic over time.
  • Timelines – Data takes time to make enough sense to make smart decisions. It also takes time for pages to rank on Google. With our clients, we measure organic search traffic quarter over quarter, which is a good length to get more reliable data.

average age of page one rankings chart

 

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic measures the number of people who visit your website from other websites that link to your website.

You could use this data to find the following insights:

  • Backlink quality – Backlinks from other websites build your site authority. The best backlinks also provide referral traffic. You can analyze which backlinks drive the most traffic and copy what you did well to acquire that link when trying to acquire new ones.
  • Promotion techniques – There are many promotion techniques you can use to get referral traffic like posting a thoughtful comment on a blog in your niche. You can measure how much traffic you get back from this and other techniques to refine your promotion strategies.
  • Site behavior – If you notice the referral traffic you get doesn’t stay on your site for long, you can make the pages they land on more attractive. If you notice they do stay on your site but don’t convert to leads, you can improve the conversion rate of those pages by adding forms, calls to action, and even media

Social Media Traffic

This metric is pretty self-explanatory, but it can be analyzed in different ways:

  • Channels – Note which channels drive the most traffic. Double down on the ones that work first, then seek to improve your other platforms
  • Ad tracking – If you want to know how well your social media ads are working, you can add custom tracking codes to measure the performance of your campaign.
  • Overall traffic – If you find yourself spending a lot of time with social media promotion, but not getting the traffic you want, you can adjust your strategy or focus more on strategies that move the needle.

Paid Advertising

Google also tracks traffic from paid advertisements.

You can use insights from other portions of Google Analytics to make changes like

  • Behavior metrics on landing pages you’re sending ads to
  • Boosting new pages with Ads to increase traffic
  • Increasing the ad quality for better conversions.

Google Analytics Behavior Metrics

Google and other search engines measure behavior metrics to index and rank websites.

This makes sense. The search engines want to present the best results possible. Knowing what turns visitors on and off can help them make better decisions. With Google updates like ‘Rank Brain‘ and the fact that search engines use AI and machine learning to understand sites, these metrics will grow in importance over time.

Here are some of the behavior metrics Google Analytics measures and how they relate to the SEO success of your website.

Bounce Rate

A ‘bounce’ happens anytime someone visits a page on your website and leaves right away. Search engines use bounce rates to answer the question “Do people like and want to view the content on your site?” A high bounce rate tells them “no” which lowers the value of your website pages.

Some of the reasons for a high bounce rate are:

  • Site performance – If your site doesn’t load quickly or has other technical issues, this will increase your bounce rate and harm your SEO results.
  • Mobile friendliness – More people use Google search on their phones than desktops. If your site isn’t mobile optimized, people won’t use your site on their phone. This is a website development and SEO  best practice you must following in 2019.
  • Content – The content on your pages need to compel users to engage. To increase time spent on your site you can rewrite the content, add media, and improve design elements of your pages.

Average Session Duration (Time Spent on Site)

Each time someone visits your website, it counts as a ‘session.’ Average session duration measures how long someone stays on your website. Usually, the longer the better, but the type of page you’re trying to rank does come into play.

For example, for something like a simple service page where the visitor lands on it and does the desired action like fill out a form or call doesn’t need a long session duration.

If you’re trying to rank an in-depth blog post you wrote, you’ll want to see a decent time spent on page, at least two minutes or more.

Here are some things you can do to improve the time spent on the page:

  • Improve your copy – Omit needless words and help people find the information they need faster and earlier on
  • Site performance – Many of the site performance issues that cause high bounce rates also drag down your average session duration
  • Content – You shouldn’t just create content. You should analyze how that content performs. If you notice certain types of content create longer sessions, consider changing your strategy and writing content that relates to your top performers.

Number of Pages Visited

In general, you want to see that visitors are visiting multiple pages on your website. In Google’s eyes, this means you’re providing quality information and have a good internal link structure, which just means you’re linking between pages on your website in a way that makes sense to search engine crawlers and helps your visitors find the information they need in a simple way.

Again, if you are driving traffic to something like a sales page, you might not want visitors to view multiple pages on your site.

If you have a site that this metric matters for, here are some ways to improve it:

  • Internal linking – You should always link between relevant pages when it makes sense for the user. Adding internal links is an art. You want to create a situation where visitors want to visit multiple pages because you create犀利士
    content that relates to other content on your site. Check out the wiki strategy by Nat Eliason for a deep dive on this topic.
  • Link depth – Many experts say no content should be more than 3 clicks away. Some debate whether or not this is true. In general, though, you don’t want to bury pages on your site, or worse, create orphan pages — pages with no internal links to it.
  • Site navigation – Your site navigation should be simple and easy to understand. That way, visitors know where to find your most important content regardless of what page you’re on. If you have a site with a deep linking structure such as an e-commerce site, consider creating a ‘breadcrumb’ navigation that shows people the steps they took to reach the page they’re on.

Google Analytics Conversion Tracking

While traffic is a good metric, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Getting people to visit your website is the first step. The second step is getting those visitors to do what you want.

This is where conversion tracking comes in. Google analytics allows you to track different behaviors people take on your site that matter to your business like:

  • Sales – If you have an e-commerce business, you can track how many sales you receive and from which channels. This can help you get exact ROI numbers for your marketing.
  • E-Mail List Signups – Email marketing can help you get more sales and grow your brand over the long term. Conversion tracking can help you figure out which pages drive the most sign-ups.
  • Contact/Request a Quote Forms – You can also set up conversion tracking to see what percentage of people reach out for more information after they visit your website.

So, what should you do with conversation tracking to improve your marketing?

Pay attention to the data. You want to know how well your website pages are converting. Your conversion rate is the number of times people perform the desired action divided by the total number of people who visit the page.

Take a look at this chart for conversion rates across all websites and visit this page for data based on industries:

conversion rate by industry

A two percent conversion rate is good. A five percent conversion rate is great. Conversion rates of 10 percent or more are amazing.

For an in-depth look at conversion rate optimization, some good resources are:

conversion rate optimization

Conclusion

As you can see, the answer to the question “Which kinds of hits can you track in Google Analytics?” has many different answers and insights.

The key isn’t the insights themselves, but the process of actin on them.

If you work with MLT Group, you’ll get data-driven SEO by an expert agency and team who will use those insights to not just grow your traffic, but your business as a whole.

Want a free SEO analysis and marketing proposal in 48 hours or less? Just fill out the form below:




 

Manufacturing Marketing: How to Promote Industrial Companies the Right Way

manufacturing marketing

Manufacturing marketing has a ton of room for growth and potential.

Why? Because most manufacturers, machining companies, and engineering companies aren’t great at marketing their own businesses.

This is understandable.

If you work in or own one of these types of businesses, you know this truth: time is of the essence.

You have to meet deadlines, make sure your operations are efficient, and constantly monitor the output of your facilities. Although many of the employees in your business may be knowledgable enough, they just don’t have the time to do things like create content, run PPC ads, promote the business through social media and other marketing channels, or keep track of SEO data to keep growing traffic.

So what’s the best manufacturing marketing solution?

How Agencies and Manufacturers Can Work Together

From time to time, we publish industry-specific guides like our post about real estate SEO.

We write these guides because we’ve gained expertise in working with these types of companies. In the past 18 months, we’ve worked with several companies in the manufacturing space in areas like precision machining, stud welding, and industrial services.

We’ve found that while different strategies are always needed for each individual business, manufacturing companies have some similarities when it comes to growing their business with SEO

Competition

Niches like marketing and SEO are very competitive. Often, you need to create insanely in-depth content and promote the “you know what” out of it to get your content to rank on search engines.

This isn’t the same for manufacturing companies.

We use a tool called Ahrefs to measure how competitive certain keywords are. Take a look at these screenshots from the tool showing the large difference between the keywords in our niche and the keywords in the manufacturing niche.

keyword research example

keyword research example 2

You still have to use a solid strategy to rank, but there is a pathway to getting a great amount of traffic with a little bit of persistence.

Content Depth and Quality

Often, the type of content that works well in a manufacturing marketing campaign has both depth and quality.

Studies have shown that content length is a ranking factor for SEO:

This is especially true for manufacturing companies because:

  • Many manufacturing techniques, machinery, and processes require an in-depth explanation to understand
  • Each type of term or phrase used often counts as an LSI keyword, which is a fancy way to say a secondary keyword. In-depth content x industry jargon = a keyword rich piece of content
  • Most companies who write content for their blogs in the space write thin content, meaning writing in-depth content can help you stand above and beyond the crowd

The Need for a Smart Agency

Most manufacturing companies can benefit from using an agency because of their lack of time to market the business.

Interestingly enough, many companies are convinced an agency can’t help them because they’re not technical experts. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

First, we have a staff of copywriters, many of which focus solely on writing technical content.

Second, we listen. Proper SEO discovery and studying resources can lead to a content campaign that meets SEO needs and maintains technical quality.

Last, we’ll go the extra mile to make sure we understand your business. If that means coming to take a tour of your plant, meeting key employees, and scheduling calls for content until we have the perfect content recipe, that’s what we’ll do.

In the beginning, there is usually some back and forth to get the technical terms right, but after that, our content doesn’t need much editing on your end to be worth publishing.

Want to see how we can improve your website? Fill out the form below for a FREE site audit!




So what are some of the components of a successful campaign?

On-Site SEO

On-site SEO is the process of adding keywords — words people use on Google searches — into important areas of your website like:

  • Page title
  • Page content
  • Image file names
  • Alt tags
  • Anchor text for links

The terms themselves aren’t that important.

It’s important to know that your entire website should be covered for SEO. This is especially true for manufacturing companies who run an e-commerce business.

Each product and category page on your website should have on-site SEO as well as keyword rich content on that page:

on-site SEO example

If you have a larger website, it may take time and money to create content for each and every category and product on your website. Often, we work with companies with large inventories by adding content to a handful of pages to start and gradually add it and boost their SEO with a monthly content creation package.

This way, you can dip your toe into marketing without breaking the bank and steadily grow over time.

Content Marketing For Manufacturing Companies

So why type of content should you create if you want to make a splash as a manufacturing company?

Content marketing for manufacturing companies usually follows a few simple rules of thumb:

  • Keyword researched topic – Some manufacturing topics get a high amount of traffic, some don’t. We focus on finding a balance between high-traffic keywords and competitive level.
  • Industry expertise – It’s good to establish a niche and focus on creating content in a narrow area first then going broader over time, e.g., a precision machining companies focusing on aerospace machining to start then branching out to something like medical devices.
  • Persistence – Creating a large volume of work over time leads to compound rewards. As pages get indexed by Google, they start to rank for more and more keywords.

We provide free marketing proposals and consults that walk you through just the type of content we will create and how it will benefit your site. Each proposal is custom-researched with no cookie-cutter components.

Enter your information into the form below and we’ll have a proposal to you in 48 hours or less:




 

Website Authority

Website authority factors into search engine rankings.

What is website authority?

Google uses links from other websites to yours to measure the quality of your site.

Each link to your site, called a backlink, is like that site ‘voting’ for yours.

So how do you get more votes?

There are a few different ways we’ll show you:

  • Directories
  • Outreach
  • The rich get richer strategy

Directories

Google likes links from high-quality business directories. They are also a huge part of local SEO.

Manufacturing has many quality directories you can submit your site to like Thomas Net:

manufacturer directories

 

Industry-specific directories provide the following benefits:

  • Topical relevance – Getting backlinks from strong websites matters, but so does getting backlinks from industries in the same niche.
  • Reputation – High reputation directories provide more authority than low reputation sites. Manufacturing has many high-quality directories to choose from
  • Real business – Often, you can actually get sales from these directories as customers actually use them to find products and services.

You can also use local directories and general business directories, which help build your authority by:

  • N.A.P – The more times your name, address, and phone number shows up on the web, the better. These are known as citations
  • Local signals – If you do have a local manufacturing business or a service area business, using these directories can help with local SEO
  • Reputation – Google loves industry-specific directories, but it also loves gold-standard general and local directories like chambers or commerce and websites like Localeze.

SEO Outreach

On top of adding your business to quality directories, you can use outreach to get quality backlinks.

Here’s how the process works:

  • Create stellar content – Your content needs to be worth sharing to get backlinks
  • Find related websites – Many websites in the space keep resource lists and link pages. Finding them is as simple as doing a Google search like “precision machining + resource list”
  • Pitch – Send a custom email to each site telling them why your content is great and how it will benefit their website to link to your content

The last point is key. It’s easier to land a backlink if your content adds value to other websites. Google uses outbound links as a ranking factor, too. They want to see that pages link out to other sites and get links back.

They want this because it shows your site is a “resource hub” that makes a good faith effort to give users the right information. Having this mindset when creating and pitching your content makes a huge difference.

Of course, we keep this in mind when we do outreach for you. Just talk to us and we’ll show you exactly how we work.

The Rich Get Richer

Once your pages rank higher, it’s easier for them to stay there.

Often, pieces of content on page one naturally get backlinks.

Think about it.

If you write an article and need to cite sources, you go to Google.

Then, you find the best article on page one to link to.

As your content ranks high on Google, you can improve it to get even more traffic by:

After you establish some top ranking pages, you can create more content and link between old and new pieces of content to spread around ‘link power.’

Other Manufacturing Marketing Ideas

We always consider content marketing and SEO the bread and butter for marketing any business. But after you establish yourself on Google, you can use other channels for marketing, too.

Adding more marketing channels leads to more growth.

They can also help your SEO efforts because Google measures user experience, too. A great example is having videos on your site to increase ‘dwell time.’

Here are some other great marketing channels you can use.

Video

Do you have company videos or instructional videos on how to use your technology?

They make a great addition to your campaign because data shows that people like to have more than one medium to enjoy the content.

This video is a great example a manufacturer could draw from:

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is a bit more complicated than figuring out how much you are charged per click, but it can be a worthwhile investment if done the right way.

Often, we use PPC campaigns at the beginning of an organic SEO campaign.

This option is great for companies who want fast results and a quick way to establish ROI on their marketing efforts. Organic SEO takes time to kick in:

average age of page one rankings chart

If you want tangible results asap, try a PPC campaign.

Social Media Marketing

Is social media marketing a great route for marketing manufacturing?

It can be if done right.

You can use social media to highlight the quality and innovation of your company. It’s a great way to show how your company grows their expertise over time.

Some great social media marketing ideas in this space are:

  • Technology – Anytime you create a new technology or process, create a press release and share it on social media
  • Conferences – Sharing insights gained from attending conference works well on social media. Turn this to a video format for even better results
  • Employees – Highlight employee achievements shows you’re a forward thinking company who helps smart employees grows. It also makes your employees feel good about themselves. Win-Win.

Conclusion

The manufacturing space has a ton of SEO and marketing potential.

It’s one of the few unsaturated markets out there.

Take advantage of these opportunities and you can grow your traffic, business, and brand all at the same time.