Manufacturing and construction businesses play a huge role in the economy. These two key sectors are not just important for the economic growth of a country or even job creation but also for sustaining product quality and meeting consumer demand.
Take America’s manufacturing sector, for instance. In 2018, it was solely responsible for over 11 million jobs. According to the US Census Bureau, manufacturing is rated as the fifth largest employer with construction coming a distance eight with over six million employees.
Image Source: United States Census Bureau
Stiff competition among players
So, what exactly does this mean?
Well, being in the top ten largest employers in a large economy such as the US simply means that competition within the respective sectors is cutthroat.
According to the Manufacturing Institute, in 2014, there were close to 300,000 manufacturing firms (in terms of plant/establishment size) in the United States.
Image Source: The Manufacturing Institute
The sheer number of manufacturing companies paints a picture of just how competitive this sector is.
And as this number keeps growing, competition is obviously getting stiffer, not only for the new entrants but also for the established companies. Everyone is pulling all the stops for a chance to be in the top 10 manufacturing companies in the U.S. And that’s not only happening in the US — every country in the world has a similarly competitive landscape in these two industries.
Being arguably the largest construction market in the world, the United States had over 700,000 construction companies in 2016. They, according to career expert, Zippia, had a collective annual revenue of over $1.7 trillion dollars.
Again, this not only just shows how competitive these crucial sectors are in the US economy but also the need for players, both big and small, to up their marketing game in order to remain in business.
Embracing Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has now become a key growth driver for many businesses across all sectors. Why? Simply because consumers have increasingly become digital-savvy.
Most people today heavily rely on their smartphones and other handheld devices to conduct business, interact with family and friends, conduct research as well as search for products/services reviews online.
Simply put, the modern consumer is constantly online doing one thing or another. To put this into perspective, the average American spends 24 hours a week online. According to a survey conducted by Hootsuite and We Are Social, North America leads with the rate of internet connection, which as of 2018 stood at 95 percent.
The survey also revealed that the global internet users, active social media users, and mobile social media users stood at 4.4, 3.5 and 3.3 billion respectively.
Image Source: The Next Web
In terms of everyday usage, Americans are reportedly spending over six hours on the internet daily using up to seven hours browsing the world wide web.
Image Source: The Next Web
So, in a nutshell, manufacturing, and construction companies have no choice but to embrace digital marketing if they want to stay competitive in their respective industries.
Why Is Digital Marketing Important?
Digital marketing is not just important but critical for the survival of any business regardless of how long it has been in existence or how popular the brand is. Today, no business can thrive without digital marketing.
Digital marketing has and continues to open up numerous opportunities for businesses. It has also become evident that a good chunk of some of the most successful businesses today can squarely attribute their unmatched success to the adoption of digital marketing.
Their success shows just how important digital marketing is and why you need to mainstream this tactic in your company’s overall marketing strategy.
9 Reasons Why Digital Marketing Is Important Today (and in the future)
1. People want to interact with businesses online
This pretty much makes perfect sense. As highlighted earlier, people are spending a sizable amount of their time online and hence it is natural that they would, in turn, expect to interact with the companies they have an interest in online.
Companies that do not have any kind of online presence today are missing out on a big opportunity to interact with consumers – both locally and internationally. So, no matter how good your products or services are, if customers cannot engage with you online, you will not be in a position to compete for market share.
2. More people are now buying online
According to Statista, the number of online buyers worldwide grew from 1.79 billion in 2018 to 1.92 in 2019. The report indicates that this number is expected to rise to 2.05 in 2020 and 2.14 in 2021.
Image Source: Statista
These numbers are indicative of just how online buying is rapidly becoming popular. This is, therefore, a good enough reason why your construction or manufacturing business needs to make it easy for customers to buy from you online.
Image Source: Statista
eCommerce is now big business, not the shy challenger anymore. With 87 percent of shoppers now beginning product searches online, companies are now flocking the online marketplaces in a bid to ensure that they get a piece of that action.
3. Easy to personalize
Unlike the traditional and more conservative ways of marketing, digital marketing is highly customizable, which enables you to personalize your campaigns. This is mainly due to the ability to accurately collect and analyze all the data received from all customer touchpoints.
Accurate data enables digital marketers to personalize digital campaigns for maximum effect. Such campaigns can be used to persuade a targeted audience. This can, in turn, influence their purchase decision.
Personalization enables you to make the customer feel heard, which is a big deal. It also puts you in a much better position of marketing the right product and services to the right audience and at the right time.
According to Business 2 Community, over 78 percent of consumers will only engage offers if they have been personalized to their previous engagements with the brand.
4. Targeting becomes easier
Unlike back in the day when you ran an advert with the hopes of it reaching your target market, digital marketing has now made it much easier for companies to target the kind of customers they want to reach with more precision.
Now you can further refine your targeting to a much smaller or precise demographic, which will, in turn, get your product or services exposed to the right people who are actually interested in what you are selling. This makes all the difference.
Image Source: Social Media Examiner
When you are able to target, you can connect with your target audience and they will be more likely to buy from you. By targeting you can also influence their purchase decision.
5. Gives your (small) business a fighting chance
We’ve all seen it happen. A deep-pocketed multinational comes into town and after a few months, smaller businesses start to close down.
This happened mainly because small businesses did not have adequate resources to compete with established companies who would spend a fortune in (conventional) marketing efforts with one goal in mind – to drive everyone else out of business.
Well, not anymore.
Thanks to digital marketing driving smaller companies out of business is no longer a walk in the park.
Digital marketing has opened up a world of marketing opportunities for businesses to compete favorably no matter the size of their budget. If used correctly, you can remain competitive in your industry.
Companies are now using the data they collect to determine how and where to spend their resources.
6. Increases your sales
The main point of marketing is to ultimately grow your sales. Traditional marketing still works but in today’s tech-driven world, your business cannot solely rely on traditional marketing to make the kind of money you want.
This is because traditional marketing is now limited in the number of people it can enable you to reach at any one given time. Placing ads in newspapers, magazines, and billboards can now only get you in front of a handful of eyeballs.
In order to remain competitive, you need to constantly expose your business and brand to more and more people. This, coupled with accurate targeting, will enable you to sell more and eventually increase your sales.
Image Source: Business 2 Community
7. Helps to nurture and convert leads
Engaging and interacting with customers (on social media) is simply just not enough. You need to incorporate email marketing if you want to nurture and convert those leads into buying customers.
Digital marketing gives you the perfect opportunity to take your interaction to the next level. Keeping tabs and periodically informing/reminding your customers about your offers significantly improves your chances of conversion.
However, emailing alone will not work as effectively as you’d want. You also need to integrate your email marketing with your other mission-critical solutions. For instance, take a look at our Salesforce to Constant Contact integration. With this kind of integration in place, you will be able to effectively track progress on your most recent email campaigns.
8. Helps you to attract and retain the right audience
Attracting and retaining customers is arguably one of the hardest things for any business. This is a challenge that has given and continues to give many marketers sleepless nights.
So, how do you conquer this challenge?
Through consistently developing and sharing relevant and valuable content across your entire digital footprint. Blogs are a powerful tool for sharing content. Supported by social media platforms, they can help you attract and retain the right kind of audience that your business needs to remain competitive.
As an effective component of digital marketing, your content creation needs to be on point. The right kind of content will help you to solve your customers’ problems. According to HubSpot, marketers who make blogging a priority are no less than 13x more likely to see positive ROI.
9. It can help you to reach today’s highly mobile consumer
With smartphone penetration at an all-time high, marketers have no choice but to ensure that they reach as many consumers as they possibly can.
Image Source: Statista
Businesses that have tapped into the eCommerce bandwagon are enjoying an increasingly mobile population that mostly shops via their mobile devices.
Image Source: Forbes
Even those that are just starting out and don’t have an eCommerce platform of their own are actively utilizing sites such as the Facebook Marketplace to reach customers that are constantly on their smartphones.
Many businesses have now become aware of the power of digital marketing and how they can use it to compete effectively in their respective industries.
Now, let’s look at the benefits of digital marketing the construction and manufacturing sectors can leverage to remain competitive.
5 Digital Marketing Benefits that Manufacturing and Construction Companies can Leverage to Stay Competitive
1. Builds and maintains credibility
Building and maintaining credibility is a crucial aspect of a business, especially at a time when the internet can and continues to be used to share negative feedback from unsatisfied customers.
If your business is already established and you have already built credibility, what you need now is to ensure that you maintain that credibility.
Both scenarios require a solid digital marketing strategy in order to succeed. Credibility is built on quality products and services backed by exemplary customer experience. Digital marketing will enable you to build and maintain good credibility.
How? By:
Luckily, all of the above and much more can be achieved through digital marketing.
2. Helps to create and maintain brand awareness
Just like credibility, brand awareness is important for your business survival. If people are not aware of what exactly you sell or the services that you provide then you will not be in business for long. Plain and simple.
Earlier, we talked about how competitive the manufacturing and construction sectors are. This just shows you how many more companies are jostling for attention.
Digital marketing gives an opportunity to narrow down your target audience and put the right message across at the right time. You don’t need everyone to hear your message. You just need the right people who are already interested in what you are selling to hear your message.
3. Showcase your products and services
If you have good products or you offer quality services, then you definitely need to show your customers. Just like creating brand awareness, you also need to ensure that there is product/service awareness.
Consumers are constantly being exposed to hundreds if not thousands of similar products/services. This is one of the main reasons why you not only need to keep reminding them that you also have alternative products/services but also show them that you understand your pain points and that your products/services can solve their issues.
Digital marketing is a cost-effective method of showcasing your products/services. This can be done through social media, blogs, eCommerce websites, email campaigns, and newsletters.
4. Enhance customer loyalty
According to Bain & Company, a five percent increase in customer retention produces a more than 25 percent increase in profit.
Image Source: HubSpot
If you take care of your customer experience at all touchpoints, this will also determine what they share with other people who might not be your customer. What this also does is multiplies the probability for repeat business as well as new customers.
Digital marketing is, therefore, your go-to solution for enhancing customer loyalty. Through social media and email marketing, for instance, you can significantly enhance your customer engagement by:
Image Source: Smart Insights
Do you have a customer retention plan? If you don’t, make sure you get one. It will help you to focus on improving your customer loyalty.
5. Position yourself as a thought leader
Producing and selling quality products and services is good but it’s not enough. Competition is getting stiffer by the day and, therefore, you need to show your customers that you are not just mass producing your products, you are actually an expert in your respective space.
People like dealing with experts. People who know and understand their industry in and out. So, it’s not just about pushing products. It is also about showing your customers that you know their problems and can confidently recommend solutions.
Digital marketing, through tactics such as content creation, is able to position you as a trusted thought leader in your space. By creating relevant and valuable content, you are able to capture the trust of your customers who will, in turn, be influenced to buy your products and services.
Image Source: Business 2 Community
According to the 2019 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, 45 percent of decision-makers said that they were influenced by thought leadership material to invite organizations to bid on a project even though they were previously not considering the brand.
Getting Started with Digital Marketing
Now that you are now fully aware of exactly why you need to invest in digital marketing, here’s a checklist of what you need to get the ball rolling.
Integration for Manufacturing and Construction Companies – Finding the Right Solution
Once you have all your digital marketing sorted out, the next step will be to incorporate the right integration solution. Consider this as the icing on the cake.
By adopting a fully integrated solution for your manufacturing or construction business, you will now be in a much better position to boost your competitive advantage.
SyncApps provides tried and tested integration solutions such as Mailchimp for Salesforce and Dynamics 365 to Constant Contact. These two options will enable you to connect your separate systems, which will offer a streamlined flow of information within your business.
They will also help you to cost-effectively manage all the insights you need for your business. A good integration should be easy to set up, do all the heavy lifting for your business in terms of giving your business a 360-degree view of your customers.
It should also be reliable, customizable and scalable based on your integration needs, not to mention able to offer round-the-clock support services.
Promag Enviro, leading equipment and chemical supplier for the water and wastewater treatment industry approached Cazoomi to help them manage their email and subscription lists through Mailchimp.
The SyncApps by Cazoomi integration experts made this possible by incorporating a feature-packed SyncApps integration that, in turn, enabled the sales team at Promag Enviro to see what their leads, customers, and prospects are buying, opening or clicking in the targeted emails sent from Mailchimp.
This integration now seamlessly integrates leads and customer data to power data-driven marketing solutions.
As a result, Promag Enviro’s customer segmentation is now refined. Their NetSuite and Mailchimp integration enables them to sync information, create targeted campaigns and also see what works and what doesn’t among other things.
Zensah, a South Florida-based that helps athletes at all levels improve their performance is also now using SyncApps to simplify their integration processes for their applications.
With their growing number of products and customers, Zensah increasingly felt the need for a better way to manage business automation. SyncApps perfectly integrated Zensah’s Constant Contact with its ERP system, NetSuite.
With the help of Syncapps, the Zensah team now uses less time entering data and more time focusing on tasks that matter.
To conclude, as a player in the manufacturing and construction sector, digital marketing could be your ticket to success. It is a cost-effective tool to use to propel your business to greater heights as well as boost your customer experience in the long run.
So, make sure you put enough emphasis on setting up a solid digital marketing campaign and tie it to an integration plan and watch your fortunes grow.
Are you are looking for a reliable integration partner to set up a modern integration that boosts your bottom line in your company, sign up with us today!
