If you’re a manufacturer, your first objective is to get the right people to your website who are looking for the products you are offering. That goes without saying. This article, however, is a more “long tail” way to bring the right audience to your website when they aren’t quite ready to purchase just yet. These ideas are designed to help you build a list of qualified prospective customers to keep in touch with. So, when that buying decision comes down, your company will be the first one they think of.
First and foremost, you must define your overall audience. You may be a manufacturer but that doesn’t mean that your website is going to appeal to each and every engineer. Generally, there is a specific engineer in a specific industry that is your ideal customer. Keeping that in mind, let’s explore some ways to attract that engineer.
Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is a simple concept. You put some information on your website about another company’s products (hopefully a company who is related to your industry but not a competitor) and get paid by that other company either for each sale made or for each lead produced.
A simple illustration of this is selling cars online with ads for tire companies. Any leads or sales that are generated for the tire company from your car website earns you a commission. For a manufacturer, it could be calibration services that could be used with your product, but not currently supplied by your company.
There are affiliate marketing platforms that you can subscribe to that will offer you items that you may want to add to your website and they provide the code for your website and manage your commissions. You can also decide to do this one-on-one with a supplier that you use for services and setup an agreement to show each other’s ads on each other’s website.
A truly automated system, but not necessarily profitable unless you get thousands of website visitors is Google’s AdSense program. At one time they offered decent funds for the clicks, today not so much and you may not have the desired control over the products you show.
Content marketing: Content marketing is when you add content to your website or blog about your business, industry and/or products. The desired content should bring people to your website who are seeking that information. The downside of this is creating that content for a website visitor to download. These are supposed to be setup to be a lead-gathering tool so that you know exactly who has come to your website and what they are interested in.
Typically content marketing consists of a “gated” area for downloads, meaning that the site visitor must fill out a form in order to download the document. This can work very well for you if the downloads are datasheets of your products. It is very difficult to create white papers and other detailed documents and make them available for download. First, it’s almost impossible to guess what the site visitor would be interested in downloading. Second, it’s time consuming.
Combo Affiliate/Content Marketing: This has been around for a long time – at least 10 years, but most people probably haven’t heard of it. The company is called NetLine Corporation. They own at least several websites: tradepub.com, netline.com, and revresponse.com. Each of these sites offers a slightly different service but you can subscribe to all of them or just the one that’s right for you.
Netline.com allows you to publish your own brochures, catalogs, whitepapers, etc. on their website and make these documents available for others to display on their website. You set the amount you are willing to pay for each lead generated (minimum $9/lead) and the limit on the number of leads you will accept. You also set the parameters of what you consider to be a “good” lead. With this scenario, your documents are now available on thousands of B2B websites and every person who wants to view that document must complete a form to download it. (The document is free, the price of download is to give you information.)
At the time of this writing, netline.com is saying that their documents get 125 million unique visitors per month, have been processed 700,000 leads per month and over 40 million leads processed to date. Remember you set the limit of leads you’re willing to accept – so 100 leads at $9 ea. would cost you $900.
For this service, you would be a “publisher” since you would provide the document(s) to be published on other websites.
Revresponse.com is the website where you put free downloads on your website to gather lead data for publishers at netline.com. Again, this is a B2B platform and all the documents are business-related. You sign up for free, select the categories that you want to offer downloads for, place a small snippet of code on your website where you want the Free Download Ad to appear, and collect money for each lead generated. (You can also use code for social media sharing, email signatures, and blog posts.)
A simple illustration would be Web-Kare’s website. We offer a “Free Professional Marketer’s Library” page that has content coming from tradepub.com that is specifically about marketing, SEO, content marketing, etc.
The success of this program in terms of money may not be exciting but consider this… your website would now have a page with new and fresh content on it for Google to index. This would increase the probability that your website’s search rankings might benefit from this new content.
Tradepub.com is NiteLine Corp’s online “research library”. You can subscribe for free to this website and create a library of content that is of interest to you. It offers all the documents currently available at NetLine and categorizes them for their readers. This site is designed to bring one more online exposure for your content. They also collect the data for you from people who want to download your document. Subscribers can use their LinkedIn account to sign in. So, in addition, to all the individual publishers that are featured on many websites, this one comprehensive website also offers opportunities for lead generation.
Admittedly, the direct sale that most of our clients enjoy from someone coming to their website at the moment that they need the product being offered, is the most ideal situation with the shortest conversion. However, using some “long tail” ways to generate leads and build a prospecting list for email marketing and brand awareness, is not something to ignore.
Please feel free to visit these websites to get more detailed information: https://revresponse.com, https://netline.com and https://tradepub.com.
And check out Web-Kare’s free marketing library at https://web-kare.com/free-library.html to see an example of one way publisher’s documents can be displayed.