At HAWKER®, we have developed a reputation for offering efficient, high quality, cost-saving battery and charger solutions for the motive power industry. Therefore, when it comes to brand awareness and sharing our product innovations, we have embarked on a digital marketing strategy that has enhanced our business branding goals while educating our customers.
We’ve been successful executing a strong digital marketing strategy, and we’ve come to appreciate its importance in achieving our sales and revenue goals. Below are some educational and impactful strategies that you may choose to apply to your organization.
In the B2B space, word-of-mouth marketing continues to be a strong business referral source. That said, marketing trends are demonstrating the increase in online prospect research, even in light of a referral from a trusted source. Respected resources in the marketing space tell us that 61% of prospects search online before purchasing a product.
As a result of the increasingly strong relationship between offline and online referral sources, businesses are adopting digital marketing strategies to ensure their brand is positioned in the best possible light when a prospective customer searches for them.
A digital marketing strategy is your opportunity to inform, engage, and attract potential customers along their pathway to purchase. Digital marketing uses digital channels like websites, social media, search engines, blogs, and emails to share marketing messages.
When someone is comparing multiple products or organizations with which to do business, they invariably choose the organization that gains their trust and demonstrates effectiveness. For example, at HAWKER we want organizations to know that we have decades of motive power experience, and that we’re industry leaders in quality, performance, technology, innovation, and cost-savings power system solutions. This is our Unique Selling Proposition, and it permeates every message we use in our digital marketing campaigns.
Digital Marketing allows us to “tell our story” in a way that showcases our brand’s advantages. One way we showcase our expertise is by sharing original news and frequent updates on our website. For example, one article we wrote recently outlines our lean processes and how they help us better deliver value to our customers. In addition, sharing these articles on social media allows us to demonstrate to our audience our expertise and Thought Leadership in areas that are important to them.
We build trust with our target market by leveraging our knowledge and experience as one of the world’s largest lead-acid battery manufacturers. Displaying our thought leadership helps our target market understand who we are and what we do. Social media posts and content marketing blogs we share are geared toward information that interests our audience.
For example, our most successful blogs is about maximizing your battery life. Having fresh, original content that entertains and shares expertise is an effective way to reach our target market through digital platforms. In addition, search engines love to see frequently updated content on our website. By frequently updating our site, we are more likely to show up in a search.
As we have begun to implement Digital Marketing strategies, our target market has engaged with our content, explored our website, and learned more about our business. And we’re not the only ones taking advantage of being online. Strategic website landing pages are used by 68% of B2B businesses to acquire leads. By gaining an increase in engagements with our digital marketing efforts, the more likely it becomes that they will interact with our company and purchase our products.
In the digital space, it only takes about 50 milliseconds for someone to decide if they like your site and whether they’ll stay or leave. Those .05 seconds matter - your website is often your company’s first impression on a potential customer.
Your website is an incredibly important asset in getting potential customers to learn more about your brand. Visually appealing websites that are functional and engaging are a necessity to a business’ success. It takes work to create and maintain a website like this. Interactive website design comes as a result of intentional design in your digital marketing efforts. Additionally, making sure that your website is updated frequently is critical in showing up on search engines.
In addition, your website must be compatible with mobile devices. 57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile website.
Finally, we’ve found that improving website loading time is imperative. 47% of internet users expect a maximum of 2 seconds loading time for an average website, and 39% of people will stop engaging with a website if it takes too long to load.
You might be under the impression that your industry is not suited for social media participation. At HAWKER, having our own social media presence has enabled us to reach out directly to our target market. Social media has dramatically grown our brand awareness.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram are all widely used social media sites by a majority of audiences. It should be noted that we do not create posts that solely talk about our own products and services. Instead, we’ve seen that posting about our company culture, relevant news, and what we offer our dealers demonstrates who we are and what we value in an easily accessible way. Social media also gives us a way to connect with and provide support to our customers.
Your social media accounts are often the first things to appear on a search engine.
There are several tools we use to show up more widely on the internet. One way we engage our audience and increase our visibility online is through the use of hashtags. To understand what hashtags to post, we use free tools like Hashtagify to see what hashtags are trending in our industry.
We’ve found that some of the hashtags that rank well for us are #forklift, #materialhandling, and #supplychain. Using these hashtags in our social media posts attract our target audience to our social media pages even if they don’t follow us.
When was the last time you “Googled” your business? Search engines drive 93% of all website traffic, and most people never make it past the first page of search results. The best way to get your company on page one is by publishing consistent, frequent content on your website and social media sites.
Writing and publishing articles on your website is an excellent tactic in the digital marketing strategy for a B2B company. This tactic of content marketing gives us credibility with Google and significantly improves our website's organic search efforts.
As a battery and charger supplier, providing invaluable information to your audience will set you apart from your competition. Moreover, you can implement a content marketing strategy without spending a lot of money simply by frequently updating your website's content. By updating and republishing old blog posts with new content and images, you can increase organic traffic by as much as 111%.
When you search in incognito mode for your own company, you can get an accurate picture of what your search results would be for a prospect. The first page of search results for HAWKER is full of our organic marketing listings. Our search results end up being our company website, Google My Business account, and our company's Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles. Studies show that if you occupy at least two spots on page one, prospects are 50% more likely to become customers.
In conclusion, people using mobile phones for website searches is projected to increase nearly sevenfold by 2021 across the globe. The increase of digital users naturally should change how we interact with and market to our target markets. Digital marketing is not a trend that will pass, but rather is a part of the marketing strategy that is imperative to the success of your business.
In conclusion, we’ve found digital marketing to be extremely useful in producing real results for our organization. We’re looking forward to making this journey into understanding the digital landscape with you and excited to see what exploring the digital space could mean for your business and your net new sales efforts.
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