Inbound Marketing works for industrial companies. An example of an industrial company succeeding using inbound marketing is Safe-T-Cover, an enclosure manufacturer located in Nashville, TN.
Knowing he needed to improve lead generation, Craig Carmon of Safe-T-Cover looked online and on Twitter for sources of industrial marketing expertise and found us as well as Consilium. He reached out to us and we undertook a pilot project to prove that Inbound Marketing would indeed drive new marketplace awareness, convert prospects to leads, and ultimately result in more sales.
The goals of the pilot project were to increase target persona awareness of alternatives to entrenched products, educate engineers about new design considerations, and increase the overall market size and grow Safe-T-Cover's market share.
The key outcome was to test the theory that industrial enclosure buyers are going online to solve problems and answer questions and that they will respond to content marketing resources.
Our goal was not to determine if will they buy a custom enclosure online but that will they start the buying process digitally and be available for one-on-one interactions leading to a sale. So in a large sense, our main goal was to reproduce introductory sales conversations with digital marketing content.
Another goal was to provide value and expertise to the enclosure ecosystem of reps, distributors, supply houses, engineers, architects and be the source they turned to for information about industrial enclosures and backflow enclosures.
Our plan was to attract new visitors with content using SEO matched to the appropriate stage of the buyer journey (awareness, consideration, decision), create emails that engaged the existing contacts, use social media to reach influencers, and start blogging to build content creation muscle and current, relevant articles for all parts of the inbound marketing plan to use and share.
We planned to convert prospects with offers on landing pages for content assets like e-books and engineering guides to help the visitor self-qualify based on their interests and behavior on the site as well as their content consumption.
We would build this content based on interviews with subject matter experts and match it to key inflection points on the buyer journey.
Our key tasks were to
- educate the team about the tools and strategy for this plan
- prepare the initial content including blog posts, emails, and offers
- advise on implementing best practices for inbound marketing
The results expected were
- increased awareness measured by visits and conversions
- greater engagement with reps and key markets
- proof of inbound marketing for manufacturing concept
- new leads and contacts in the pipeline
The results of this initial project were definitive.
- Website visits increased by 43% in 90 days
- Leads generated went from virtually none to 22 in the third month of the project.
- Built co-branded email campaign for large rep group that yielded 4 new projects.
- Created the ebook "Project Engineer's Handbook For Custom Enclosure Design Considerations"
- Started blog with 6 new posts and started regular email updates to contact database.
With the effectiveness of Industrial Inbound Marketing proven for Safe-T-Cover, Craig decided to continue our engagement and drive the process of creating content, distributing and promoting that content, and engaging the ecosystem to build connections and share expertise.
Over the next year we helped Safe-T-Cover create new offers based on target personas and buyer journey stage, continue blogging, reaching out to influencers on social media, build workflows to automate follow ups, integrate content with advertising campaigns, continue to optimize the website for SEO to drive more top of the funnel traffic, analyze competitors, create more co-branded campaigns with partners, and educate the team at Safe-T-Cover on how to extend the ideas of inbound marketing to the sales team.
The results of this ongoing project were again definitive.
- Overall site traffic increased another 31%
- Lead generation went up to over 1% of all visits
- Over 300 new leads were generated in 2016
For 2017 we recommended a new site design and full migration of all content to the HubSpot platform as well as a continuation and expansion of the Inbound Marketing strategy in place.
So far in 2017 traffic is running about 30% ahead year over year.
The conversion rate of visits to leads has more than doubled since the launch of the new site.
But the best part is the growth in sales.
Crag Carmon says, "We are having to consider expansion plans based on the increased volume of sales. Our sales were up over 25% last year and are running at about a 20% growth rate this year on top of that. We are entering new markets and expanding the sales of our custom enclosures line. Inbound Marketing is a winner for us. We have the sales to prove it. Todd and Ed are experts at this process. We understood the strategy in general but they helped us clarify what we should be doing and why we should be doing it, and then guided us in the implementation of that strategy. They know the right things to do and how to do them in a way that produces results."
Topics: Case Studies, Sales
