Manufacturing Solutions, Inc. was established in 1992 to design and manufacture equipment for the industrial fastener industry, with a focus on the oil & gas industry local to southeast TX. Over time MSI developed a very effective system to bevel a pipe end in preparation for welding. This was a manual task that MSI now automated with a significant increase in quality and reduction in process time. In addition, MSI designs and manufactures a number of other automated processing systems for the large bolt industry.
MSI is a small manufacturing operation with ten employees and less than $5 million in sales. The market for MSI’s products is global and reaches across several vertical industries.
MSI Bar Shear Machine
Until late 2009, MSI was marketing in a manner that is still very common to small manufacturing companies.
This approach was successful to a large degree until the recession that hit in 2008 ended the effectiveness of this marketing approach for MSI. Leads dried up, fewer prospects called, and the projects MSI did have took longer to close, resulting in an overall sales drop.
Wayne Moncla, the founder and President of MSI, struggled with several questions common to many manufacturers during the tough 2009 year.
“We were not seeing as many good opportunities or orders from the same amount of marketing work. What we were doing was not making a big difference to our revenue. We needed a shot in the arm to grow our business and that is what we got and get from Todd Hockenberry.” states Mr. Moncla
Clearly, something needed to change.
Todd sat down with MSI, reviewed their current marketing results, costs, and ROI, and determined that there was a better way to not cost any more than the existing marketing expenditures.
MSI was convinced that the cost of doing inbound marketing would result in significant ROI by reaching the real economic buyers for their very specialized products. It became clear that MSI needed to jump in and implement a full inbound marketing approach to growing their business.
The implementation plan was simple and completely focused on these key ideas.
MSI's first step was to end the PPC campaign and save $1,000.00 per month. Looking at the data from the monthly reports of traffic, comparing the leads to the quote log, and then lining up with who actually bought, we found that the PPC campaigns had zero return on investment.
The bottom line on PPC for MSI is the leads never turned into sales, and impressions or clicks were not connected to results. Although this broad-based and general campaign was failing, it was determined that a more persona-targeted PPC campaign might be useful in the future.
Todd and his team then completed an extensive target market analysis to determine the exact keywords that would generate traffic from the right people – the target MSI persona company. For example, ‘beveling’ is a keyword that describes from a high level what MSI’s main product does. This keyword generated visits from people looking to bevel granite or countertops – not good targets for MSI.
When the site was optimized for ‘pipe beveling’ and other long-tail keywords, the traffic increased and was more qualified.
Todd's team optimized the website both on-page (what you see when you navigate to the site) and behind page (behind the content things like metadata and H1 tags) to reflect the focus on a defined set of long-tail keywords.
MSI launched a blog about manufacturing automation, allowing prospects to read about other manufacturing operations, case studies of MSI clients, and techniques and products used to improve industrial companies’ processes. These blog posts are targeted to MSI customer personas, optimized around the long tail keyword set, and published roughly once a month.
MSI created a series of videos showing the products in action. Todd's team incorporated these videos into the website, started a YouTube channel for MSI, and optimized the videos using the target long-tail keyword set. These videos help MSI demonstrate the products quickly and inexpensively to prospects and leads.
MSI launched social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. MSI uses social media as a content outlet and even a way to locate people to hire (yes, they are hiring due to a significant increase in sales but more about that later). Using the HubSpot social media tool and Google Alerts, MSI is now commenting on other blogs and forums where their particular expertise is needed.
In addition to the inbound links generated by these comments, Todd's team started a campaign to generate inbound links from relevant and authoritative sites in the industrial arena. High-quality inbound links have improved the authority and power of the MSI site, moving them ever steadily up the Google rankings for target keywords.
Using HubSpot’s integrated e-mail management tools, MSI and Todd's team set up a lead nurturing campaign to automatically send follow-up e-mails over a 30-day period to leads that converted on the website. We also imported all e-mails from previous marketing campaigns into HubSpot and began a regular e-mail campaign to the entire customer and prospect list.
MSI did not stop attending trade shows but integrated inbound marketing with outbound marketing to significantly increase the return on trade show investment.
Recently MSI attended a trade show, and even though attendance was weak, they were able to drive traffic to their booth and generate high-level interest and high-quality opportunities. MSI publicized the show on the website, wrote about it in the blog, sent e-mails to all current contacts, promoted the equipment's videos, sent e-mails to the show attendee list, and sent postcards to targeted attendees that fit the ideal customer persona.
Todd uses the Analysis tools within HubSpot to help set goals and targets for marketing, adjust inbound marketing efforts, and deliver partner accountability for the only results that matter to MSI – increased revenue.
MSI recently decided to expand by developing a global representative and distribution network. One of the reasons they made this decision is that a number of interested distributors from around the world found the site, liked the products and solutions offered by MSI, and wanted to be able to partner with MSI to offer these solutions to their customers. So far, MSI has located and agreed to work with distributors in S. America, Europe, and Asia. “The content we publish on the site has definitely given us credibility with these potential partners,” states Mr. Moncla.
MSI launched HubSpot and a full inbound marketing campaign with Todd at the end of June 2010. As of the end of December 2012, thirty months after launch, the following results show the power of inbound marketing:
Data based on the ten months prior to starting inbound marketing compared to the 10 months doing inbound marketing:
Clearly, the strategy worked and continues to work. Sales more than doubled while the number of quotes and quote volume required in order to close a sale went down.
“Targeting the right people is making the quoting process more efficient with less quotes needed to get a sale and more effective in that more quotes become sales. For a small manufacturer like us this time savings is invaluable” states Mr. Moncla.
MSI is now using social media to reach out to the manufacturing community to locate good machinist candidates. As most manufacturers know, one of the hardest things to do these days is finding well-qualified employees with the right skill set and experience, and we will expand our reach using social media.
“Inbound Marketing implemented by Todd and his team using HubSpot has been a big winner for us. Our revenue is growing, we have seen our investments produce a good return in a reasonable time period, and we are building a marketing system that will yield results for years to come”, says Mr. Moncla.
Just recently, MSI was sold, and the impact of inbound marketing on the value of the business was impressive. The value of the business was three times what it would have been prior to the implementation of inbound marketing. The consistent leads, increased revenue, and engaged contact list created lasting business value.
“Having a reliable, repeatable marketing system made our company more valuable when the time came to sell. Having an active database and communicating regularly with them helped us grow our revenue and our sale price and for that we thank Todd and his team”, states Mr. Moncla
Targeted content is the key, and we will continue to monitor the target customers, answer the questions they are asking, and provide expertise where needed.
There are a number of initiatives planned for the next year for MSI focused on content creation, including accelerating blogging frequency by adding posts answering customer questions and case studies and continuing to define the details of applications and results derived by the users of MSI’s equipment.
We will also develop more extensive white papers for download using calls to action and landing pages to convert a higher percentage of site visitors to leads. The early calls to action were all basic and low-level, and it is now time to develop offers for prospects throughout the buying funnel and not just contact us, request a quote, or other lower convert to lead percentage calls to action.
MSI will develop a direct mail/call approach to very niche markets identified by inbound marketing. We will focus on geographic and small target niche markets and reach out using online tools as well as some old-fashioned ones like cold calling and snail mail. These outbound efforts will be integrated with inbound efforts through the core of MSI’s marketing, the website.
MSI is also developing new equipment based on feedback from the leads and contacts generated through inbound marketing.