Increasing Online Searches in the Machine Tool Industry
There are 190,000 manufacturers with less than 20 employees – your shop is probably one of them. Marketing might mean more hours added on top of the hours devoted to getting jobs through the shop. But you don’t need to do marketing in-house, especially digital marketing.
Word of Mouth and Door Knocking Limits
Word-of-mouth sales leads are great. These leads come from a very cost-effective way of obtaining leads by having existing happy customers do the selling for you. But wouldn’t it be nice to have more? Our research shows that not a whole lot of machine tool distributors take advantage of the capturing customers that have been searching online. The ones that do easily dominate the market at a state-wide level. I’ve had the opportunity to chitchat with several distributors from nearly all states in the recent IMTS 2018. Their sales teams typically range from one-man-shops to teams of six. They rely heavily on door-knocking and word-of-mouth. Here are a few obvious issues. 1. Door knocking takes a lot of manpower. 2. Word-of-mouth is hard to predict – you just can’t dictate it.
Does Digital Marketing Have a Limit?
Being found on Google right when customers search for the products you sell can almost instantly increase your market share. Here’s a hypothetical, yet a very common, example. If there are 7 distributors in your state. One of them is a multi-state distribution giant with its own online marketing team. The other one is a lean 5-man team with an online presence. And then the other 4 are just relying on word-of-mouth sales leads. And then there’s you. Now, you decided to jump on board and establish your online presence. The next time people search for machine tool equipment, they’ll see your website on Google with your products. Now all of a sudden, you are in the conversation. It’s as simple as that.
Google search for “machine shops near me” has increased exponentially yearly from 2014 to 2018. According to Google Adwords, that exact search phrase is being queried 49,500 times a month on average with a competition level rated at “low”. This means that the exact search phrase that leads customers to your shop is being searched 49,500 times per month with not much competition. This equates to literally around a dollar per legitimate sales leads into your website.
Our own research shows that there are way more distributors that don’t have an established online presence. At this point in time, the prime position in Google ranking for machine tool distribution is still anybody’s ballgame. It still doesn’t take much to be on top (especially at the per-state level). But I wouldn’t wait much longer.
The bottom line is that you need to market to feed your pipeline. You can’t just rely on word-of-mouth or repeat customers to stay in business. Especially when there are customers (sometimes in immediate need) out there that are actively searching for machine shops, you just can’t afford not to be in front of them. With the numbers presented above, it is very inexpensive to rank high on search results in this industry.
At this point, you already probably know what you need to do to easily outperform other machine tool equipment distributors in your area. You probably have competitors covering the same area that have an army of salesmen to send out to prospects at their disposal. See, in today’s day and age, your sales activity doesn’t need to depend on how big your platoon is. Do you know how many salespeople we have in our team? We don’t have a battalion – I’ll tell you that much. But here I am, in front of you, standing in confidence that you’ll click the button below to find out how staying in front of your customers costs a lot less than you think.