By Michael Bird, CEO, Spindustry —
In today's digital age, manufacturers, distributors, and dealers face a crucial turning point when it comes to digital transformation and marketing. AEM service member company Spindustry speaks and works with many businesses like yours, and while there are several differences in these conversations, there is a commonality– most organizations are not doing enough and not coordinating within their dealer channel to create a win-win.
The shame of not taking advantage of digital opportunity is – it is relatively easy to do. Compared to needing to re-engineer your products, a supply problem, a pricing problem, or even a branding problem, most of the organizations we talk to could fix some of the holes in their digital strategy or execution relatively easily.
In this article, we wanted to highlight the most common problems or missed opportunities we see in the hopes you can take the first steps to resolve them if they are true for you.
Solving the Wrong Problem
We often hear “our website is a mess,” but this is often just a theory. The problem is, essentially, nobody is visiting the site in the first place – or certainly not the right people. Therefore, you cannot blame the website. "It’s not the music at the party… nobody came to the party." Another example could be an organization thinking the pricing of products is the problem when it is the shipping.
The good news is that with the right tracking in place, such as Google Analytics, you do not have to guess. You can find out:
- How many people visit your site
- What pages they visit
- When they leave
- What they searched for to find you
All the information is there, and a frighteningly high number of organizations (large and small companies alike) make decisions without looking at this information.
Not 'Asking for the Sale'
It is shocking how often this is the problem. In some cases, it is straightforward. On an e-commerce site that is consumer-focused, the call to action is clear – shop and check out. It is beyond that where the lack of asking for the sale starts. On many very nice sites, we see a product page describing in great detail a $300,000 piece of equipment.
Obviously, people are unlikely to buy this online, but could they request a quote or find a dealer as the next step? Of course. Sometimes are those options someplace else on the site? Yes. But many times, where there should be two big red buttons asking the user to take action, there is simply no button. Will the user find the button elsewhere on the site anyway? Maybe, but even if you lose 20% of the opportunity because the user is unsure what to do next, it would be a significant loss in sales – and so easy to fix.
Marketing to the Consumer
It makes total sense why manufacturers partnered up with dealers years ago when canvasing the country without them would have been difficult. It also makes sense why manufacturers still need dealers today to handle repair, installation and more.
What has changed, however, is the ability to market to consumers in an affordable way for manufacturers. Now, if your dealers are doing a good job in the digital landscape, then that’s great. But it is quite possible that while you are not marketing to consumers and assuming your dealers are doing so digitally, they are not. In that case, you lose, your dealers lose, and your competitors win.
You also do not have to “cut out your dealers” to develop a relationship with your consumers. You can communicate with consumers and drive them back to your dealers. You can ask consumers to request a quote on your site and then share that quote with your dealers. You could even let them shop on your e-commerce site and give the dealers credit. There are many options.
You likely work with your dealers on some marketing efforts and maybe have co-op dollar programs, but in a surprising number of cases we have seen, digital efforts are not allowed or not a priority. There are many ways to tackle all of this, but it is important that somewhere in your sales channel someone is connecting with your consumer audience via digital.
If you can start solving the right problem, asking for the sale, and coordinating with your dealers, your digital efforts will be more successful (and you’ll see an increase in sales)!
A Few More…
We could talk about missed opportunities and website problems in strategy or execution for many more pages. That said, a few last examples of things to be sure are in place:
- Google Analytics – We mentioned it before, but many companies do not have it or have it set up incorrectly.
- On-Site Search – If you do not have an on-site search, add it. Based on our research, users like to search rather than navigate through the site. If you can track what they type in and which results are hits or misses, even better.
- Mobile Friendly – We are embarrassed this still has to be on the list in 2024, but many sites still do not perform well on phones, even when more than 50% of your audience – and maybe the most on the go and likely to act audience – is primarily interacting via mobile.
We hope these tips ignite your digital transformation journey and get you thinking. Whether you realize it or not, your company operates in both B-to-B and B-to-C spaces online, so it’s time to rethink digital as an OEM!
Michael Bird is CEO of Spindustry. Spindustry serves clients in the areas of Ecommerce, large-scale web applications, Intranets, digital/social marketing services and Microsoft O365/SharePoint development, training and mentoring services. Spindustry is located in Des Moines, Iowa. Learn more at www.spindustry.com.
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