The Art of Connection: Social Media Strategies for Manufacturing Companies

“Social media wouldn’t work for us. People aren’t interested in what a manufacturing business does day-to-day”

Social Media Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers

You have been put in charge of your manufacturing business’s marketing strategy, but your CEO doesn’t believe that social media is a viable channel to gain new leads or inform people of your offerings. But what if you could prove the value of social media?

Here we will break down what social media strategies your manufacturing company can leverage to connect with your target audience, help you to establish your business as a thought leader, build brand awareness and ultimately gain new customers.

Know Your Audience

Knowing what triggers and engages your target audience is imperative to being able to connect with the right people. You need to figure out:

Where your audience lives online – Do some research into where your audience spends most of their time online, and which platforms are they using? What are they searching for most? You can do this using a social media research tool

What content your audience engage with – Does your audience prefer video, image or text-based content? What hashtags do they use? Is your audience following any of your competitors? If so, what content do they engage with most?

Knowing what your audience is looking for will make it easier for you to attract their attention. Building this around personas will make it easier still to ensure your content keeps them front of mind.

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Create Engaging Content

Creating content that will attract your target audience and maintain their attention, is one of the most important parts of a successful social media strategy for manufacturing companies.

You could share an educational post series focusing on your audiences main challenges, their pain-points, or advancements and opportunities in the manufactuing industry.

Examples of educational posts:

5 common manufacturing challenges and how to overcome them
Understanding industry standards: A short guide for Manufacturers
The future of manufacturing: Emerging technologies to watch
Environmental sustainability in manufacturing: Best practices for a greener future

Showcase your team

People engage with people.

Although social media provides a digital platform to engage with content, your followers still want to feel as though they are hearing from a human being, not a computer.

By involving your team members in your social media marketing efforts, you will give your feed a more personal touch and break down the barriers that make your business seem so complex.

We’re not telling you to divulge your business’s operational secrets, even scratching the surface of what you do day-to-day will help your audience understand the importance of your work.

Here are some social media content ideas that focus on your employees:

How we manufacture _____
The steps we take to ensure ____
Meet the team
Employee spotlights: Showing a day in the life of your employees

Establish Expertise

By consistently posting informative and entertaining content around manufacturing you will begin to establish expertise in your field.

Produce educational content, such as blog posts, whitepapers, and videos that address industry challenges and emerging trends. Share unique ideas and solutions to problems specific to the manufacturing industry.

Actively Engage

Make sure that you are responding to comments, direct messages and enquiries on your social media platforms. You can do this by nominating a member of your team to monitor and manage your notifications or you could use a social media management tool to automate your direct message responses.

Being engaged and responsive to your followers will help you to build a strong, trustworthy brand image and strengthen your relationship with your clients.

79% of customers expect a response to their social media posts within 24 hours, the average response time for businesses is about 5 hours. Most companies experience severe negative repercussions for a lack of response to social media posts and comments, especially when these comments are negative.

Run Contests and Giveaways

Once you have grown your social media following and your content is attracting potential customers you could run a competition or giveaway. You can be as creative as you wish! Here are some examples of how B2B businesses have used competitions or giveaways to extend their reach and collect lead information:

DEWALT’s #TradeStory contest encouraged tradespeople to share their achievements with a chance to win $500 worth of DEWALT tools. By creating a hashtag specific to the contest DEWALT was able to create a buzz around their company and draw attention to the changing nature of their industry.

SuperOffice’s free trial lead forms have allowed them to collect over 135,000 leads from 20 forms on their website. Using forms to gain access to free trials, events and gated content on their website SuperOffice have leveraged their content to gain new leads.

Pink Panda Digital Solutions used a Facebook contest to generate 200+ qualified leads. By using their premium web design package as a prize they automatically qualified entrants as people who were interested in their services.

Contests and giveaways are a great way to increase the reach of your brand. By encouraging your audience to enter by sharing your page or liking and commenting on your post you will get an instant boost in your metrics and expand your audience to new, qualified leads.

You could give away things like:

A service/product you offer for a reduced price
A prize draw so you can collect your audience’s details

Analyse and Adapt

You need to stay on top of your analytics! Measuring things like reach, engagement, likes, comments, shares and saves is an easy and effective way of learning what type of content your audience is most interested in.

As well as the metrics on your content, you can take a look at your follower analytics to analyse your audience’s age range, location and most importantly your audience’s most active times by hours and days. This will give you a rough guide as to when you should be posting and make sure that you are online when your followers are active online as well.

You can change your posting schedule, tailor your content and target the audience that is most engaged.

Manufacturing Social Media Marketing Strategies, in Conclusion..

In conclusion, you can prove the value of social media marketing by experimenting with different techniques, closely monitoring your audience’s behaviour and consistently providing useful content for your followers.

If you provide some compelling examples of how your social media followers can turn into new business, you can win the support of your colleagues and maybe even convince your sceptical CEO to get on board.

Written by:

Jason Morton | Marketing Manager

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