Tom Gullily, Sales & Marketing Manager at Profile Precision Extrusions, recently wrote a guest blog for StringCan Interactive and allowed us to interview him for a client testimonial video so that other manufacturing companies can understand the benefits of digital marketing and how it works. Here is his story:
While serving as the Sales & Marketing Manager at Profile Precision Extrusions, one thing that has truly fascinated me is how digital marketing has grown and transformed our company. I have seen and experienced the impact of digital marketing firsthand because I've worked closely with our digital marketing team at StringCan Interactive. So when they asked me to write about my experience so that others in the manufacturing industry could learn from it, I quickly obliged!
If you haven't heard of us yet, Profile Precision Extrusions is the industry leader in manufacturing the smallest and most complex aluminum extrusion designs for a wide variety of industries. Our parts can be found in surgical instruments, aircraft, satellite cooling systems, bicycle wheels, and much more.
Since we focus on being the experts at "small," we decided to let StringCan Interactive be the experts at digital marketing. We partnered with the company's founder about ten years ago when online search was in its infancy. The first step we took was advertising on Google, and it worked! Even with an ad budget of just $5 a day for the first month, we gained several new customers. With the initial results being positive, we decided to continue investing in digital marketing and expanding our efforts. Ever since then, our company has experienced several exciting changes that I want to share with you and other manufacturing companies:
Remarkable Business Growth
Once we began taking full advantage of digital marketing, our company has experienced major growth! For example, our team consisted of only 25 people just a few years ago. Today, we have 45 employees (and growing) on our team, and each one contributes substantial value. If we had never taken the steps necessary to make ourselves searchable online, we wouldn't be enjoying the success we are today.
Constructive Customer Insight
We now understand our audience better than ever before, which makes it easy to engage with them the best ways possible! This knowledge is all thanks to the personas (fictional representations of our target market) that StringCan Interactive created for Profile Precision Extrusions. To create these personas, StringCan conducted extensive research to validate our target audience and to understand our prospective customers on a deeper level.
This digital marketing strategy was extremely insightful and revealing for us. Although we already knew that many of our customers are engineers and material managers, creating personas for these audience sectors revealed unknown demographic and psychographic information about them that we can now leverage. For example, we learned where these personas “live” online so that we can can target them in the right places at the right time. Plus, StringCan found out that we have another group of potential customers that we never even considered! Discovering new personas gave us the opportunity to reach out to more customers who are truly interested in our products.
Reaching Far and Beyond
Many manufacturing companies have a website they created years ago, which is great! But, if you don’t ever update your website or optimize it for search engines, your website’s reach will fall short. As part of our new strategy, StringCan created a new website for our company from the ground up. In addition, StringCan’s team compiles and shares valuable metrics with us every month to show us how our new website is performing. We are able to see how many website visitors we get every month, how they are getting there, how long they are spending on each page, and much more.
The fact that you can use online analytic tools to measure digital marketing is extremely beneficial. Right away, the metrics made it clear that our new website is allowing us to reach more customers. We expanded our reach not only nationally, but internationally as well! With the use of digital analytic tools, we found that people from all over the globe are looking at our website. Since we know that people from these countries are interested in our products, we can confidently consider the possibility of expanding our target market.
Ever since Profile Precision Extrusions began taking advantage of digital marketing, our company and our sales have experienced impressive and positive growth. So if your manufacturing company isn’t using digital marketing tactics yet, don’t wait any longer! Digital marketing can give your business the boost it needs to be more successful. The sooner you pursue it, the sooner your company and sales will benefit.
Image by Gunter Stachon via Flickr CC
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Jay, the CEO of StringCan, oversees strategy and vision, building culture that makes going into work something he looks forward to, recruiting additional awesome team members to help exceed clients goals, leading the team and allocating where StringCan invests time and money.
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