Signals from the Field

In general, manufacturers have been slower to embrace digital marketing compared to some of their B2B counterparts in other industries. As they do shift their marketing budgets gradually towards digital, they often see impressive results and are then eager to try more inbound marketing tactics.

When this manufacturing client began working with WebStrategies in 2016, they quickly realized the importance of developing a digital marketing strategy. In turn, they have broadened their opportunities to generate leads in very niche target markets and generated impressive results from their digital strategy.

Your website is the ultimate hub for your credit union. Each day, thousands of users visit your site to log in to their accounts, make payments on loans, receive financial education, or research more about why they should choose you as their financial partner.

Every page on your website is valuable, but some hold more weight than others. This post will explore two of the most important types of pages for credit union websites: product pages and location pages.

The digital landscape is constantly evolving. To remain relevant, businesses and marketers need to constantly pay attention. What’s hot today could be gone tomorrow, and tomorrow’s big thing may not even exist yet.

Content marketing is a powerful, long-term strategy for business growth in the manufacturing industry. Compared to other marketing tactics, it's one of the best ways to gain visibility from your target market. It enables you to drive more traffic to your website and solve those burning questions your potential customers have.

However, content marketing for manufacturers is complex. It requires extensive research, planning, and development, making its cost vary widely depending on the scope of work.

Pressured to show immediate success, or lacking deeper insight into marketing performance, it’s easy for credit union marketers to rely on vanity metrics to guide their decision-making process. 

However, these metrics only support non-transactional marketing goals and don’t provide you with the entire picture of how your campaigns are performing.

Your decisions should be backed by more sophisticated metrics like cost per application and funded loans to get the best results from your credit union marketing strategy. These metrics show the real impact that your efforts are having on your credit union, and allow you to make adjustments to where you focus your time and marketing budget.

In many cases, manufacturing companies will not have complex eCommerce platforms that allow their customers to purchase products directly from their website. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't list your products or services on your website at all.

After all, the number one reason for having a website for your business is to attract new customers. If those potential new leads that come to your site aren’t able to immediately find what they’re looking for, the chances of them disappearing and never contacting you are much higher.

An effective marketing campaign creates results. But how good are those results? What outcomes did they lead to? Every credit union marketing campaign needs to be analyzed to determine effectiveness. No matter how creative, interesting, or responsive it is, you have to ask what came of that campaign. Did it reach the goals you desired? Was it worth the investment?

By analyzing the results of any campaign, you can then make decisions on how to further improve it to achieve an even better ROI. Analyzing campaign success leads to even better results next time. It also allows you to be more selective in your marketing.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a recommended strategy for all companies, including manufacturing businesses.

With SEO strategies in place, you can gain more organic traffic, quality leads, brand awareness, and, ultimately, an increase in revenue.