Strategies for succeeding in a digital world

Although the World Wide Web is just a little more than two decades old, the way we use it today has little in common with the way we used it when it debuted. For example, in the late 1990s, few businesses had websites. The few businesses that did have websites used them for little more than posting brochures and displaying other static pages. These days, the sky is the limit—many businesses host videos, have page after page of technical information about their goods or services, provide customer service via chat windows, and take orders directly via the web. In fact, it would be unusual to find a consumer-based retailer without the ability to take orders online and provide its customers a variety of payment and delivery options.

All of these capabilities mean that any business, even a small business, has many more ways than ever before to advertise itself, demonstrating its capabilities, competencies, and capacities. The downside for small business owners is that every business can use all of these avenues, so it’s increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd.

Of course, difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Separating yourself from your competitors on the web doesn’t require a large number of complicated steps; it’s actually just the opposite. A program that focuses on a few basic yet effective steps can go a long way in getting your company noticed.

You can do a lot with just four tenets: Be there, be useful, be quick, and connect the dots. Before looking into these four concepts and using them to improve your website, it’s necessary to learn about customer behavior, specifically how customers search. The strategy of learning about customer behavior and using that knowledge to improve your website to capture the attention of more customers is a five-step process call the Five Hows.

Five Hows and How to Use Them

The first four hows focus on the customer; just one, the last one, deals with you and your website:

1. How your customers search
2. How they find you
3. How they are influenced
4. How well their search experiences unfold
5. How you can make improvements to increase traffic to your website and turn more traffic into sales

It might seem hard to believe, but according to Google, 89 percent of business-to-business (B2B) research is conducted digitally. This isn’t to say that other avenues aren’t important. Traditional information-gathering modes include discussions with peers or colleagues (69 percent), reading catalogs and brochures (58 and 54 percent, respectively), and visiting trade shows (41 percent). That said, considering that nearly 90 percent of research is online, the digital environment is a good place to put some attention. According to Google, the number of searches per month exceeds 175 billion. Of those, 15 percent are new searches every day.

Generic searches—an information-gathering process that takes place before homing in on specific brand names—account for 71 percent of initial B2B searches. It takes about 12 searches before a B2B researcher engages a specific brand’s website1. How can you capture more of that traffic? Take a critical look at your website. Are you content with your content? If you determine that the information on your site isn’t easy to find, easy to understand, and thorough, your customer and potential customers won’t either.

The B-Smart Method® is an effective way to conceptualize your content’s strengths and weaknesses. The acronym stands for:

Brand. Brands that are easy to recognize go a long way in pulling in web traffic. In the case of fabrication equipment, naming a specific brand of tube bender, laser cutting machine, end former, or welding power source can go a long way in advertising your capabilities.

Size, Shape, or Specification. You can bend, cut, form, and weld, but that’s not nearly enough information. The critical information includes minimum and maximum sizes, shapes, and specifications of the products your company supplies. Diameters, lengths, bend radii, shapes, minimum yield strengths, and ultimate tensile strengths are necessary to fully specify your products.

Material. Fabricate a lot of carbon steel? That’s probably understood, but it’s best to call out the specific metals you fabricate, especially if you fabricate specialized materials. Don’t stop at “stainless steel” or “chrome-moly,” because even these labels aren’t specific enough. Call out the types or grades and add descriptions: 316L surgical stainless steel, 304 stainless steel for boilers and condensers, 4130 chrome-moly for aircraft and motorsports applications, P91 chrome-moly steel for high-temperature service, and so on.

Application. Are you long on experience in fabricating for construction, aerospace, automotive, medical, or other specialized applications? If so, say so! If your work is certified for aerospace, call out Nadcap, AS9100, ASQ 9001:2000, or any other relevant standard your company meets. For automotive, don’t keep them guessing—mention ISO/TS 16949 if you have earned it and any supplier recognition you have been awarded.

Requirement. If your products concern the oil and gas industry, boiler applications, or construction, be sure that you mention the relevant standards, whether they are from the American Petroleum Institute, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, or the American Institute of Steel Construction.

Type. Naming your services is a good start, but adding specific details will help ensure your customers know exactly what you have to offer. Cutting isn’t too informative; citing specific processes is better. The capabilities, cycle times, and finishes vary substantially among laser, waterjet, plasma, band saw, cold saw, and shear, so these labels let your customers know what to expect. The same goes for bending. A multiaxis CNC rotary draw bender capable of right- and left-hand bending has little in common with a roll bender or a twin-head bender.

Welding doesn’t say as much as gas metal arc welding, gas tungsten arc welding, submerged arc welding, plasma welding, or shielded metal arc welding. Letting your customers know about the specific types of machines you have and the specific fabricating processes you provide can go a long way in helping the right customers find you.

Before gathering and organizing information for your website, it’s important to know what your customers want. That information, by percentage, is as follows2:

Technical......................................... 82

Pricing.............................................79

Reviews, testimonials .....................56

Thorough contact information........ 56

Video ...............................................25

Case studies, white papers ..............17

Blog posts......................................... 5

The quantity of information is critical. Providing a superficial overview of your company’s capabilities is a sure way to lose a potential customer’s interest. More than 80 percent of product or service research projects include two to four visits to a vendor website before initiating a request for quote3. Do you have enough material to warrant a second, third, or fourth visit?

Engaging the Customer

Once you’ve got the customer’s attention, how do you measure engagement? A call to action (CTA) can help with that. Ask the customer to do something and track those actions.

• See it in action, watch a demonstration, watch a video. Regardless of the specific wording, this shows that your website has been successful in capturing a customer’s attention beyond reading about your products or services.
• Download a PDF, request more information. These indicate a more thorough level of research and the possibility that the downloaded information will get passed around among decision-makers.
• Request a quote.

CTAs must not be vague or difficult to find. Place them prominently on product pages where website visitors will see them and use them.

Closing the Sales Loop

Tired of telling your biggest customer that Friday’s shipment indeed will ship on Friday? Don’t have time to return his email acknowledging you’ll ship an extra 10 pieces in that order? Too busy to call him back to let him know that you’ll ship it for delivery in two days instead of the usual three days? Likewise, your competitors probably are tired of that, they don’t have time for that, and they’re too busy for that. How important is all that, anyway?

It’s probably more important than you think. Fabricating metal is only one of the reasons your customers do business with you. Another is service. A recent survey revealed that 79 percent of potential customers say that customer service is very important when selecting a new supplier4. This is an opportunity to scoop up a little more market share, but only if you’re not really too tired of it, if you really can find the time, and if you’re really not too busy to keep up with your customers’ requests.

To gauge your chances of capturing a new customer, look at your retention of existing customers. If they stay with your company year after year and their order volumes grow, you’ve established yourself as a trusted supplier. Another metric is your company’s response time. Do you reply to requests for information on the same day the request was made? This is critical to 86 percent of potential customers5. If you’re not quite up to speed in these areas, you might want to put some additional effort into customer service training. Six percent of companies report scheduling customer service training sessions weekly; 49 percent never hold them. Other training frequencies—monthly, quarterly, and annually—are just about equal at 10, 10, and 12 percent, respectively6.

If your customer response time isn’t quick enough to establish confidence from the get-go, it might be time to schedule more frequent customer service training sessions.

References:

1. Google/Millward Brown Digital, B2B Path to Purchase Study, 2014.

2. TechValidate. TVID: 53F-249-682

3. TechValidate. TVID: 829-67E-E3E

4. TechValidate. TVID: 1FE-2FE-F40

5. TechValidate. TVID: 082-C7C-B00

6. TechValidate. TVID: 789-2AB-A2A