The Role of the Internet in Developing Your Business

aj — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:25:44 GMT

The Web has become the preferred channel where manufacturers, prospects and purchasers go to research sources and partners to build and develop their products. But many manufacturers miss opportunities for new business because they're presenting incomplete or insufficient information online.

Prospective customers use the Internet to research potential solutions. They have specific purposes, and they collect information on plastics processors that can provide those solutions based on their specific, technical specifications and business needs.

Today's prospect is a stealth prospect: in control and anonymous throughout the research cycle until they chose to reveal themselves. Their online behaviors aren’t very different from yours when researching a capital equipment purchase. What they find online about your company – or don’t find there – can strongly influence who they'll engage or investigate further, and who they won't. If you’re deemed worthy, they’ll engage you.

To attract, influence and motivate prospects to add you to their short lists of potential suppliers or partners, an online strategy to maximize exposure AND effectively capitalize on prospects’ behaviors must include:

Present Your Core Strengths – Your equipment and facilities are important. So are the industries and companies you’ve served. But the primary purpose to any successful Web presence for plastics processors is to differentiate you from your competition. And there’s nothing that differentiates you like describing the details of projects you’ve worked and parts/products you’ve made. Present the technical features of each part, the materials and equipment used, the improvements made to the part/product during the life of the project, and any problems encountered and how you solved them.
Start A Blog – They’re inexpensive (many are free), they’re relatively easy to set up and you don’t have to know code to update them. And best of all, a Blog (short for “Web Log”) is an effective means of communicating what your company is doing, what projects you’re working on, company news and anything the market may find interesting. Easy, inexpensive and effective. And here’s a tip: post to your Blog regularly, but you don’t have to post frequently.
Participate On The Web – Find related forums for plastics professionals – like those on Plastics.com – and answer questions, offer suggestions and contribute to the dialogue. Each post acts as an organic reference for you and your company. And remember that once the discussion has faded into the background, your posts will remain in perpetuity – legacy posts are often found by prospects searching for suppliers, and these “breadcrumbs” can be very effective at putting your company in a prospect’s view.

Military Portal Serves Up Important Web Lessons For Manufacturers

aj — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:39:49 GMT

The National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) is a technology provider to the U.S. military and its contractor and supplier base. Its list of Alliance (technology) Partners and Board of Directors reads like a who's who of the machining universe - technology providers, academia and corporate leadership.

To get a strong flavor of the types of support the NCDMM offers the U.S. military supply chain, check out their Manufacturing Solutions page and select from the menu titled "Our Success Stories."

Now, certainly the NCDMM offers great value through driving efficiencies into the intricate manufacturing and machining processes required to build such sophisticated products. Rifling through those Solutions will give you a strong sense of what they've done and how they've done it. And they're actually much more effective at explaining what NCDMM does than the tired prose you find throughout the primary pages of the site. For example:

Over a very short period of time, NCDMM activities evolved from quick response support to participation in a full range of initiatives to resolve production issues that challenge the manufacturing and machining efforts of defense organizations and their contractor communities. This participation addresses currently deployed weapon systems as well as future systems. The impact of the Center's participation is quantifiable and significant.

Ugh.

Now, check out this one example from their repository of Solutions (in PDF format, unfortunately):

Now which of these best portray for you the NCDMM's competence as a potential partner?

(If you said the text, please contact me through this site with the name of your doctor. You obviously get better drugs than Elvis.)

The project sheet does several things that your Web site should do in spades:

Create Brief Vignettes of Your Competence - The PDF is brief. It's easy to read. It states the challenge and the solution and explains how it was done.
What Was The Payoff? - Show directly how your professional competence resulted in real benefits to a past customer through manufacturing excellence.
What Were The Time Benefits? - Time is important to your prospects. Maybe you improved the cycle time of a part or product. But maybe it was improved delivery time. Maybe it was better logistics. Whatever you did to get parts to a customer quicker and cheaper - list it.
Who Was Involved? - What partners did you use? What divisions or groups in your shop or plant or company? Show your versatility.
Put These Examples Front and Center on Your SIte - With apologies to NCDMM, don't bury your vignettes like they have. Make them the centerpiece of your site - you're talking to people that are looking for competent partners, not loquacious wordsmiths.

And another benefit of following this advice: the search engines LOVE this stuff, because you're naturally adding the keywords and phrases that your prospects are actually searching for.

Look, people don't go to the Web to read - they go to the Web to work. To be specific, the folks that you should care most about - prospects looking for manufacturers to make them look good - are.

The NCDMM - a great organization - got their Web site backwards. Push the words to the back, and what you do that makes you great to the front.

MFGx Blog

The Role of the Internet in Developing Your Business

Military Portal Serves Up Important Web Lessons For Manufacturers