When it comes to lead generation, a quality web presence can optimize your industrial marketing dollars if you know about the online marketing trifecta.
What trifecta, do you ask?
Google’s free tools, HubSpot’s marketing automation platform and SEMrush’s online research data.
First, let explain what each component of this grand marketing trifecta is.
Google’s Free Tools for Marketers
Everyone knows what Google is, but most do not know how much data Google collects that can be of value to an industrial marketer. Google has two primary tools you can use as an industrial marketer:
Basically, Google Analytics gathers pre-click data. That is, before a web user clicks anything on your web page, such as, impressions & position tracking. Google Search Console (GSC) gathers post-click data. Post-click data provides metrics such as bounce rate and completion of goals you set up in GSC.
Google Analytics allows you to add a piece of code to each webpage and then drill down to critical data such as:
Google Search Console is a suite of tools, provided on one dashboard.
From a technical aspect GSC can tell you just about everything a marketer needs to know. For example:
Here is the challenge for a marketer using the Google marketing platform and tools.
They only help you monitor your own website. Google Analytics and Google Search Console tells you little about your industrial competitors.
This is where SEMrush comes in:
According to SEMrush’s website, “SEMrush is an online market intelligence and competitive research platform that provides estimations of any website’s desktop and mobile traffic. It can help you spot your rival’s strength and weaknesses, evaluate a new market or niche, and even build a successful media buying strategy.”
If you want, read a review of SEMrush from PCMag to review the many tools SEMrush offers.
SEMrush has over 30 tools, has indexed over 8 billion keywords has over 8 trillion backlinks and 143 geo databases that provide data to their many research tools.
So…let’s get real. How does all this data help you?
I will tell you exactly how I use SEMrush and highlight the strategies and specific tools I am using for a regional industrial supplier. These are strategies and tools that would work for any good size regional or national industrial supply or service company.
Let me first start with my top-level strategy. Each tools’ capabilities & benefits flow from my top-level strategy.
As I have written often, there is a lack of online marketing know-how in the industrial sector. Specifically, industrial marketers are very poor at publishing great content for their prospects & customers…as now required by Google. (I will show you in paragraph below about SEMrush’s Position Tracking Tool and prove this statement to be true)
To take advantage of this large opening for savvy industrial marketers, I have focused on three specific areas that I can exploit for the benefit of my industrial client.
SEMrush not only proves to me the statements above are true, the SEMrush tools help me fine tune my strategy and tactics to optimize content on my client’s website and take advantage of competitors’ lack of online market savvy.
For example, my client has selected a specific number of key topics that he would like to be ranked for on Google’s first page. These topics are not selected by any online research tool, but products and services that are current or potential profit centers for my client. Some would call these niche services or low-hanging fruit.
I call them money-makers.
So…to feature these critical topics we are building pillar pages with topic clusters for my client’s website. According to HubSpot a pillar page is, “the basis on which a topic cluster is built. A pillar page covers all aspects of the topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in the more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page.”
To simplify, in the graphic below the circle in the middle is the pillar page and the related sub-topics are then linked to the pillar page. In other words, most people (64%) now use four words or more in their search queries. Moving forward, we are seeing a growing number of longer more semantic searches, such as, “OK Google, tell me where the closest supplier of commercial Rain Bird products is?” And…of course, this is often done on a mobile device using voice recognition.
By giving Google what they want…more information…using the pillar page & topic cluster you are telling Google, “Hey…Google, we really know lawn sprinklers. We are a commercial supplier. We have been in business for 30 years. We carry commercial Rain Bird sprinkler components and we are located in Plano,Texas.”
If your company’s pillar page contains valuable information about “the difference between residential and commercial Rain Bird products” and contain outbound links to Rain Bird’s web site and additional information about commercial irrigation projects, then Google knows to place you at the top of the search engine return page. Based on your mobile device’s location, Google can also tell a web-user where the closest supplier is as long as you met Google’s specific requirements for geo-targeting. Platforms such as SEMrush give you a “heads up” when you fail to give the data to Google in the proper format. Again, if you build your website in this manor you are all set for voice search.
Using SEMrush gives me the following information to optimize this strategy.
This graphic demonstrates the lack of content for industrial marketers. In this graphic SEMrush provides data for 30 critical topics that I have entered manually into SEMrush on behalf of my client. These are topics my client wishes to be an online thought-leader for. Having top positions will help branding & top-of-mind awareness. These are common topics that anyone in my client’s industry should rank well for. I have also entered 20 of my client’s competitors. I have included regional competitors as well national leaders. The national leaders, mostly public companies, are more likely to have the resources to do world-class online marketing. This graphic clearly demonstrates they have not invested in the competitive edge the marketing trifecta provides.
This graphic provides data for 6 key SERP features that you have all seen, but maybe not aware of. Moving left to right SEMrush shows featured snippets, local information provided to Google, how many online reviews, how many inbound links, how many videos & how many videos have been featured on other, external, websites.
As I said earlier, my goal for my client is get them to Featured Snippet status and improve backlinks. A secondary goal, to start publishing more videos on their website. We are currently working on 30 pillar pages, blogs to support these pillar pages (sub-topics) and more videos.
What the graphic clearly demonstrates is that my client, even before we upgrade their website with Featured Snippet status, more backlinks and more videos, is the only website out of 20 industry leaders taking advantage of these 6 key SERP features. The darker blue columns simply show that my client has filled Google’s requirements for local information and that they are the only one of 20 competitors that have any authoritative backlinks that Google recognizes.
Now, the third component of the powerful marketing trifecta, HubSpot
If you read my blog often you know I am a big fan of HubSpot.
If an industrial company wants to get serious about lead generation and improve top-of-mind awareness they must publish great content for their audience and for Google to notice. Period.
The only way to publish great content (pillar pages, blog posts, e-books, videos, product sheets, etc.) efficiently is to deploy your content using marketing automation and HubSpot is the best choice for small to mid-size industrial companies. This will involve a subscription and you can see the pricing right here. If you want, you can start with a free CRM package. It is unlimited and you will never be charged for the service. I use it and it is excellent.
Once all your trifecta components are tied together (including integration of Google’s tools with HubSpot & SEMrush) you will have a competitive advantage that few have in the industrial sector…at least for now.
I’m sure for the industrial marketer that would like to achieve better results from online marketing efforts, these tools can be intimidating. Sure…anything like this takes time, resources and expertise. However, Google and SEMrush have excellent tutorials and videos to learn from. HubSpot, on the other hand, has some of the best training in the world, as well as world-class customer support.
It is a long road indeed, but I believe the industrial companies that embrace these industrial marketing tools & tactics will end up at the top of the heap and stay there for some time…because I simply don’t see the small to mid-size industrial community embracing these principles as they should.
If anyone doubts me, I will be glad to share with you what I see. SEMrush makes it easy to see what your competitors are doing. Give me your top 10 competitors and I will easily demonstrate the gaping hole your friends in the industrial community have left for you.
Can you say, “Opportunity”?
For more info on what The Repp Group can do for your industrial marketing & lead generation…CLICK BELOW