What’s a good conversion rate for a manufacturing business? What can you do to boost your manufacturing conversion rate? And what if you have low traffic — can you still do it?

These are all great questions. In today’s article, we’ll examine 5 strategies to increase conversion rates for manufacturing brands. By the end, you’ll know exactly how to turn more leads into paying customers for your business — even if you don’t have the traffic or the sophisticated analytical tools that some brands do.

Interested? Read on!1. Focus on driving high-quality traffic

If you want to boost your manufacturing conversion rate, do not start with your website. Instead, take a long, hard look at your incoming traffic.

The quality of your website visitors is always important — but it’s absolutely critical if you operate in a B2B industry with large deals and long sales cycles like manufacturing. The more serious, high-quality buyers you can attract to your website and your landing pages, the better your conversion rate will be!

Here’s what you can do to improve your traffic quality:

  • Break down all incoming visitors by traffic source and check which ones convert the best. Then, do a little test: drive more traffic from those high-performing sources and watch how it impacts your manufacturing conversion rate.
  • Implement more campaigns that attract “warm” visitors who have heard about you before. For example, set up search ads with your brand name as the keyword (so they don’t cost much) and create a retargeting campaign to bring back abandoning visitors.
  • Build up a following on third-party platforms where your ideal customers hang out, so you can direct your audience to your site later. LinkedIn, Slideshare, and YouTube could be reliable sources of traffic, to name a few.

2. Qualify leads like your life depends on it

Conventional wisdom says that your funnel should be buttery smooth, with no friction whatsoever. The moment your leads run into trouble, or have to think, they will become frustrated and quit you for a competitor.

The reality is a bit more complicated, though.

Yes, nothing kills your manufacturing conversion rate faster than unnecessary friction. But friction can also be useful — mission-critical, even! Here’s why…

For starters, remember that your goal is to attract not just any leads, but only qualified ones! So it makes total sense to make it harder for new visitors to move down your funnel. The real trick is to do it right.

How? The general rule of thumb is: make it easy… but not simple.

For example, let’s say that your leads have to complete a 3-step form before they can apply for a free quote. The form should be easy to complete — fast-loading, clear, and to the point. But it shouldn’t be simple. Every question has to matter. It needs to convey useful information to you about the lead.

Sure, this approach might lower your conversion rate from website visitors to leads. But it will improve your manufacturing conversion rate from leads to paying customers. It will also save you precious time and attention that you would otherwise waste on people who are a poor fit!

3. Identify sticking points and eliminate them

Your marketing funnel is only as strong as its weakest point. The best thing you can do for your manufacturing conversion rate is find those weak links and fix them up.

In fact, here’s one you can test right away!

How long does it take your team, on average, to reach out to a prospect requesting a free quote or consultation? Well, whatever the answer, try to shorten that time! Responding to a customer request within 1 minute can boost conversions as much as 22x. So the faster you can call or email back to your leads, the better it will be for your conversions.

Chances are, this is far from the only bottleneck in your manufacturing business. Completing your opt-in form; going from verbal agreement to signing the contract; getting a new buyer to make the payment; getting a response to your follow-up emails — even separately, these hiccups can slow down your sales cycle. But if they add up, your manufacturing conversion rate can plummet well below 1%.

If you don’t want that to happen, stay on the lookout for any snag in your marketing funnel. And as soon as you spot one, take immediate action to fix it!

4. Find YOUR baseline manufacturing conversion rate

“What is a good conversion rate for my industry?” is a question that almost entrepreneur has asked, at one point or another.

And in many industries, you can pull a naughty high-schooler and simply look up the benchmark conversion rate! It’s the business equivalent of peeping someone else’s homework and passing it off as your own.

However, this trick doesn’t work as well for manufacturing. The spread in pricing, average deal value, sales cycle length, traffic volume and other indicators is just too much! As a result, one brand might be losing money with a conversion rate of 15% or more — while another one thrives converting just 1% of their leads.

That’s why you want to identify the baseline conversion rate that is unique to your manufacturing brand. What percentage of leads do you need to convert for your business to be sustainable?

Once you’ve found your baseline, you can use it as a point of reference for your marketing campaigns. If you manage to surpass it, great! And if you dip below it, you can always take is as a signal to step back and reexamine what you’re doing.

5. Use qualitative data in addition to quantitative data

Gosh, that subheadline is a mouthful! Here’s what we mean by that:

To optimize your manufacturing conversion rate, you don’t have to use your website analytics alone. Sure, quantitative data is important, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Plus, sometimes you just don’t get enough traffic to draw statistically significant conclusions!

To improve your conversion rate, you can also measure the quality of customer interactions with your manufacturing brand. For example:

  • You can record and evaluate the quality of your team’s calls with potential customers, to identify areas of improvement.
  • You can record unique visits to your website and separate landing pages, so you can see what trips people up and where they get frustrated and quit.
  • You can do customer development interviews with existing customers, or anyone from your target audience, and use those insights to improve your marketing.

A lot of business owners neglect conversion rate optimization because of low traffic — you don’t need to be one of them! Focusing on qualitative data can help you just as much as doing fancy A/B tests or heatmaps would if you had enough traffic — so don’t neglect it!

Get a free audit of your video marketing strategy

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If you’re already using video in your marketing, or even just thinking about it, we want to help you make the most of it!

Interested? Then we invite you to book a free video marketing strategy audit with our experts here at The Draw Shop:

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