Manufacturers are plagued with decentralization. Because manufacturers are tasked with managing numerous products, and across multiple geos, it’s very easy for an organization to lose brand control. Compound that with the complexity of the partner and dealer distribution models and you have a recipe for fragmentation. Manufacturers often have issues with product teams and partners building duplicate websites. Regional teams will then develop these same sites in their native languages. This results in inconsistent branding, and equally detrimental, a decrease in data transparency. In order to shift from a cost-center to a revenue-center, manufacturers need to come together as one team, as one company, bringing all marketing investments into alignment.
Manufacturing marketers are focusing on predictive marketing, solution selling, integrated sales, expert support, and unified customer experiences. Manufacturers also need to move fast. In order to meet their objectives they need to digitize and they need to centralize their marketing strategy. Websites are often the digital hub for that centralization. It’s through the website that brand is strengthened, customer experiences are fused, and analytics are gathered. 
But How Will They Find Our Content?!
Have you heard this before? In my experience I’ve found this is the greatest objection to a centralized marketing strategy. Product teams and geos worry their content will get lost in the fray. They balk at pulling their product site into a larger corporate site because they believe they will fall to the bottom of site navigation map.
In order to gain the buy-in needed, marketers needed to demonstrate the benefits of centralized content and analytics, as well as satisfy the traffic requirements of the numerous product teams. While explaining the benefits of inbound tactics like SEO, that’s often not enough to calm the angst of losing ownership of an entire site.
Get Smart Content might be the solution you are looking for, the glue that leverages and increases the effectiveness of all your marketing investments. Get Smart Content works with manufacturers to instantaneously display the relevant offerings on the web page to the appropriate traffic segments the very millisecond someone visits the website. Manufacturers use this solution to not just drive inbound traffic, but convert that traffic into action. Manufacturers have seen success with initiatives like up-selling and cross-selling, promotion of training initiatives, and sample requests. This direction can be driven by the behavioral data (Digital Body Language) of the contact, previous product purchase history, previous site engagement, referring URL, geolocation and keywords searched.
Drive Web Traffic to Mid-range Products
Rockwell Automation needed a solution that would enable them to not only increase traffic to their mid-range pages, but drive the right segment of their overall website traffic. They also needed a method of ensuring these mid-range product pages engaged and converted each visitor with relevant content upon landing.
They segmented based on migration (customer previously purchased older controller), up-sell (customer previously purchased controller, but not mid range), and acquisition (existing customer who owns a different product). Before, conversion rates were at 5%. Conversion rates shifted to 23% on migration, 18% on up-sell, and 43% on acquisition.
Cummins saw a similar challenge because they also have a diverse set of products. The Cummins corporate web team is tasked with engaging and routing visitors to the most relevant business unit’s corresponding web properties, each which has their own relevant product content, engagement paths and calls to action. By implementing Get Smart Content, Cummins saw a 53% increase in relevant traffic to business groups.
How does your company drive relevant traffic to the appropriate pages on your website? Are you challenged by these same multi-product challenges?
If so, reach out to Get Smart Content. They can help.