With the recent business climate, featuring low commodity prices and high uncertainty, diversification has been on the mind of many industrial businesses. Whether it’s entering a new geography, or focusing on alternative applications for your product or service, the recent economic decline has made testing the waters in new markets more and more appealing.
With so much interest around this topic, we recently co-hosted the webinar Must-Know Diversification Strategies for Industrial businesses with speakers from Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters and Global Trade Credit. You can find a link to our webinar at the end of this post.
Webinar Topics:
Based on the popularity of the webinar, we decided to write up a quick summary of some of the key takeaways from our portion of the presentation on how to leverage online capabilities to enter new markets.
Your niche products and services are hard to find, but not by search engines. With strong SEO, you’ll be able to be found for what you do by global buyers.
Here’s a tip – the more specific your keywords the better. For example if you are a pump manufacturer, don’t try to win on a broad keyword like “Pump.” Instead, optimize for long tail keywords like “Horizontal Multistage Centrifugal Pumps.” This will help you drive highly targeted traffic to your website (for free!) with less competition.
With online advertising platforms available today such as Google AdWords, it has never been easier or lower cost for businesses to advertise to specific locations of interest.
If you’re hoping to test out a new market before opening a regional office or hiring sales reps, targeted online advertising is a great option. Through online advertising, you can target your ads to any location you like to generate inquiries and gauge market interest before making any large investments. To sweeten the deal, with Google’s pay-per-click model, you’ll only pay a nominal amount for the visitors who actually click on your ads, and get free branding when your ads are not clicked.
It’s great to have customers come to you, but when you’re interested in generating business in a new market, spending some time on outreach is extremely useful. Though many may cringe at the thought of outbound, associating it with awkward cold calls, tools like email marketing have made it easier than ever to reach out to a large audience.
Some good advice on email marketing – develop strong mailing lists and make them targeted. If you’re not reaching the right people you’ll never see results.
Try segmenting your lists by categories like verticals, geographies and job types. This will make it easy for you to target the right people, with the right message to make the most impact.
With the online capabilities available today, it is easier, lower cost, and lower risk to move into new markets than ever before. So what’s stopping you? Start leveraging online capabilities and making an impact in new markets!
Want to learn more must-know strategies for diversification? Check out our partner webinar with Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters and Global Trade Credit here!
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