Establishing awareness and credibility through word-of-mouth referrals is great. Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy to translate that success online.

A custom plastic injection molding company headquartered in Northeast Ohio wanted to increase lead quantity and quality using organic and paid tactics. The problem was that they weren’t alone in the endeavor and needed to adapt in order to succeed. Let’s break down how Aztek took an alternative approach to achieve these goals.

The Challenge

The custom plastic injection molding industry is a highly competitive industry, so differentiating the client online was no easy task. Ranking organically for keywords like “plastic injection molding” was unlikely and it was too costly of a keyword to bid on in Google Search Ads. Investing time and money in broad keywords would end up in little ROI and quite a bit of frustration, so it was clear that an innovative approach was needed to market their injection molding services.

The Strategy

Through client conversations, we discovered that our client offered a Transfer Tooling service that inspected and transferred injection molding tools to our client’s facility. While our client did not manufacture the tools, they had the expertise to work with the engineers to build, house, and maintain injection molding tools.
Our initial instinct after learning of this service was that it would be a great opportunity to promote this service. Once a prospect has transferred their tool to our client, it would only make sense to have them run their plastic injection molding manufacturing projects in our client’s facility. However, we had to confirm that the opportunity was there digitally before we could fully invest in this idea.

Using tools like KeySearch, SEMRush, and Google Keyword Planner, we were able to identify that there were keywords and queries related to transfer tooling that were very low competition and had a decent search volume. After establishing that building a strategy around their transfer tooling service was a good move, it was time to build a more substantial plan.

Step 1: Define the Messaging

We had to be cautious of how we promoted the transfer tooling service because the client was not a tooling manufacturer. The phrasing was incredibly important as a result. From a paid perspective, we created ad copy that positioned them more as consultants or experts that knew how to carefully handle or maintain an injection molding tool. We purposefully did not bid on or include the word “manufacturer” because of the possibility that someone may easily mistake them for a tooling manufacturer.

From an organic perspective, we took the approach to answer why it’s important to have expert tooling maintenance and to transfer your tool to a trusted expert that knows how to expand the lifespan of the tool. This messaging approach proved to be effective as our client’s sales team reported back that prospects clearly understood the service that they offered.

Step 2: Build the Content

Once we understood the right approach for the messaging, it was time to build content. This process required us to create new content and update existing pages to support our strategy. These initiatives included the following measures.

• Tooling Page Optimization

  • The existing page did not provide enough information about their services and was not ranking for any keywords, so it was clear that the page needed some work. We conducted on-page optimization by adding new sections, refreshing the focused page keywords, and fixing technical errors.

• Transfer Tooling/Tooling Maintenance Blog Posts

  • Our research showed that users were actively searching for several questions related to our client’s services. We created a content game plan to create blog posts that addressed these questions to drive relevant traffic to the website.

• 8-Step Transfer Tooling Downloadable Guide

  • We created a new guide to intrigue potential prospects organically that outlined the simplicity of the transfer process and how our client did it differently.

• Unique Ad Landing Page for Google Ad Campaign

  • For the different ad groups, we created unique pages that included keywords that we were going to bid on which helps with ad visibility. These pages were built after the initial Google Ad research.

Step 3: Create a Google Ad Campaign

For Google Search Ads, we decided to separate the service into four different categories: design, maintenance, transfer tooling, and general. These categories allowed us to better identify which specific services the audience was interested in and allowed us to refine our campaign after launch. Setting up these ad groups required quite a bit of research, audience refining, carefully positioned ad copy, and strategic budget allocation. 

The Result

Once we had our content and paid ad campaign set up, we started promoting the service organically and using Google paid search ads. The lead-generation strategy ended up landing our client two new customers in less than six months that collectively provided them with millions of dollars of new revenue.

The success of the digital marketing campaign was so notable that we ended up reducing promotion efforts because the client was no quoting business due to limited capacity. For a company that was initially struggling to build awareness online, this development was a great problem for any enterprising business.

Need help developing a digital marketing strategy or resources for implementing next steps? The digital marketing team at Aztek is here to help. Contact us today to discuss our digital marketing services.