You’ve heard the old adage, “if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it…” Like many companies, our Industrial Automation client was challenged with limited digital awareness and lead generation to support their sales efforts. In addition, this client dealt with complex subject matter and a more technical audience that includes sophisticated business owners, plant managers, and engineers. These challenges meant that it was time to take a new approach to digital marketing to drive growth and position the company as the leader they are.

The Challenge

Industrial automation through the use of robotic systems is a quickly growing industry across the world. As manufacturers aim to increase efficiency, decrease operating costs, and ensure quality, they are looking for sophisticated industrial automation solutions. However, when they’re looking, they were finding all of our client’s competitors. Our client wasn’t showing up in search results nor were they driving traffic to or leads from their website.

The Strategy

In the middle of 2019, our industrial automation client launched a new website before working with Aztek. However, the site wasn’t optimized and was generating only a few hundred visitors per month – and no leads.

Our first step, as with any of our digital marketing clients, was to deeply understand the services that our client offers, the industry forces, and their audience. In addition, we went through a thorough digital audit with our client that included:

• SEO Audit – We researched the keywords and topics for which the website was currently ranking and identified the biggest areas of opportunity.
• Competitor Research – Learning about the client’s key competitors, we identified keywords and topics that they performed well for so we could develop a strategy to outperform them.
• Analytics Audit – We updated our client’s instance of Google Analytics to ensure proper tracking was set up and conversion points were identified.
• Social Media Audit – We audited all of our client’s current social media platforms with recommendations for content, cadence, and channel branding.

Once we had a clear vision of where the client was today, we developed what we call a Game Plan. This plan included three important elements: the client’s goals, how we’re going to measure success related to those goals, and the tactics we’re going to use to reach those goals.

Search Engine Optimization

Through our audit, we identified that our client had some of the right content on the site, but it wasn’t optimized for search engines, and they were lacking some key content that was consistently seen on competitors’ sites. Our SEO strategy consisted of several elements:

• Technical SEO – We made several updates to the client’s WordPress website to ensure fast load speeds, better usability, and indexation by search engines.

• On-Page SEO – We updated and optimized the content on nearly every page of the site to add valuable context that was missing.
• Off-Page SEO – We focused on building several valuable backlinks early on to increase the fairly new site’s Domain Authority.

Content Creation

In order to increase quality website traffic, we needed to focus on producing new, recurring content focused on the audience’s needs. Our team added a blog to the website in order to publish topical and evergreen content and began posting two new blog posts each month.

Digital Advertising

There was a big opportunity for our client to show up in search results for high-intent keywords, even if they weren’t ranking for those organically. Our strategy leveraged two platforms: Google Ads and LinkedIn.

In Google Ads, we did extensive keyword and competitor research to build several campaigns focused on our client’s key service offerings, namely assembly machines, industrial automation, robotics, and parts systems. Within the first month, we were seeing double-digit leads.

In LinkedIn, we identified a highly targeted audience based on job titles, industries, and affiliations with specific LinkedIn groups. Our team developed a robust guide and promoted the content to this audience. Within a month, these campaigns generated 20-25 leads per month with a budget of just $500.

Reporting

While our client is highly technical, they wouldn’t consider themselves marketing experts. That means that simply sending them spreadsheets' worth of data each month isn’t helpful. As we do with all of our clients, we built a custom monthly report that showed them website performance, lead generation, and insights into what each metric means for their business.

The Result

In a little over a year, our SEO and content-focused approach increased our client’s website traffic by over 700%. Their monthly website sessions when we began were around 300 and have grown to consistently 2,500-plus sessions per month.

Our mix of digital advertising and SEO efforts have taken the company’s online lead generation efforts from zero when we started to 20-30 Contact or Quote Request form submissions each month. Add on to that a consistent number of direct phone calls, and around 20-25 leads directly from LinkedIn, and we’re keeping their sales team busy.

But what good is website traffic and even lead generation if it doesn’t turn into revenue? Well, our client has closed multiple projects of several hundred thousand dollars or more, their capacity is booked for the next two years, and they’re expanding to a significantly larger facility to support their growth. How’s that for success?

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