ILMA Compoundings March 2018 - 30

Speaking Your Language
How to choose a marketing partner

arketing agencies have become
a commodity, and with so
many people starting agencies
in the past 10 years, it can be difficult
to find the one that fits your company. Most of these fresh marketing
agencies have zero experience in the
manufacturing and industrial industries. Although these agencies might be
equipped to handle other businesses, a
one-size-fits-all method does not work
for the manufacturing industry. Mainly,
the issue is in their tendency to miss
a lot of the key points that are most
important to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) because the agencies
don't understand their target demographic. These marketing mistakes tend
to arise because the agency has sold you
on the false idea that marketing is marketing no matter who it involves. This
couldn't be further from the truth. Below are two examples that I experienced
firsthand with clients that suffered from
choosing the wrong agency.

Case study 1
A plastics company was looking to do
some advertising to increase traffic to its
site. Personnel searched Google for local
advertising agencies in their city and,
after speaking with a few, made their
decision and moved forward. The

MARCH 2018

| COMPOUNDINGS | ILMA.ORG

agency they chose advised them that
Google AdWords would be the best
strategy and that agency staffers were
experts in it. After five months of
advertising and a total of $15,550 spent,
between pay-per-click (PPC) costs and
management fees from the agency, the
company canceled the program for lack
of results. When questioning the agency
about the poor performance, the agency
responded by saying, "We need more
time to continue testing out the target
demographic's behavior and optimize
the campaigns." The issue with the
campaigns was occurring because the
target demographic was not turning to
a "Google Search" for suppliers in their
category. The traffic the company was
getting was mainly inventors, while their
target demographic was Fortune 500
companies. Had the agency been more
experienced in the manufacturing marketing, this could have been avoided.

Case study 2
A contract manufacturing company successfully completed a website
overhaul with a local marketing agency.
After 12 months of search engine optimization (SEO) maintenance, the company wasn't excited with its keyword
position improvements and didn't see
much of a traffic increase from the pre-

By Kyle Milan

vious 12 months. So far, it had $18,225
invested into the SEO maintenance
and decided to not renew its contract.
The company lost hope in SEO and
said it didn't work for the business.
Some time later, upon completing an
SEO and website audit, it was found
that there were numerous "red flag"
issues with the website and none of its
pages were optimized for the correct
theme and phrases for the business. The
company had decent position rankings,
but they were for search terms that had
little to no monthly search volume. The
agency didn't fully understand what the
company's manufacturing service was
and couldn't figure out other relevant
themes and phrases.
It also didn't help that the agency was
focusing on backlinks instead of creating new content. Google has made it
clear over the past 12-18 months that
content is important and rewards companies that produce new content with
higher rankings. The $18,225 previously spent was lost because all of the pages
needed to be optimized for the correct
themes/keywords and all website errors
fixed. To get the website back on track,
it cost the company another $5,500. Its
SEO maintenance is now in full swing
and organic traffic is up 647 percent
from the previous 12 months.

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ILMA Compoundings March 2018

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