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No product sells itself. Manufacturers or retailers must put in some level of legwork to entice customers and to deliver upon their expectations. This is just as true of analytical equipment like Fourier-transform (FTIR) spectrometers as it is of commercial high street goods.
Online marketing has revolutionised the process of retaining customer interest. It has armed digital marketeers with a unique set of tools that can radically improve the attraction-conversion-retention cycle. However, this arsenal remains underutilized by individuals in many sectors. In this blog post, we will explore three benefits of using online content to promote your analytical equipment.
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1. Improving Engagement
The underlying theme of this process is engagement. At every stage of your strategy, the content you are circulating must engage your target audience. First, you want to attract new visitors to your website, and there are numerous inroads for this. Visitors may discover a promotional blog post via an organic search, come across a high-quality video of your production facility on social media, or discover an interview with a thought leader who extols the benefits of your services. There are myriad possibilities for increasing traffic to your site.
Each of these can be positioned across external websites or social media platforms to draw the attention of the demographic that you want. Blog posts, like the one shown in figure 1, are the ideal format for this. Up to 77% of internet users read a blog, and with the right online content yours could be among them. Once they're there you can begin to engage directly engage.
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Figure 1: Application article screenshow - Making Cars More Fuel Efficient with Tribological Measurements
2. Enhancing Conversion
Now you have a visitor on the site, the objective is to convert them.
AZoTopTip: Conversions are specific to your company, so it is worth spending time deciding what a conversion is in the context of your business. It could be a download, sales enquiry, marketing enquiry etc.
This content can be linked to the item that first caught their attention. So, if they arrived at a blog post on a specific scientific concept, they may navigate through internal links directly to your analytical equipment.
A typical website has an average conversion rate of just 2.35%, but with a dedicated online content strategy this can be vastly improved. The above example from AZoNetwork uses our own blog post as an opportunity to convert visitors, by linking the equipment PDF file. Similar and more subtle calls to action can be embedded throughout online content (See figure 2). These include anything that causes direct engagement with the visitor and creates an opportunity for conversion, such as a sign-up form for your email marketing, or a link to a separate sale you may be having.
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Figure 2: PDF CTA for the equipment discussed in the article.
3. Ensuring Retention
Your visitor has been successfully converted by your online content, but the job isn’t finished. Now that they have consumed your content and possibly completed a purchase, your business is no longer at the front of their mind.
AZoInsight: AZoNetwork has processed a total of 350,000 sales lead enquires for clients in 2018. 23% of those sales lead enquires were generated on article content.
Online content allows you to double-down on the engagement phase of the customer journey to retain their attention beyond the conversion process. This enables you to strengthen your brand. It is similar to the initial attraction stage, and the same content can used to bring new customers in and retain previous ones.
Customers may have consented to email marketing during the convert stage, or have bookmarked a particular landing page, which enables you to periodically pique their interest with new content. A newsletter is a typical example of this. An example of this can be seen in figure 3. AZoNetwork's Automotive edition has links to other articles on the same topic, so if the receiver isn’t attracted by the first one, they may see something they do like further down. You’ve now established a connection between them and your brand, and this wouldn’t have happened without that initial content to attract them.
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Figure 3: AZoNetwork Automotive newsletter
Along with using this strategy to develop their own client base, AZoNetwork also offers their services in assisting other business in developing their own online content to promote analytical equipment. If this is an area that you are looking into and require some expert advice, please contact us today.
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About AZoNetwork
AZoNetwork attracts over 85 million visitors per year from around the world. Our mission is to educate and inform a worldwide audience of researchers, engineers and scientists with the latest industry news, information and insights from the science industries.
Although the business has grown significantly to include a range of science, technology, medical and life science platforms, it has always stayed true to its principal aim:
We love telling science, technology and medical stories to people who can make a difference. Everything else follows from that.
Today we tell these stories across all digital platforms to a monthly addressable audience in excess of 5 million unique individuals.
Our customers come from all scientific, technological and medical sectors. Our extensive web footprint and subscriber base allows us to display a measurable return on investment to billion dollar multi-nationals and SME start-ups.
Find out more about our solutions here.
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