Much of what&#;s written on the web about marketing is specific to B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing. While there&#;s also some content discussing broad-based B2B marketing, B2B digital marketing strategies for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and other industrial companies is unique.
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In working with OEMs, we find certain common patterns that must be kept in mind when building a marketing strategy for OEMs, who typically deal with nuances such as long sales cycles, niche audiences, complex products, global reach and supply chain, multiple personas, and the need for CRM and other technical integrations. Furthermore, in the accelerating transition from traditional to digital marketing, it&#;s easy to feel left behind. Some key steps for getting a handle on your OEM marketing strategy, wherever you are on your trajectory toward modern marketing, are:
One of the first lessons in creating marketing strategies is: &#;You have to know where you&#;re at to know where you&#;re going.&#; When it comes to digital marketing strategy, this means taking a close look at your current state and asking yourself and your team some hard questions:
Many manufacturing sectors tend to lag behind when it comes to digital marketing, so there&#;s a huge potential upside to making even small improvements that lead to outperforming your competition online.
SEO can be broken down into three distinct areas according to how they are executed and their impact on your marketing efforts: on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO.
On-Page SEO
This is the focus of your keyword/organic strategy, and it&#;s arguably the most important type of SEO when you&#;re starting to build a strategy. You&#;ll want to start your plan with a target keyword list (a list of terms that you would be disappointed not to rank for, if you Googled them and didn&#;t see your company&#;s name in the results). We help our clients create this target list by evaluating a few different things:
Err on the side of being specific versus broad &#; SEO for OEMs is not about casting a wide net, but attracting a very specific group of technically-minded buyers. This article goes into more about the importance of being specific with your SEO for an industrial or OEM marketing strategy.
Once you&#;ve gathered your list, Google each keyword (in an incognito window or similar) and make sure that the search results pages seem like the types of content that you want to be grouped with. Then, once you&#;ve verified your list of keywords, you can use it to make sure each page on your website is focused around one of those target keywords. You may find that you want to create additional pages or blog articles to help elevate that ranking.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO deals more with having other reputable domains link back to your website to improve your rankings. Getting listed in relevant directories, and asking other manufacturers, distributors and partners to link to your website or blog articles is an effective way to raise your website&#;s authority in Google&#;s eyes and drive quality traffic to your website. Early on in your strategy, start within your network. Once you&#;ve tapped that, you can begin to look at other tactics, such as submitting articles to publications.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO can be challenging. Google looks at your website not only for its information, but its performance. It&#;s evaluating your load time, page speed and other factors. The quickest way to evaluate your website&#;s technical SEO state is to run a PageSpeed report (see the example below). This report breaks down mobile performance and desktop performance, helping you see whether your website currently passes or fails its &#;Core Web Vitals.&#; If the website is failing, it&#;s wise to dedicate in-house or partner resources to streamline it and get that score above 90, as Google has made it clear that they will continue to prioritize high-speed, high-performing websites over low-performing ones.
Identifying your ICP&#;the type of company that is an ideal fit for your product or service&#;will help your marketing team not only generate leads but ensure that they are high-quality leads that won&#;t leave your sales team wasting time with a lot of qualifying discussions. Establishing personas is critical to messaging and conveying your value proposition in your content and on your website. We recommend reading about how to develop ICP and personas in a B2B context and holding a &#;Persona Workshop&#; with sales/marketing/leadership to help drill down into the 2-3 job titles that most often turn into high-quality customers. For many OEMs, your target customers are engineers or other technical folks, who will want to have as many of their questions answered by your website as possible, ahead of talking to your sales team. In order to get inside their heads and create a website and marketing strategy that really resonates, talk with your sales staff and some key customers, to answer the following:
Putting these into an easy-to-read document and refining and updating them over time will arm both your marketing and sales teams with valuable perspectives when creating content.
Bonus Resource: Whitepaper &#; OEM Digital Marketing and SEO Leads to Success for Manufacturer
To start providing instant ROI, there are a number of quick wins your team can aim for in the early stages of your OEM marketing strategy. We&#;ve written an article detailing some easy starters, including these:
Evaluate KPIs: What are the metrics that will drive your OEM marketing strategy forward? An example would be breaking the types of metrics into categories, such as attraction and lead generation. In terms of attraction, you might want to track:
While most SEO strategies tend to focus on bringing in more traffic, in the case of an OEM marketing strategy, you&#;re not looking to attract anyone and everyone to your website. Your aim is to attract the very specific subset of people who are likely to buy from you at some point in the future, and engage them with your content and website as a whole. That&#;s why it&#;s important to always be looking to lower the Bounce Rate and increase Time On Page even while increasing (qualified) traffic to the website, in order to improve its value and effectiveness as a marketing tool.
As companies focus more efforts on digital marketing, it&#;s more important than ever for sales and marketing teams to work together to have a shared understanding of what high-quality leads and successful lead generation look like. In terms of lead generation metrics, you would likely want to track:
And, of course, you&#;ll need tools to track and report these KPIs, which brings us to the fifth step of building a successful OEM marketing strategy.
A full-tilt marketing strategy will have multiple people from multiple disciplines working at once. Whether or not you have the resources for that, having systems and tools to streamline the work will be impactful in reducing overhead and delivering value. These are some handy tools:
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With the right tools in place, you&#;ll be able to manage your workflow and get the high-quality reporting and data you need to keep your marketing moving in the right direction. Looking at your website critically and objectively, and checking progress every quarter to evaluate ongoing priorities, is vital to the success of any marketing strategy. The data sources below are those that we use to evaluate our own marketing efforts and determine our priorities for the next 90 days:
A simple way to manage these sources is to integrate them into Google Data Studio or a third-party dashboard that can display different views for different portions of the marketing program.
There&#;s a lot that goes into creating a successful OEM marketing strategy. If you take the time to ask the right questions, establish a strong foundation and remain data driven, you&#;ll make real progress and see success in your program.
We support OEM marketing teams with the content on our website (like this article), webinars, on-demand training courses, and through our digital marketing and website design services that are specifically tailored to industrial, manufacturing, and other technical industries, including OEMs.
What is OEM? Short for Original Equipment Manufacturer, it is an acronym you might be familiar with if you get your products manufactured by another company, possibly in another country such as China, for example. By its basic definition, an OEM is a manufacturer that specializes in making a particular product or part for another company that provides it with the design and specifications. An OEM part therefore is manufactured to order.
China is the world&#;s largest manufacturer by output, a position it has held on to for 11 years. It is also the world&#;s largest automotive manufacturer. It produces more vehicles in a year than the United States, Europe and Japan combined, accounting for 30% of global production. The success of China&#;s automotive industry rests largely on the performance of its OEMs. China&#;s auto parts industry is estimated to be worth $550 billion. This is just one example of how China is a specialist when it comes to OEM products.
In this piece, we take an in-depth look at OEMs, how they work and how you can do business with one, especially in China. Read on to know:
To fully understand what an OEM is, we need to go beyond the simple definition provided above. An OEM manufactures goods not for retailers but for another company, which sells these goods under its own brand. This explains the origin of the term OEM, which is said to come from the Dutch phrase &#;onder eigen merk&#;, loosely translated as &#;under own brand&#;. The company that buys an OEM product is called a &#;value-added reseller&#; (VAR). Usually, it improves the product or component or adds more components to it, thereby adding value to it before selling it.
Traditionally, an OEM works on a business-to-business (B2B) model while a VAR sells directly to customers. However, recently, more and more OEMs are selling directly to niche groups of customers (for example, technology enthusiasts who customize and assemble their own computers).
1. It manufactures specific components for the VAR, which uses these in its final product. For example, Microsoft sells its Windows operating system and Intel sells its chip to PC maker Dell. This makes Microsoft and Intel the OEMs and Dell the VAR.
2. It assembles and completes the product for the VAR to resell. Taiwan-based Foxconn, which assembles Apple iPhones, is one such OEM. Its largest factory &#; a 1.4-square-mile iPhone plant &#; located in the Longhua District of Shenzhen city, China. If you look at the back of any Apple product, you will find the printed statement &#;Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China&#;.
Outsourcing your manufacturing to an OEM can be lucrative for the following reasons:
Read our detailed blog on the &#;Four advantages of OEM&#;
That said, buying an OEM product can be challenging if you are not careful. Here is what can go wrong:
1. Protect your IP: China only acknowledges trademarks that are registered locally. This, coupled with its first-to-file system, makes it extremely important to register your trademark in that country if you intend to manufacture there. You can register your trademark either through the China Trademark Office or World Intellectual Property Organization (in the latter case, you must apply from the country where you trademark is currently registered). Manufacturing in China without a locally registered trademark leaves you open to:
While registering your trademark in China, keep a few things in mind:
Registering your trademark in China can be a complicated process and can take a year or more to complete. But it is an important step to complete. A trademark attorney/agent can make the process easier.
2. Negotiate an airtight contract: Make it comprehensive, covering everything from product design, specifications, raw material and equipment choices, production deadlines, packaging, and quality control procedures to branding, pricing, the contract duration and everything in between. This will save you a lot of legal hassles down the road. Remember, just signing a purchase order is not good enough. Negotiate an airtight contract, paying special attention to the following aspects:
3. Ensure quality control: The entire point of working with an OEM is to get quality products. Hence, it is important you pick an OEM with an in-built quality control system. Some manufacturers might have their own quality control department. Some might use the services of third-party quality inspectors. What is important is that the OEM is transparent about the measures they take to uphold quality standards. Before signing a contract, make sure you ask the manufacturer about their processes and checks. If you can, visit their factory for a physical audit. Even if you are convinced, don&#;t just take their word for it. Insist on samples before finalizing the purchase order.
4. Get yourself a China sourcing agent: Outsourcing your manufacturing to a China OEM becomes a lot easier when you work with a China sourcing agent. From helping you verify and select an OEM to monitoring production, a sourcing agent increases your chances of receiving a quality product for the best price and on time. Advantages they have that you might not, such as:
In conclusion, outsourcing to an OEM in China has many advantages &#; high quality products at low costs and the satisfaction of working with experts being just a few. However, do not forget to take the necessary precaution of protecting your trademarks in that country.
Sourcing Allies is a team of expert China sourcing agents that has helped western customers manufacture and source products from low-cost regions since .
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