How Can a Chinese Factory Benefit from Inbound Marketing?

Imagine you own a factory located somewhere in China.  You make an extremely high quality product, you have an excellent team, you stand behind your product and you want to increase your market share.

On the other hand, imagine you have a need to have a product manufactured.  You are looking for a reliable company to make your product.

As a researcher, my first impulse is to look to the Internet and perform a search. My results do not show you in my search result, but a list of portals.

I enter one of the portals and my search continues. There are plenty suppliers to choose from, perhaps hundreds or thousands.  My search hasn’t become easier. It is now more difficult.

A real life example.  I was looking for a Chinese OEM alkaline battery factory and I was directed to a site that was offering lead acid batteries for automobiles.

The search is more difficult for two reasons. First, I am no longer using superior quality search engines, but the portal’s search engine. Secondly, the information in the portal is missing, incorrect or dated.

So what seems to be the disconnect?  Simple. Researchers cannot find the information they are looking.

Communicating on the internet is like talking to one another. If you don’t talk in the language the listener understands, you don’t’ get heard. And that is the problem.  It is just happening with web pages, not our tongues.

It’s no one’s fault. It is just a misunderstanding.  As a researcher, there is little I can do about it.  As a supplier or factory owner, there is tremendous opportunity for you.

Factory owner:  Talk to me in my language!  Figure out how to talk to me so I can hear to you.

What does that mean to you factory owner?  It means a website and a marketing strategy redesign. Please don’t interrupt me, but let me, the researcher find you. Help me become more informed and educated. Talk to me in my language.

Enter China Inbound Marketing

Your website needs a major redesign! You need your own website. Not just a page on a portal.  You need to take total control of your message you are sending me.  As long as it is just a portal page, you are limited in what you can accomplish. You don’t need to discard the portal, just make it easier to communicate with you.

Improve your marketing strategy by incorporating inbound marketing techniques rather than using outbound or old marketing style.

The method I refer to is called “Getting Found”, a component of the Inbound Marketing strategy. What is Inbound Marketing?  Inbound is an informational and educational approach to attracting customers. Inbound marketing is fundamentally more cost effective as we are not spending money on interrupting people who don’t care about our message. Fundamentally, it is a three step process.

Get Found.

We generate leads.  We use tools attract interested prospects to your website. It consists of generally blogs, social media channels and organic search (SEO) to generated leads. The majority of the companies blogging and they are seeing significant results.

Convert .

We convert leads into prospects, then prospects into buyers. These leads are high quality leads because they have essentially raised their hands and said, “Please market to me.” Seth Godin called this permission marketing.

Measure.

We look at our results and better understand what we have done and make improvements.

Repeat.

We perform the process all over again.

If over the years you have used outbound marketing techniques, this may be a very difficult step to make.  However as with any opportunity, nothing ventured, nothing gained.