The Importance of Strong Manufacturing Web Design
In today’s world, a website is essential for the growth and success of any business. This is especially true for the manufacturing industry. While manufacturers produce a countless variety of products, parts and solutions for other businesses or end-consumers, the web design needs for each business are unique.
Depending on your target audience, the technical specifications of your product, and the industry you’re trying to reach, it is important to weigh all those factors together when thinking about your website.
Evolve Creative has been building websites for manufacturers for decades. Since 2004, we have helped bring products together with their customers in creative and innovative ways.
Understanding the Unique Needs of Manufacturing Web Design
While many people make the assumption that all manufacturers are the same, that couldn’t be further from the truth. A business who manufactures children’s toys will need to market and advertise very differently from the way an aerospace manufacturer does. Every industry is different, and although they’re all manufacturers, it is important to understand the unique needs of each client when we’re building their site.
Target Audience Analysis
The first step in creating a unique website for your business is to identify who your target audience is. This has many layers to it, but ultimately what you’re trying to do is determine who the decision maker is for your products. These are the user groups that you’re trying to communicate with and ultimately will be selling your products to. A target audience analysis can have several different components:
Geographic Targeting
It’s important to know where your target audience is. If they’re a local audience, then you can use your website to discuss how you’re a manufacturing leader in the community and showcase the impact your company is making locally. However, if you market and sell your products nationally or even internationally, the local aspect of your website is less important. In that case, it’s more important to highlight some of your national partners or customers so that new businesses will know that you’re competing on a higher level.
Demographic Targeting
The next thing to consider is your demographics for your target audience. If you’re a manufacturer for consumer products, this could range wildly; you may produce toys, skin care, winter sports gear, or anything in between. What you produce clearly determines your website’s look and feel, but also can influence the tone of voice you use and what imagery you select. When you’re building a new website, it’s important to remember your demographic audience first, because different audiences will look for different things, and a website that resonates with them will help make your job selling to them that much easier.
Seniority and Job Functions
If you manufacture parts or components for other businesses, your demographic audiences will look somewhat different. For example, if you sell pipe handling attachments for the trenchless drilling industry, you work with project managers and senior procurement officials and people with seniority or a specific job function. In that case, it’s important for your website to communicate the technical specifications of your product, combined with strong case studies and testimonials.
Key Functionalities
Another important thing to consider with the unique needs for a website for the manufacturing industry is to identify the key functionalities of the site. These may include photo galleries, product showcases, technical specifications, or even customer portals.
At Evolve Creative, we often tell our clients that their website should be their hardest working salesperson. In doing so, your website needs to highlight and communicate what makes your products unique and better than the competition. By including product showcases and technical specifications, you’ll be able to demonstrate the features of your product, while also leading your visitors to get in contact with you either by phone, email, or even live chat.
Essential Elements of Effective Manufacturing Websites
There are several important elements to making your website effective in the sales and marketing process. The first is having user-friendly navigation. When people visit your website, you will only have a few moments to capture their attention and hook them into learning more. Very often, static or outdated websites will have a much higher bounce rate, where visitors will land on the homepage and immediately bounce back to the search engine because the site didn’t effectively capture their attention.
High Quality Visuals and Videos
Having visuals on your website is extremely important, especially for manufacturers. Being able to show off your product, rather than just talk about it, can elevate your brand and really set it apart from your competitors. At Evolve Creative, we have a portfolio of high quality photography and videography that we have done for our clients, and by using them in their websites and marketing materials, it has helped them grow to the next level.
View our video capabilities here
Mobile Responsiveness
Although the manufacturing and b2b industries typically have a lower mobile traffic percentage, the average will still be roughly 30-40% of site traffic from either a phone or tablet. With that in mind, it’s important to ensure that your website is mobile responsive and looks good on any size screen.
SEO Optimization for Industry-Specific Keywords
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is extremely important for businesses, especially manufacturers. At Evolve Creative, we often say that you can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if nobody ever finds it, it’s essentially useless. That’s where SEO comes in.
SEO is a lengthy process of optimizing your website for search engines so that they better understand:
- Who you are
- What you do
- Where you do it
It sounds simple, but many manufacturing websites fail to communicate that, which makes it difficult for Google and other search engines to understand how to rank your website compared to the millions of other sites on the web.
By implementing a strong SEO strategy during your website redesign, Evolve Creative will launch your new site with the best chance for success in ranking high in search engine results.
Case Studies and Success Stories
One of the many things that your customers will look for on your manufacturing website are case studies, testimonials, and success stories. It’s always a risk to try a new vendor, but to see other people’s success will help lower any of that apprehension for potential customers.
Examples of these could be before and after comparisons, a designed sales sheet with a case study, or a strong client testimonials and feedback. These are all great ways to help bolster the expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of your company.
Incorporating Advanced Technologies
Something that will really help make your manufacturing website stand out is by incorporating advanced technology. For example, this may be using 3D modeling and virtual tours of your production facility, integrating IoT and smart manufacturing data onto the site or having some sort of chatbot or AI for customer support. By showing your customers that you fully embrace and understand the changing technological landscape, you demonstrate that you’re capable of helping them with all their needs.
Ensuring Security and Compliance
One thing to keep in mind for all websites, but especially manufacturers, is the security and compliance of all your data. For example, if customers are submitting any information on your site, it’s vital for your site to have SSL encryption so that none of that information can be leaked.
Additionally, data protection standards are very important in today’s age, and having a plan for remediation is key, which is where a strong agency partner like Evolve Creative can come in as a strategic partner.
Compliance with industry regulations is also very important. ISO standards, GDPR compliance (if you do any business in the European Union), as well as accessibility standards to meet ADA compliance are all very important nowadays and something that should be top-of-mind when building a new website.
Measuring Success: Key Metrics and Analytics
Finally, it’s also very important for you to measure success on your new website. Identifying KPIs, such as conversion rates, users and sessions, pageviews and organic SEO rankings will all help you determine the success of your site. As mentioned above, we believe that your website should be your hardest working salesperson, and you should be able to track their performance just like any other salesperson
The beauty of a new, modern website is that you are able to tag and track many of these important KPIs. With the use of tools such as Google Analytics, Search Console, and Hotjar, you can view where people come from, who they are, and what they do on your site. Sometimes, these tools will also help you find areas of improvement for your website post-launch that you had never even considered before.
Evolve Creative Can Design Your Manufacturing Website
Evolve Creative has been designing websites for over 20 years. As leaders in branding, marketing and web design in Minnesota, we are knowledgeable experts in any industry, especially manufacturing.
In the past several years, we have built manufacturing websites such as GreenEdge, LaValley Industries, Aircorps Aviation, and Seaway Plastics, and would love to bring our expertise to your business as well.
Fill out the form below to see how Evolve Creative can help you update your manufacturing website today.