If you’ve ever wondered if a well thought out and executed marketing strategy can really affect your bottom line, Marketing & Engineering Services (MES) is a great marketing success story to prove the point.
MES sources manufacturing overseas. Initially, they were sourcing mainly to China and India, but the list of manufacturing providers has now grown to include several other countries.
Axxis Design Group has been working with MES since 2007. At that time, it was primarily run by its owner Hiten Shah on his own. We got involved when Hiten wanted a website re-developed. Axxis Design provided a marketing assessment detailing the information that should be present and a navigation structure. The site that was developed by another provider was visually attractive, but it wasn’t working as well as hoped to attract visitors and drive leads.
By that time we’d had the opportunity to get to know MES’ business and people very well. It was decided that we would take the lead on re-branding and the next website.
Our first challenge was to make sure we organized the content in a way that would make sense and be intuitive to viewers unfamiliar with MES. We made sure that it was easy to access content that contained general information about them and their services from a top navigation menu. Specific services were listed in a sidebar menu, making it easy for viewers to see, on any page, exactly what kind of manufacturing services they source. Having the Services menu available on every page, with SEO optimized link names, also added a great deal of SEO benefits to their site overall.
Our goals were straightforward and simple: Get traffic. Grab viewer’s attention and lead them deeper into the site. Give them enough information to convert them to a phone call or form submission.
Results were good, but we, like MES, believe in continuous improvement. We decided to change the focus of the SEO efforts, which had previously concentrated on supply chain management, to focus on types of manufacturing, such as castings. That change alone contributed to much higher traffic on their website.
Another change was to add regular content to the blog/news section of their website. Some posts deal with manufacturing subjects, many are giving information about MES as it grows, some are congratulating MES teams for their hard work. All blog posts are cross-posted on multiple social media accounts with links back to the post.
One important piece of the marketing strategy was to add a ThomasNet program. We took the money previously used for Google AdWords (99% of this traffic was useless), and put them in a place where there are customers actually looking for their services.
Good Marketing Gets Results!
We certainly can’t take all the credit for MES’ success; they are a hard-working group of people who love what they do, and Hiten is an excellent leader. However, we have seen great results from our work, including:
- Website traffic is up over 233% compared to last year.
- Manufacturing keywords are now the most used to get to their website.
- They have received many RFQ’s from ThomasNet
- ThomasNet refers many viewers to their website, increasing traffic & conversions.
- ThomasNet visitors are a great resource for qualified leads.
- Website RFQs now account for over 3% of the total RFQs; previously it was 0%
- Total RFQs for this year have already surpassed last year’s.
- MES has grown to over 60 people worldwide.