Marketing is critical in a 
down economy

When the going gets tough, the tough implement marketing plans! A marketing plan includes a variety of company promotion vehicles including brochures, advertising in trade magazines that serve the markets you serve, attending trade shows and conferences, and the all-important website.

You can never assume that customers will find you and come knocking at your door—or website. It takes a lot of work to drive them to where you want them to go, and then to be able to meet their needs. Developing your brand is key to getting customers to understand what makes your company and its products and services different from the others who do nearly the same thing you do.

Developing a brand is easy when your brand name is on the packaging. It’s more difficult, however, when your package is merely the container of the brand owner’s products. That was the dilemma facing Flex Products (Carlstadt, NH). “We didn’t have a brand,” says Ed Friedhoff, who became co-owner of the company in 1990. “Our customers put their products into our packaging to go to market, so the Flex Products brand just wasn’t visible. The result was that the company wasn’t growing to its full potential.”

Flex Products branded its containers to gain recognition in the marketplace.

Friedhoff’s previous business was in soft drinks, a product that is marketed directly to the end user, so the company’s brand was clearly visible. “When we bought Flex Products, we were not marketing to the end user anymore, but to someone that uses your products in their product. This was total culture shock,” he states.

Flex Products is supplier of custom and proprietary packaging, whose processes include injection molding, extrusion, and thermoforming. It manufactures containers, caps, closures, and myriad parts that go into products ranging from medical devices to automobiles, skateboards, tractors, and roller blades. But no one ever “sees” the molder or identifies with its “brand.”

That’s the dilemma facing many custom molders. As suppliers to the OEM manufacturers, their “products”—the components, parts, containers, etc.—are hidden within the OEM’s product with nothing to indicate the company responsible for these components.

However, developing a brand is critical to getting OEMs to find your company and develop a supplier relationship. A big part of that brand development is differentiation. Flex found a way to improve its sales and drive more traffic to its website, a critical tool in helping with that differentiation. When Flex Products discovered that an increasing number of prospects were turning to the Web to find packaging providers, the company decided it had to rise to the challenge of this new competitive arena. It had no way of knowing how many potential buyers were considering Flex, how many were bypassing it because the company was practically invisible online, and, of course, how many opportunities it was losing as a result.

The company responded quickly to this new phenomenon and put up a basic website as a Band-Aid approach, and in the process discovered that a website that doesn’t work very well isn’t much better than no website at all. “It was performing very sluggishly, and seemed to be holding the company back,” notes Friedhoff. “Flex was nowhere to be found when prospects searched for the kinds of products it provided.” In short, Flex Products offered abundant product options to its customers, but its limited approach to online sales and marketing threatened the company’s future expansion.

“We wanted to provide an online experience that would attract buyers and keep them engaged until they got in touch with us,” says Friedhoff. “Since so many of Flex Products’ customers place nonstandard orders, the goal of the website was to get them to reach for the phone, ask additional questions, and then make a purchase.”

Friedhoff says that developing an effective website can be daunting, especially for the custom aspects of the company’s products. “People who come to us for custom items often don’t realize what is involved in making these,” Friedhoff explains. “We find that we have a lot of customers that might want our packaging, but need something done to it that’s extra, such as modifying one of our closures into something unique. For that, I need to talk to the customer. It might not be able to be done the way they think it can be done. That’s where flexibility comes in and I want our website to show that we’re very flexible and accommodating in meeting the needs of customers through our inventory of tooling. As our site evolves, we’re putting more emphasis on this flexibility and the idea of mass customization.”

It’s critical to getting new business to create a way for the customer to understand this flexibility so that they will pick up the phone and engage with your sales personnel, no matter what their needs are. “Bottom line, you don’t want the customer to go somewhere else, so either I can do it or I can source it,” says Friedhoff. “It’s key to get the customer to stay with me rather than stumbling upon one of my competitors.”

The company supplemented this content strategy by appearing on ThomasNet
.com, which millions of industrial purchasers and engineers use every month, and used ThomasNet’s tracking tools to monitor leads and conversion rates. ThomasNet evaluated the company’s business goals and reviewed the website, making suggestions and then rebuilding it. Then, ThomasNet implemented a complete overhaul to turn it into a robust prospecting and sales tool. For the first time in its history, Flex knew what kinds of buyers were coming to its website, the companies they were from, where they clicked, and what actions they took. And very quickly, the numbers of paying customers proved their strategy right.

Getting ThomasNet involved with the process provided Flex Products with a new approach to making its website an effective selling tool that involved adding content, refining existing online information, and adding simple navigation features, product specs, and comparison capabilities. The original site needed more detail to be effective, including better product descriptions, features for searchability by multiple categories, and product images to make it easy for prospects to gain an immediate understanding of the kinds of packaging and containers available.

“Our goal was to be informative and succinct, so people could quickly see what we offered without getting lost in technical language. If they clicked to view our containers, they could find pictures of products that were round, square or rectangular,” explained Friedhoff. “They’d seen how easy it was to order a basic package, to decorate it, or to thread it with a screw cap. Every possibility was laid out in an easy-to-use, inviting way.”

The results: Flex Products realized more than 20% sales revenue growth to more than $10 million, and is now doing international business, which contributes to about 6% of sales. The new marketing/sales program and enhanced website has also opened up new market niches for the company, including the demand for products from recycled plastics. Recycline is a company that makes razors and toothbrushes from recycled plastic products, and Flex provides packaging for Recycline’s products. Additionally, search engine referrals for Flex Products have tripled since 2005 and Web conversion actions such as catalog pages viewed and requests for additional information have increased eightfold.

“While Flex has a minimal sales force, the new rules of the road for industrial selling make it less essential to have a larger sales team to find new business,” says Friedhoff. “The new Flex Products site serves as a very reliable and effective 24/7 sales department. We’re watching the numbers to make sure that the site continues to perform beyond our expectations. The ability to monitor results is putting Flex Products in the driver’s seat to move toward additional growth in the years ahead.”

ThomasNet’s help for 
industrial businesses
ThomasNet.com is the Internet evolution of Thomas Register of American Manufacturers, the industrial suppliers’ guides that were ubiquitous in purchasing agents’ offices for about 100 years. This online destination enables buyers from large and small companies, the government and military, and more to search among 607,000 suppliers of industrial and business products, from adhesives to machine parts. In addition, ThomasNet helps individual industrial companies improve their websites to penetrate new markets, attract new customers, improve efficiency, and ultimately increase revenues. ThomasNet helps those suppliers replicate the sales cycle online. That includes making the first contact, providing the needed information to the potential buyer, and connecting the buyer and seller to make the sale.

Travis Sherbine, senior director of marketing and sales support for Web solutions at ThomasNet, notes that buyer expectations are continually becoming higher. “When industrial buyers go online to look for an injection molder, they have the same expectation as they do when they go on Amazon. They expect to find detailed information,” he says.
 
The traditional sales process for injection molding is one in which a lot of consulting and educating goes on between the OEM’s engineering staff and the molder’s or moldmaker’s engineering team. That sales process—that high level of consultation and education that used to happen on the phone and/or in person—today, ThomasNet’s research shows, happens online. “The companies who have the best competitive advantage are the ones who serve the customer in that consultative, educating way. Those are the companies whose phones are still ringing today,” Sherbine states.

Sherbine adds that the first step in ThomasNet’s process is to help people understand the necessity of a website. “Many companies have modest websites or no websites,” Sherbine says. “In today’s marketplace, you have to have an effective online presence. From buyer studies that we have conducted, we know that 73% of buyers research three to five suppliers before they decide who to go to for the purchase.”

Susan Orr, senior director of strategic marketing, says that in replicating the sales process, all the same considerations are employed. Who are the contacts? How many contacts need to be made? How many in-person visits? What questions are buyers asking? “We follow that process online,” she says. “All the things that they used to engage with customers in the past has to be present on the website. All those conversations and information requests that used to happen offline are now online.”

The big difference is that with online sites, buyers and prospects are anonymous. However, from a basic marketing perspective, the seller is meeting a need. Knowing the potential customer’s needs is key, “but because you don’t know them you definitely need to be there with the online content,” says Orr. “Prospects only have about 5-8 seconds to evaluate a particular company’s website and see if the company will meet their needs, which means the site’s home page is critical.”

ThomasNet has a system to help industrial suppliers establish effective websites. They call it the VSET method.
Verify. The potential customer lands on the home page of a company and in that first 5-8 seconds that the customer looks at the site, he determines if this company can supply what he needs. “We help educate customers in how to use the Web by tying back to traditional selling processes, such as answering a question that might be asked if a person were to call into your company,” Sherbine says. “‘Do you do injection molding?’ might be the first question a caller asks. The answer to that initial question should be found on the first page that a potential customer sees.”

Search. The education process continues in the search process. “‘Do you do engineering polymers?’ might be the next question,” says Sherbine. “‘Do you build your own tools in house?’ might be another next logical question. Does your site accommodate that search for the answers to these questions? Additionally, can someone who lands on your site search and in multiple ways? That’s another key to making your website accessible.”

Evaluate. Once the potential customers’ initial questions have been answered, they need more information to evaluate the company on a deeper level. A molder might list material types, mold types, press sizes, tolerances, quality standards, or a catalog of capabilities, the types of work they’ve done for previous customers. It’s the detailed information that will help a potential customer evaluate whether or not they should contact you in person or send an RFQ or part print.

Take action. Sherbine explains that an effective website is one that gives people who come to the site every opportunity to buy from you. Every page should contain the phone number and a “Contact Us” link. “Companies should take advantage of every opportunity for someone to share your information with a colleague and to forward it from the engineer to the purchasing manager, for example. This could even include uploadable CAD drawings of the products,” says Sherbine. “This is the closing-the-sale area.”

To help companies make changes to their sites based on prospects’ behavior when they visit particular pages, ThomasNet provides a reporting service with its Web solutions. The reporting is critical, Sherbine notes. “We provide Web Traxs as well as some other tracking solutions. It’s a tool you can use to manage and understand what’s working and not working, whether you need more or better content,” he explains. “Tracking is critical and clients have discovered new markets just by what prospects are searching for and doing online. We help you manage the Web just as you would your salespeople.”

Sherbine adds that in talking to industrial companies, one thing is clear: “The world of the Internet can become overwhelming, but it boils down to, what is your sales process? How do you get that online?” he says. “Then you have to monitor it, make improvements on it, and view it as an ongoing tool for the business, and you’ll get amazing results.” —Clare Goldsberry