For more than a generation, industrial manufacturing in places like upstate New York has been sliding away. With high taxes, red tape and bad weather outweighing “quality of life” considerations, the tables kept tilting further and further to the South … and to the Far East.
But recently, things have started to tip back.
Why?
Well, we can partially credit government support, like the megabucks New York tossed chipfab giant GlobalFounderies as an “incentive” to build a production facility just outside of the hot town of Saratoga Springs.
But smaller manufacturers, with decidedly less state support, are seeing sunnier days too.
Take for example our client, Utility Systems Technologies (UST), a Latham-based manufacturer of voltage regulators. While the company has benefited from some community assistance, including a recent NYSERDA grant to fund a study of the energy savings potential of one of its new products, UST is growing, organically, and is competing, internationally, in what was until recently pretty rocky soil. And it is doing it all on its own.
How? The Internet, of course. Combined with smarter, leaner and less ad-centric marketing, fully integrated with a solid sales process.
Technology now enables manufacturers to communicate with the world, identify opportunities and target prospects, on a budget. In the right hands, really simple tools like WordPress, MailChimp and AdRoll (substitute your favorites) are actually powerful enough to bend the reality of regional manufacturing to the point where “old-fashioned” luxuries – like good schools and shorter commute times – can factor back into the where-to-locate formula.
How can you live where you want, make what you like and engage a global audience with only a modest communications budget? Let us present …
POSTMKTG’s 10 (or 11) Steps to Global Domination
- If you have an advertising agency, fire them and hire a leaner branding and marketing partner
- Do some basic research – Google, plus a few interviews with key reps will probably do
- Specialize and simplify your product offering
- Modernize and professionalize your brand
- Build a user-manageable, responsive website
- Shave off some of your IP and share it via white papers and articles to drive visits and registrations
- Get serious about list building and email marketing
- Jump into digital retargeting
- Monitor interactions and optimize at least one thing every day
- Update (or launch) and start promoting your company LinkedIn page; and offer to update your executives’ LinkedIn pages
- And maybe (but only maybe) run an ad or two
Of course, you must also set a schedule, establish a reasonable budget and trust your partner to test and trial stuff somewhat independently.
But if you can do that … bwahaha … the world is yours!
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