Just as e-commerce has become an integral part of our everyday lives, it has also become a significant part of how your business works. Customer behavior has been transformed. However, when asked, why most distributors and vendors feel that e-commerce is not the best solution for their businesses? They replied, 

“It’s because most of our engineering products are complex and custom specialized. They have a large number of features with complicated configurations and may become a tedious task for customers to make a choice”  

This is your opportunity to set your business apart. Most distributors end up merging consumer retail marketing strategies with e-commerce marketing strategies. They fail to understand that they are missing out on an untapped marketplace for their specified product and all they have to do is understand how their customer's identify their need. 

Strategies That Manufacturers Can Adopt to Make Their Online Business a Success

When considering your Industrial supplier or manufacturer business as an Industrial e-commerce business, there are two parts of making it a pioneering success. One revolves around the development of your online store while the other depends on how you are going to market it.

Industrial Store Building Strategy

Here are a few handful tips on how you can build a thriving online industrial e-commerce store:

• When you are designing an ecommerce store for your industrial products, make sure to add customizable features which can help buyers to configure custom products. Even if this is a robust RFQ tool. 
  
  
• Add a Customer Support solution - Live Chat, support forum, dedicated support email address: any way to provide direct access to collaboration with a specialist to guide your buyers, if, by chance; they complicate themselves choosing the right product for their specific needs.
  
  
• Add price variation feature depending on the type of visitor coming to your industrial e-commerce website. This will provide liberty to make an easy pick for the customer.
  
  
• Add a layer of purchase scheduler, such as a saved cart, so buyers can make a pick and purchase it at a later date.
  
  
• Last but not the least, enable corporate payment gateways for purchase orders placed on your industrial ecommerce store. This could be as simple as a PO option for approved buyers or a process to send the order to a purchasing department to be completed. 

These strategies can help you build the perfect industrial online store. However, it entirely depends on your creativity and innovation depending on the type of industrial product you wish to sell out into the market. 

Industrial Store Marketing Strategy

Marketing is all about deriving the right targeted traffic to your website. You want to sieve out the right market and converge it to your specific store. To do so, you need a creative SEO tactic and means to enhance your brand visibility.

• Social Media is one of the many tools that can help you create your very own brand visibility. Create pages, groups and marketing ads on different social media platform. Go viral.
  
  
• Integrate analytics to your website in order to learn which channels are more attractive for customers. Convert traffic into potential leads and end up creating monetary transactions.
  
  
• Educate your consumers more about the product which you are selling. You can achieve that by taking active part in similar communities and sharing blog posts from your website.
  
  
• Drive buyers to your website by placing the best offers through ads. Promote products not just through social media but also make use of email marketing, white papers, etc.
  
  
• While blog page is one thing, create a knowledgebase of your website to educate individuals on what you are selling. It will help them, professional and educational, in both ways.

Where to get started? Try asking yourself the following questions

• Where does my business stand in the next 5 years digitally?
  
  
• What can I do to compel purchasers to come buy my product?
  
  
• Today Facebook has more than a billion accounts! Where will other social media platform stand in the coming future?
  
  
• Should I refine my business ideology and include more lucrative options to my business model?

AVATAR has extensive experience helping industrial manufacturers and suppliers develop ecommerce strategies that work.