Using Your Digital Presence to Increase Chemical Sales

>December 09, 2018 0 COMMENTS by Bjorn V. Seljevold

I spend many hours every day researching chemical distribution and manufacturing companies and find that there are very few who have gotten their website and digital structure right. Don’t get fooled into believing that the visual appearance of your website will help you get customers or increase traffic. It will not! A great looking site will make you feel better about your digital presence, that’s about it.

When you get into the process of updating your website you need to ask yourself: What is the main purpose of my digital presence? I will give you the correct answer; SALES!!!! Increase in sales is the ONLY correct answer, so you need to keep that in mind when you start this process.

Next, you need to find a company to do the job. Herein lays several selection criteria such as design ability, functionality, ease of use, cost, timeframe, digital presence and more. When you get down to the final few, ask them this: “Show me what you have done for companies within my industry”. This is important since your website will be the backbone of your digital image and efforts and if your partner does not know your industry it will take a lot of time to train them and the risk of you being dissatisfied with the end product gets pretty big. 

As I mentioned above your site should be built with the purpose of increasing sales and needs to have a clear conversion path for website visitors to submit an inquiry and find any product information about your products. If you do not design this from the get-go you will struggle later and may have to hire a company like ours to redesign the whole thing which will lead to a time delay and additional cost.

The next thing you need to keep in mind is that you will miss out on new prospective customers that search for your products and services and cannot find you if you don’t create an Enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. Prospects will find your website and submit inquiries through many digital channels, but none will produce the ROI that organic SEO will.  We have produced over 100,000 sales-qualified inquiries via organic SEO which is typically more than ALL other digital channels put together.  The search engines rely on several factors to find your product pages and rank them based on all of the various queries.  Such factors like age of the website, domain authority, age of each page on your website, links that point to your site and pages, and many others.  This is in addition to the basic on-page optimization that has to be done to your website.

Then,- before hiring an SEO agency, you MUST vet them properly. Beware of subpar SEO agencies. It seems as if everyone is a qualified SEO expert today and that is simply not true. Every one of today’s web companies claim that they are experts at SEO which has mis-led many to believe that SEO doesn’t work. To be clear, SEO works!  Here is the one question you need to ask an SEO agency when you are vetting them: “Show me 5 queries I can search on Google right now to see your work ranking #1, #2, #3”.  If your SEO agency will not show you their work, they are not right for you and you need to keep looking. 

Now, in addition to SEO, you also need to market your website via other digital channels. Some of the ways chemical companies need to market themselves are via Content Marketing, Social Media, Paid Advertising, Remarketing, Marketing Automation etc. and the company you select should have experience doing this WITHIN YOUR INDUSTRY! Electing the correct partner for your digital presence will therefore include a broad specter of selection criteria’s and you must have all these in mind before you go to bed with a digital marketing or design firm.

Over the past several months we have had many dialogues and meetings with companies that proudly show their “new” website only to get their “bubble” burst when we had to show them why their website wasn’t setup properly and needed a rebuild..

It’s all about sales.

Bjorn V. Seljevold

Bjorn is the Chairman of ChemSource. An experienced managing director with a passion for ensuring the success of early stage companies having great potential. Bjorn shares his time between NJ and Europe. A business development professional with extensive experience in the Aviation, Beverage and Digital Marketing industries, Bjorn is also a pilot, former lumberjack, and graduated from the RNoAF.

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