At Beard & Fitch we have an established, steady, client base but, like any growing company, we are always looking to bring in new customers through referral and marketing.
Digital Marketing is something we are relatively new at. Last summer we made an investment and employed Lauren (me), our Marketing & Sales Assistant to streamline our processes and generate more business via marketing tools. The question is what are the right marketing tools for Beard & Fitch and our niche industry.
The first question I asked was what can we bring to the market that our competitors lack? I decided to start small. It’s possible that we might not nail our marketing efforts on the first attempt. It’s better to do one project right and see it through to the end, and I really wanted to be able to monitor and analyse the results.
We were already online with a new website but was this working for us? My predecessor was using AdWords and PayPerClick but it wasn’t really yielding much new business. How could we organically get closer to the top of the Google search results? Because to be honest, who clicks on the Ad at the top of the page, I don’t, and after questioning lots of people and doing a bit of research it seems that a lot of smaller business are moving away from this. So what to do next……
I had vaguely heard of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but only from skim reading marketing articles. To be honest I thought it was just magic how some pages popped up on the top/first page on Google. Please also be aware that I knew nothing about this way of marketing, when I undertook my degree it was all press releases, advertising and editorial. This has been a learning experience for me and I was lucky that I could pick the brain of our website developer. He recommended that we install a blog feature on our website that will incorporate key words, thus boosting our organic search rating. So far so good and at the moment the majority of new customers have found us after looking on line.
We are also embracing social media adding Facebook & Twitter accounts – something I was much more familiar with but there is still a lot to learn. Facebook especially has lots of tools to assist in business promotions at a fraction of the cost of other direct marketing campaigns.
My personal aim is to increase our customer base in order for the business to grow and offering exceptional customer service for existing and new customers. So this is me signing off for now. I will keep up to date with our blog and our progress over the next year.
Beard & Fitch’s mission is to manufacture transmission components and machined parts to customer specifications, to give a reliable and cost-effective service that delivers real value for money. Services include manufacturing to drawing, and reverse engineering from customer samples to part machining free issued components. We provide full inspection and advice and back all our products up with total quality assurance systems. B&F follow a continuous investment programme, with more planned over the coming years.
If you would like more information or would like to discuss any upcoming projects Beard & Fitch could assist you on please contact us. Tel: 01279 425 358 or Email: sales@beardandfitch.com
Lauren White – Sales & Marketing
