Recycling companies that collect and/or deal in ferrous and non-ferrous metals have found themselves in an industry with a fantastic growth rate. Consider that the global recycling market grew 4.5% CAGR in the last eight years, and is expected to increase to 7.8% CAGR until 2025.
That’s fantastic growth, but the problem is that this amounts to more competition. Furthermore, your clients are going online in droves to conduct research about your products. It’s likely that if you haven’t implemented a digital marketing plan, then your competition has, and potential customers are using information provided by your competition to drive their decisions.
Consider that three separate reports about B2B buyers concluded that 50-70 percent of the decision-making process is completed before a sales representative is even engaged. This means that your competition is providing value to B2B decision-makers before they’ve even asked for anything in return.
Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes: Who would you give your business to? Would you choose the company that’s in the dark and without any digital resources to help drive their proof of concepts? Or would you choose the recycling company that has implemented a digital marketing plan that provides valuable resources that they can use?
At times, when you hear “marketing,” you think of loud and annoying advertisements without any substance. Well, digital marketing by its very nature cannot succeed if it follows the aforementioned path. Recycling digital marketing strategies only succeed if they provide valuable resources and information to users and clients.
This is by virtue of how the digital space is set up, where search engines like Google use criteria to generate algorithms that reward content that is deemed “valuable.” Understanding these algorithms isn’t rocket science, but it is an art, and a good digital marketing agency can get your company’s content to the top of Google, and other search engine rankings.
So what is “valuable?” Well, you may think it’s obvious that there is immense energy savings by using recycled metals versus virgin ore, and so much so that energy savings amount to 92 percent for aluminum, 90 percent for copper and 56 percent for steel. That’s valuable information for your potential customers! And getting it in front of them is a daunting challenge that a digital marketing agency can solve.
And that’s certainly not all. Good marketing involves establishing several touchpoints to your customers during their buyer’s journey through the sales funnel. In the end, the goal is to deliver you customers, or bring your sales teams quality leads that they can close.
Of course, it’s one thing to say we can deliver quality leads, and quite another to actually put it into practice. Digital marketing has several different channels that can be used to generate leads and sales, and recycling companies can adopt some, or all of these services.
First of all, there is no generic approach to lead generation: You’re not a run-of-the-mill recycling operation, and we’re not an ordinary digital marketing agency. We implement custom strategies that focus on your company’s role in the recycling industry, whether you do live loading of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, specialize in demolition and salvage or sorting and grading (or all of the above).
BY IMPLEMENTING STRATEGIES THAT USE SEVERAL OF THE BELOW MARKETING CHANNELS, IN JUST NINE MONTHS MAIN EVENT DIGITAL HELPED ONE OF OUR RECYCLING COMPANY CLIENTS QUADRUPLE THEIR LEADS FROM THE PREVIOUS YEAR. Contact Main Event Digital CEO Mike Mayer for details on how we did it.
Believe it or not, social media actually plays a bigger role than you think in B2B buying decisions. In fact, a LinkedIn study found that 84 percent of CEOs and C-suite executives are influenced in their buying decisions by social media.
LinkedIn and Facebook play the biggest part in social media B2B lead generation, but there’s also Alignable, which is fantastic for working with a local market. Many recycling companies work within a region due to railroad and cost of transport constraints, and Alignable helps generate leads that are within your company’s community.
One thing to keep in mind is that each channel of digital marketing is geared toward making potential customers want to contact you. And since we’re talking about digital marketing channels, then it’s absolutely necessary that you have a stellar, fast and robust website.
Main Event Digital designs our sites around core Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), including measures of how much time visitors are spending on your website, and how quickly and easily they navigate through pages. This is a constant process, as optimizing for an excellent user experience (UX) is a hands-on process.
Your buyers are also increasingly becoming millennials, and one thing they use often is their mobile device. Up to 70 percent of B2B buyers use their mobile device somewhere in the buying process, making it absolutely essential that your website is optimized for mobile
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the process of getting your content to the top of search engine rankings, such as Google. If you want to be found in Google, you need to focus on SEO.
But let’s back up for a minute and talk about what it’ll take to get there. A Harvard Business Review study found that three-out-of-four B2B buyers will choose the first company that adds value.
Think about the example above about energy savings because of using recycled metals versus raw ore. If you have market insights or offer services that are unique to the industry, then Main Event Digital will create blogs, infographics, or video content, for example, that gets this information to relevant customers, such as ones who are concerned about the environment.
That adds value right away to your clients, who will see you as a leader in the industry. It’s just a matter of helping them find you, which is what SEO and content marketing accomplish.
Paid advertising also plays a role in getting the word out about your company, and it can be utilized on a number of different platforms. It can take months for your content to rank on Google, and in the meantime, you can make your website the number one hit with a paid advertisement.
The nice part about these kinds of ads is their Pay-Per-Click policy, where you only pay a fee if a user clicks on the advertisement. From there, Main Event Digital creates a path toward lead generation.
Personalization and targeting relevant customers with specific messages is at the core of Main Event Digital’s email marketing campaigns for recycling companies. At Main Event Digital, we keep our client’s brand in focus when we create winning email campaigns, and just like our content strategy, we offer your potential customers things of value, such as newsletters, infographics, downloadable assets and more.
Main Event Digital is a Chicago-based digital marketing agency that specializes in industrial, recycling and many other B2B companies. We currently service two recycling companies in the Chicagoland area (and beyond). We’ve produced fantastic results for our recycling clients through implementation of several of the above strategies, and continue to do so to this very day.
