Many industries are already leveraging the use of digital presence to enhance their business growth; the manufacturing industry is following the same trend. This is contrary to past decades when manufacturing industries could only target local customers. This trend caused the manufacturing field to decline or stagnate since it couldn’t attract new customers.

However, the internet and the ever-changing technology have made it possible for the manufacturing industry to scale higher, attract more clients, and enhance business growth, thanks to the introduction of manufacturing websites.

Through manufacturing websites, it becomes easy for a business to attract clients across the globe, explore new opportunities, and compete with other giant manufacturing firms across the globe. But then, how can you create a manufacturing website successfully? What are the must-have features of a manufacturing website? This guide will take you through all the insights you need to know when creating a solid, secure, and reliable manufacturing website.

What is a manufacturing website?

A manufacturing website is a digital platform meant to showcase all the products and services, including detailed descriptions of products and services for a specific company or manufacturer.

Other details these manufacturing websites show include case studies, customer testimonials/reviews, and other technical resources, among many other vital details.

Benefits of a manufacturing website

So, why does a manufacturer require a manufacturing website? Below are some top advantages of a manufacturing website:

• Enhance customer engagement

Customers can engage actively via a manufacturing website, especially when the website has diverse communication channels that accommodate all types of users.

Therefore, such a website keeps customers glued to your website through live chats, contact forms, and FAQs, which enables users to ask questions, resolve issues, and make purchases. This not only increases website traffic but also enhances business growth.

You can include extra resources that users can download, such as installation guides, manuals for specific products, and troubleshooting issues. These features create better customer relationships, loyalty, and general satisfaction.

• Market products and services

Another reason you need a manufacturing website for your manufacturing business is to showcase your products and services to your potential clients.

The ability to display your products & services through a well-designed manufacturing website gives visitors who can turn out to be regular customers the confidence to trust in your services. Above all, it shows how your business is focused on delivering the best, which is the core aspect of any other business.

• Generate leads and maximize sales

With a well-designed manufacturing website, you can optimize SEO to attract new and more customers while retaining the existing customers who need your products and services.

Include elements such as targeted landing pages, call-to-action buttons, and capture forms to drive and increase sales.

You can achieve this through blog posts, case studies, and white papers to provide useful information that puts your company at the forefront in offering specific products and services.

• Be competitive

With many manufacturing businesses coming up, it can be hard to beat the competitive market without proper strategies. However, with an updated manufacturing website, it becomes easy to stay ahead of the competition.

You simply need to observe emerging trends in the manufacturing industry, customer behaviors, and other business approaches or strategies. With such details, you can elevate your manufacturing website, ensuring it is updated and follows the trending industry practices.

• Increase your market reach

With a good manufacturing website, you aren’t limited to local customers. You can reach a wider market reach across the globe. All you need is the right approach, such as multilingual support and international SEO strategies, to attract customers from different regions of the world. This will expand your market reach and grow your business tremendously.

• Showcase testimonials and reviews

How will new customers trust in your ability to deliver excellent products and services? It can be through past client reviews and testimonials. They act as selling strategies. A manufacturing website with a detailed section showing previous customer engagements and success stories is likely to grow faster and better.

These details show your high level of professionalism and ability to deliver reliable products and expertise in service delivery, thus convincing potential customers to trust in your business.

• Explore valuable insights with analytics

With a responsive and well-designed manufacturing website, you can study customer behavior and patterns and draw valuable insights from such analytics.

For instance, you can use Google Analytics to track and monitor visitor’s interaction with your website. You can collect insights such as areas they engage in most or actions they perform on your sites & how long they stay.

With the data collected, you can define what users need and prefer, then tailor your website to meet all these needs, thus satisfying customer needs and wants.

• Streamline communications and processes

Again, a manufacturing website will help you streamline operations and internal communication.

For instance, you can choose to integrate your website with CRM, inventory management system, and any other software solution to automate processes. This ensures seamless updates of different activities in a timely manner. Above all, it minimizes errors, ensures efficiency, and provides the teams with real-time information and updates.

• Maintain a sense of professionalism and credibility

Customers always look for credibility element in a manufacturing business. A detailed, well-designed, and updated manufacturing website shows how committed you are to offering high-quality services and products to your customers. This is especially crucial if you want long-term engagements and handling high-value transactions.

• Mobile optimization

Most people rely heavily on their mobile phones to perform various tasks. For this reason, many businesses are now creating highly responsive websites to serve people who are accessing the website through different devices seamlessly. Therefore, a good manufacturing website will enable you to reach out to many potential clients through their smartphones.

Must-have features of a manufacturing website

As you plan to create a manufacturing website, it is essential to understand the need to create a secure, responsive, SEO-optimized, intuitive navigation and a website with consistent branding. These are the elements that make a good manufacturing website. For these reasons, ensure you include the following features in your manufacturing website for effectiveness:

• Intuitive navigation

You need to design an easy-to-navigate through website. All visitors should be able to navigate intuitively and achieve all they want from your manufacturing website without facing challenges. Of course, most visitors will leave your website immediately if they can’t navigate through it easily, thus declining your business.

• Polished product photos

Manufacturing entails creating parts and pieces. Depending on a specific industry, the final results are the products.

As a way of letting potential customers or website visitors understand your offerings, you need well-polished images of the final products. Therefore, include photos that are captivating and can convince a website visitor to make a purchase.

• Regularly updated content

Today, digital content is key. Regular and updated content will drive traffic and generate leads that will enhance your business scalability and growth.

Make sure you tailor the content to help and guide users in relation to your products and services. Most importantly, research the trending topics, emerging technologies, and new discoveries in your specific industry and create content that aligns with these guidelines.

As your website content grows, you can then start producing detailed guides such as e-books, white papers, and spec sheets.

• Visible, clickable calls-to-action

CTAs – call-to-action buttons encourage and guide website visitors into performing a specific task or action. Make sure you include visible CTA texts on your manufacturing website to guide users into the next steps or actions to take.

Well-placed and designed CTA texts can easily convert website traffic into leads. Therefore, make your CTA texts bold and bigger for visibility. Don’t forget the color element. Choose a color that blends perfectly with your website and could motivate users to follow the guidelines.

• Case studies

Traditionally, most manufacturing industries relied heavily on word-of-mouth to improve sales and convert more visitors into customers. However, the trend is changing with the advancements in digital technology.

Case studies are simply the digital version of the traditional ways or spoken guidelines for recommending a potential client to specific services.

Therefore, include a section of case studies on your manufacturing website to guide and show visitors how serious and professional your business is when handling clients.

• Virtually appealing modern design

Depending on your industry and the products you are offering, you need to tailor your manufacturing website to align with your products and services.

The design should be simple, high-performing, and mobile-friendly to accommodate all users.

• Accessibility & Responsiveness

A highly responsive manufacturing website with ease of accessibility will attract more visitors, who can become long-term customers.

Therefore, create a manufacturing website that works seamlessly on all devices with different screen sizes. This enables existing users and new users to access the website without device limitations.

You can also add a hover effect or design CTA text as a button to make the content clickable. Moreover, ensure the CTA compliments well with the language, color, and placement on the website to make work easier for the visitors.

• Buttons/Widgets for Social Sharing

The social media platform is a powerful tool when it comes to marketing and advertising your products and services. Therefore, on your manufacturing website, allow visitors to share the details through different social media platforms to increase traffic to your website.

Therefore, include sharing feature on the website to reach a wider audience through social media platforms. Above all, create a website that allows users to comment, like, or share insights about your products and services on social media platforms.

• Detailed product specs and descriptions

Some website visitors need straight and forward descriptions of products and services. Therefore, include specs and descriptions of your products in a simple and straightforward manner. Don’t forget to include technical aspects of your products for your technical audience.

• Simplified contact forms

What if your visitors need to contact you for more products, services, or any other concerns? Your manufacturing website should have a section showing your email, phone number, and address, or any other relevant information or platform through which they can reach you easily. This content should be on every page of your website as a footnote for easy access by visitors. Keep the contact form simple and easy, giving the user ample time to fill in the details.

• High-Speed of website

Another key aspect you shouldn’t overlook is the website loading speed. Many visitors will immediately leave a website that is taking forever to load. Above all, a website that loads faster enhances the SEO rankings, which ensures more visibility and equals more leads.

• Multi-language support

As a manufacturing business owner, you don’t want to limit yourself to a specific audience reach. Therefore, including a multi-language support feature in your manufacturing website accommodates people who speak and understand diverse languages. This feature will help elevate your manufacturing business to international standards.

• Strong hosting of a website

The hosting provider influences the growth and security measures of your manufacturing website.

A solid hosting provider enhances the security of your manufacturing website, creates more traffic, and generally delivers excellent results. With the many hosting service providers available, you should do research and select the ideal hosting provider that aligns with your manufacturing industry and maximize the use of extra features to always update and secure your website from different vulnerabilities.

How to Build a Manufacturing Website

So, you already know why you need a manufacturing website for your manufacturing business and the features you must include. This section describes a step-by-step guide on how to create a solid and reliable manufacturing website that will take your business to the next level.

• Domain name registration

This is the website address on the internet. When people search for your website, they will see the domain name.

You must choose a reliable and unique domain name. Below are some constructive tips that will guide you when choosing a domain name for your manufacturing website:

• Your domain name should align with the nature of your manufacturing business. This makes it easy for visitors searching for similar services to get and access your website.
• Don’t use numbers or hyphens. Including numbers and hyphens makes it hard for people to remember your domain name, especially when they want to revisit the site again.
• Keep it simple and easy. Avoid complex domain names that will make people struggle to remember when they want to access your products and services.
• Select a top-level domain (TLD). This is a domain with .net, .com, or .org.

If you are struggling to find a perfect domain name for your website, contact us at Aalpha Information Systems, India, and share the concept of your manufacturing business. We will help you come up with the best domain name for your website.

• Choose the best website host

With the domain name ready, you will need a website host. This is a company that keeps your website files, making them accessible to visitors. Before you choose a website host for your manufacturing website, consider the following factors:

• Speed – Get a website host that is fast-loading to enhance the overall user experience. What’s more, a fast-loading website can rank at the top of search engines.
• Reliability – How effective is your website host? Choose a website host that is easily accessible and available when the visitors need it.
• Costs – Choose a website host with subscription or payment plans that align with your budget.
• Features – lastly, choose a website host that has features relevant to your manufacturing website. Check elements such as bandwidth, space, and storage, among many other features, that will guide you on how to choose an effective website host.

• Select a website design template

The design template of a website is simply a pre-made design used to create a website. Using a website design template helps in saving costs and time since you don’t start all the processes from scratch.

For manufacturing websites, you can consider templates from wix or wordpress and select a responsive and visually appealing design template that aligns with your manufacturing business services. Most of these design templates come with ecommerce functionality, blog section, contact forms, and image gallery features, which are among the must-have features of a manufacturing website.

• Create content

Next, your manufacturing website requires content that will keep the visitors active and engaged. Therefore, tailor your website content to align with the products and services you are offering. Keep your target audience in mind, ensuring you use the writing style that fits them better.

Some of the ideas that will guide you when creating content for your manufacturing website include the following:

Trending topics and valuable insights– as the manufacturing industry keeps changing and advancing with the introduction of new technologies and practices, create content to update your audience on what is happening. These topics show readers how you are informed and updated with the services and products you are delivering.

Tutorials and how-to guides – these topics help cover step-by-step instructions to follow when using specific products. This gives customers an easy way to explore your products. Besides, they show your skills and experience in a specific industry.

Customer stories – you can also write content based on past clients’ experience with your products or services. For instance, you can write about a customer who saved on expenses just by purchasing your products. Or a previous client who benefited in different ways from buying your products.

Webinars and videos – videos and webinars create an interactive session with your customers. You can choose to showcase your products in video form or set up webinars to discuss hot topics related to your products and services.

Infographics – this includes data represented in compelling visuals that users can easily interpret. When creating an infographic, keep in mind the key information you want to pass across. You can then use visuals and present the key points in a compelling manner.

Icons, graphs, and charts are some of the ways or methods you can use to create visually appealing infographics.

• Launching the website

At this point, you have your manufacturing website with all the basic requirements. You can now launch it and make it available to the users. Before you launch, the hosting provider must be reliable, and the domain name should be captivating.

Most importantly, the website must be compatible with multiple devices and SEO optimized.

• Promoting and advertising the website

With your website available through the internet, you need to devise plans and strategies to attract potential clients. This step involves advertising and promoting the website through the following ways:

• Email marketing – collecting email addresses of potential customers and contacting them more often. You can keep them updated with your latest manufacturing business activities, including available offers, introduction of new products, or general insights on your products & services.
• Social media – leverage the use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among others. Share your products and services as you aim to attract new customers. Once you understand your target audience well, you will know the appropriate social media platform to use most.
• Online advertising – Use platforms such as Google Ads to target potential users who are searching keywords that align with what your business is offering.

• Updating the website

With your manufacturing website active and fully functional, you shouldn’t stop there. You need to keep it updated with fresh and relevant content while removing content that is no longer valuable. Above all, you need to follow security guidelines and practices to ensure your manufacturing website is fully protected from different forms of vulnerabilities.

Some of the things to do to keep the website updated include the following:

• Monitoring website traffic – keep checking behaviors or patterns of how and where your visitors are from. The insights you collect will guide you on where to improve and where to make changes.
• Creating new content – content could be educative videos, product images, informative articles & blogs, or any relevant content related to your offering. Just ensure the content is updated, informative, and engaging.
• Security measures –the security of your manufacturing website is a vital aspect. So, consider website backup and HTTPS practices to keep your website from unauthorized access or any other form of attacks and threats that could affect your business negatively.

What is the cost of creating a manufacturing website?

Finally, you may be wondering how much you need to spend to create a perfect manufacturing website. Well, the costs of developing a website for manufacturing industry differ based on the following:

• Size and complexity of the website

A huge and complex website will require more resources, including building resources and skilled personnel and thus be costly. This is contrary to a simple and less complex website with a few requirements.

• Development team

Depending on the type of development team handling your manufacturing website, you can spend more or less.

The available options are:

• Web Development Agencies – this is a whole team of tech experts. In fact, it is a whole company with experts ready to handle your project from scratch to the end. The team has vast industry experience and is highly skilled, hence high-quality results. Hiring web development company like Aalpha Information Systems will cost more, but the results are top-notch with professional engagement.
• Website builders – these are online platforms that simplify all your work. You simply drag and drop. They are ideal for a simple and basic website since they lack the extensive features of a fully functional manufacturing website. Besides, they don’t have customization features to tailor your website as you would wish. They are cheap and easy to use but limited to huge and complex projects.
• Freelancers – this involves hiring an individual contractor to create your manufacturing website. However, this option is best for small and short-term projects. The challenge could be finding an experienced and knowledgeable freelancer who can turn your website vision into reality.

• Content

Your manufacturing website will require a captivating blog and articles. While you will need to invest in high-quality content, you will gain the benefits sooner than you expect in the end.

• Design & functionality

A website with complex functionalities and custom animations will cost more. Therefore, the cost of creating a manufacturing website will depend on your design preference and the overall functionality of the website.

With that said, the cost of creating a manufacturing website could range anywhere between $5000 and $50,000 or even more.

Conclusion

A manufacturing website is a resourceful tool for any manufacturing business. While you will incur costs building a manufacturing website, the benefits afterward are worth all the resources and investment.

Want to build a website for your manufacturing business? Get in touch with us today!