Hydraulic.net is a manufacturer and end user reseller of hard-to-find hydraulic pumps. Over the last 20 years, their sales model has shifted from selling large orders to OEMs to selling one-off orders direct to end users and smaller hydraulic repair shops.
In the early days of this shift, there was not a lot of competition for paid ad leads and SEO for high rankings was a lot easier. Success with digital marketing was good. Over the last 10 years as the competition has increased, more focused targeting of products to sell and ways to reach leads has required more work.
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WSI B2B Marketing has been a significant support to my company’s success over the last 10+ years. The management are now good friends and strong partners in our business.
– Steve Smith, Owner of Hydraulic.net
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WSI B2B Marketing has been a significant support to my company’s success over the last 10+ years. The management are now good friends and strong partners in our business.
– Steve Smith, Owner of Hydraulic.net
Steve Smith, owner of Hydraulic.net , said in May 2022:
“Working with B2B Marketing for over 10 years has been both profitable and a pleasure personally. We now have a steady stream of online sales of the right kind of products when can manufacture and sell in spite of the current supply chain slowdowns. If not for their strong digital marketing partnership, we may not have been able to make the transition to profitable end user sales and sustain the company.”
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The Challenges
Hydraulic.net’s small management team have learned a lot about digital marketing after working with WSI B2B marketing for over 12 years. The owner is an excellent engineer who has a superior knowledge of hydraulic pump design, manufacturing, applications, and operations. His ability to focus on the right hard-to-find hydraulic pumps which are no longer supported by the OEM has made the business successful when the OEMs shifted manufacturing all to China with no margins for companies like his.
The company had made a strategic shift of manufacturing from Chicago Ill to Georgia, then another shift to a small final assembly operation and manufacturing offshore. He knew they had a valuable ability to manufacture almost any model of hydraulic pump, inventory parts for quick final assembly, and supply pumps “just in time” to the end user. The challenge was twofold:
- Knowing which pumps would be most popular for selling to the end user
- Reaching those end users when they needed a new hydraulic pump
A digital marketing partner was needed to understand their business, craft the trustworthy messaging that will make a sale quickly and develop a strategy to apply a process to developing new business leads.
Our Solution
Having worked with this company for over 10 years, we knew the basics of their products and some of the competition. About 3 years ago, we reworked our detailed competitive research on the opportunities from online search and looking at their competition as benchmarks for doing competing even more in the end user market. We knew that we had to focus on the 20% of their products that were profitable AND that people were looking for on Google search.
Creating an Online Store and an eBay Store that worked together
Early on, we developed an online store populated with the “estimated” most popular products. We optimized those pages for SEO so that they could be highly ranked and found for part number searches. The sales from this online store were slow at first but have steadily picked up so that the volume is excellent now.
Shortly after the eCommerce website was launched, the owner also started an eBay store. The results from that were more impressive at first, but as time went on, the nuisance of eBay returns, and other things made that a less profitable sales channel.
With the eCommerce store we also launched a modest size Google Ads campaign targeting the key brands and a few of the terms that indicated the buyer was ready to purchase a new pump. The paid ads worked well as the SEO results grew and started to produce organic leads and sales. Today, the results continue to steadily improve as the SEO gets stronger results and the Google Ads continue to get optimized to perform even better.
Qualified Lead Generation with Inbound Marketing
We helped Hydraulic.net grow their web visibility in search engines, primarily Google, to drive the right kind and volume of online sales. Paid traffic on Google Ads advertising was precisely targeted to reach end users of machinery that needed they hydraulic pumps that Hydraulic.net manufactured but had never heard of them. Trust was essential for a $300 to over $1,000 purchase.
Working with B2B Marketing for over 10 years has been both profitable and a pleasure personally. We now have a steady stream of online sales of the right kind of products when can manufacture and sell in spite of the current supply chain slowdowns. If not for their strong digital marketing partnership, we may not have been able to make the transition to profitable end user sales and sustain the company.
– Steve Smith, Owner of Hydraulic.net
The Results
During the period 2018 to 2022, we helped Hydraulic.net sustain it’s revenue in the midst of massive upheavals in the industry. Each year over $400K of “new” business was delivered directly through digital marketing activity.
BEFORE
AFTER
