The more obscure your product is, the easier it is to get found online.
Yes, it’s true. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Let me explain.
I learned this working for a company that makes very sophisticated lasers for manufacturing extremely small parts. We’re talking parts with features smaller in diameter than a human hair. They were struggling to get noticed in a world of giant manufacturing equipment companies.
Researching possible solutions was discouraging. We didn’t have the budget to advertise on a large scale. We tried hiring a PR firm, but most of our customers were in the medical device manufacturing space, which is notoriously secretive—meaning we didn’t have a lot of stories we could tell. We decided we needed a new website—spent a lot of money and developed a beautiful site that made our internal audience very proud and happy. When we turned it on, nothing changed.
Then we found Hubspot, and I learned about the world of inbound marketing. The premise of inbound marketing is this: the way people buy has fundamentally changed. People research online and find out as much as they can about solutions to their problems before contacting a vendor. The good news is that if you have a viable product or service, people are looking for you. The difficult part is getting found. But with the right combination of optimized content, frequent publishing (blogging), and great educational content as offers, the people looking for you will find you.
Still, I thought, how many people are looking for industrial lasers that machine teeny tiny parts? The answer is, “not very many,” and that’s a good thing. That means there is less competition for the search terms in the industry, making it far easier to get our content to rank on the first page of search results. It also means that the people who are searching for these terms are very likely in, or close to your target audience. Right? People aren’t searching for industrial lasers for microscopic medical device manufacturing just for the fun of it.
So we adopted the Hubspot platform, optimized our web pages and started blogging around the terms our customers are looking for. Boom. Within three months, our web traffic tripled and our lead database grew 6x. I’m not kidding. I won’t say it was easy because there was a lot of hard work and careful planning involved, but the results were spectacular.
After my tour of duty with that company ended, I started doing the same kind of work with other companies in various segments of the life science industry, and I got similar results. Like I said, if you have a good product, people are looking for it. Honestly, it’s even better if not that many people are looking for it, because that translates to less competition for search terms, which gets you found faster.
I call it “superniche” marketing. Give us the most narrowly focused product on the market. It is easier to get found and it is far more rewarding to the marketer than to stand out in a very crowded field.
