Adjusting to newer, modern methods of finding leads can be difficult when you’ve heavily practiced building relationships through sales calls or word-of-mouth.
The oil and gas industry is an extremely competitive market, so it’s essential to stay ahead of your competition to be successful. That’s why digital marketing for oil and gas companies is critical.
The Importance of Digital Marketing
The oil and gas industry may recognize that digital marketing can extend their business development and reach, but not everyone fully understands how. They may think that their sales efforts aren’t broken, so why fix it?
Instead of thinking there’s nothing to fix, it’s best to ask yourself, “how can I make things better?”
By adding more value to your relationships to help drive more leads.
Digital marketing won’t replace your traditional sales efforts, but it will add more content and ease in generating leads. It’s important to understand that these go hand-in-hand and that digital marketing will not be replacing the other. It’s not digital marketing vs. the sales team. Together, digital marketing, subject matter experts, and sales are powerful.
Where do you start?
Digital marketing can build your relationships more than you realize. And more relationships = more leads.
When presenting yourself online, you’re able to reach current and future clients where they spend the majority of their time: on the internet. With keywords “oil company” and “gas company” receiving up to 5,400 and 110,000 searches monthly (according to SEMRush), your company needs to be high on the search engine results.
Consumers will not only visit the websites that are higher on their search engine results, but they will also check to see how consistent your branding and content on your website are. By having consistent branding, you’ll gain more authority and trustworthiness, just like how you present yourself during in-person sales.
Keeping that in mind, you also want to outrank your competitors. When people are searching, they’ll often see local ads for oil and gas companies near them. Using digital marketing, you can present yourself in front of partners and offshore clients at ease–no business trip necessary!
To better build your relationships and drive leads, you need to focus your time on understanding your audience, having a content strategy, building your SEO, and combatting heavier lead-generating tactics like ads. Let’s jump in on ways to start digital marketing.
Buyer’s Journey
One of the first steps needed to begin digital marketing success is to work on a Buyer’s Journey. The Buyer’s Journey describes a customer’s process when purchasing a product or service in four phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Success. Think of it as a sales funnel but from a customer’s perspective.
This is also a great tool to share with your team so that everyone has the same messaging and understands how to approach potential customers better.
With this information, you’ll be able to reel them in with the right marketing message at the right time in their journey.
Competitive Research
You next need to focus on your competition. You’ll need to analyze your competitors and determine what strategies will help set you apart.
What works well for them? What doesn’t? Do you offer a product or service that they don’t?
With these questions in mind, you’ll be able to hone down on how to make your business retain current customers and attract new ones.
Update Your Website
While you may get many inquiries through word of mouth or referrals, that’s just a small percentage of what you can gain from a website. Updating your website’s design and content can help appeal to new users and encourage them to navigate through the website with ease. Keeping your website updated can also help with loading times as well. No one wants to browse or request a quote through a slow site.
It’s also important to optimize your keywords. As mentioned previously, many keywords in the oil and gas industry receive a high volume of monthly searches. You want your company to be at the top of the search results so that people don’t have to search extensively for your business. By ranking higher in the list, it will show people that your website is authoritative and trustworthy. Humans, by nature, want to minimize their time and effort to find what they need. Make it easier for them by effectively using SEO.
Content Strategy
Creating blogs, articles, podcasts, and case studies can boost your visibility and authority while showing your expertise not only to search engines but to clients. This material is also effective because it can be shared with others to help educate, inform, and inspire. (Yay, free advertisement!)
It’s also important to understand that some terminology has evolved. Blogs may be known as personal blogs where people would share household and lifestyle tips; however, now, they are used to share keyword-rich articles about your company or industry knowledge, making it a strong business tool.
To top it off, you can even lock this content by requesting someone’s contact information before they can download or view the information. This lets you know that you can start a conversation with them and send other great news to their inboxes!
Digital Ad Strategy
Digital advertisements are a perfect way to get your name in front of customers, build brand awareness, and generate leads.
One of the best ways to get faster results is to target specific people using Pay Per Click. Not only can you control which areas your ad spend goes to, but you only get charged if someone clicks on it!
Banner ads are also another effective form of ads. They’re placed in high-traffic locations on web pages to help create more brand awareness and generate more leads. These ads are normally placed where people’s eyes tend to wander, which makes them more likely to click and browse your website.
There are many forms of ads that work well in the oil and gas industry, and there’s not a one-solution-fits-all ad. It’s best practice to monitor ads and check on those leads!
Let’s Build a Powerful Partnership
In this extremely competitive market, you can’t let your oil and gas business get left behind. As a business owner, it can be difficult to find time to work on digital marketing for oil and gas, but we’re here to help.
Stop knocking on physical prospective doors. We can help you build more leads since we hold the key to your success. Start a digital marketing partnership with us today.
