Sector guide: The manufacturer’s guide to commissioning a website that wins specifiers
Your buyers do not buy the way websites assume
The person who first finds you is rarely the person who signs, the gap between first visit and order can run many months, and the visitor who matters most is often an engineer checking whether you can actually make the thing. Most manufacturing websites are built as brochures for a buyer who does not exist. This guide is how to commission one for the buyers who do.
What the site has to do
Three jobs, in order. It has to convince a technical specifier of capability quickly, which means real specifications, tolerances, materials and processes on the page rather than behind an enquiry form. It has to make the evidence easy to hand upwards, because your first visitor sells you internally to the person who signs, so case studies and capability documents need to be sendable. And it has to be found for the searches specifiers actually run, which are precise, technical, and almost never the marketing phrases on your current home page.
What to put in the brief
List the products or capabilities that earn the margin, not everything you can do. Name the three customer types who visit the site and what each needs to leave with. Gather the technical documentation that exists today, because datasheets you already have are content the project does not have to fund. State the systems the site must talk to. And decide who internally owns keeping specifications current, because a manufacturing site with stale specs is worse than none.
What to measure
Qualified enquiries, meaning the ones your sales team did not immediately discard. Downloads of technical documents, which are the earliest signal a specifier is working you into a project. And the search terms bringing engineers to the site, which tell you which capabilities the market currently associates with you and which it has not noticed yet.