Customer First Digital Marketing for Taiwan Manufacturers
I have spent the last 20 years visiting and interacting with wonderful people in the manufacturing industry in Taiwan and have found them to be highly focused on making great products, innovating new solutions, and looking after their customers. This has led to great success in the past, but now, in the era of online integrated marketing, this success does not seem so certain as they are often not adopting the digital solutions they need to stay ahead of competitors in the online market space.
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The importance of your company website has evolved
Your business website has become at least as important as international exhibitions, and digital marketing has become far more advanced with most customers now finding new suppliers solely through web searches.
But this digital shift created both opportunities and pitfalls for Taiwan manufacturers. Covid 19 accelerated this transformation from 2020-2023 by forcing Taiwan manufacturers to focus on their online presence as there were no trade shows to visit. At the same time, customers discovered that they could find suppliers online without investing in sending their people to those expensive international trade shows.
This rush to establish an online presence was great for web design companies too: Taiwan manufacturers raced to order new websites to avoid losing market share to their competitors. Large web design companies produced (not really designed) huge numbers of B2B websites based on a few similar website templates. This avoided them having to do any original design and was very profitable for the marketing companies, but was this a good thing for Taiwan’s manufacturers?
Is that the right way to build your company website?
This hurried approach to improving their online image led most companies to follow a standard template-driven process that didn’t deliver the results they hoped for. If I look at the way most large Taiwan web design companies operate, once the salesman has signed you up, the process has changed little in the last 20 years:
- Take photos at the factory
- Make an expensive company video (which you do not need)
- Collect the company catalogues
- Copy the catalogue content onto the website
- Hire a foreigner or use GPT to correct the English (If you are lucky)
Many companies are still following this process today. Perhaps you can see what is missing with this process? The customer.
Where is the customer research, competitor research and market research in this process?
- Will your website look similar to your competitors?
- Will your website answer customer questions or is it just another online catalogue?
- Does your website fully represent the quality and capabilities of your company?
None of these important questions are properly addressed and this is costing Taiwan manufacturers time, money and market position as many of them fall further and further behind their international competitors.
The Solution: A Customer First Approach to Digital Marketing
Start your website design or digital marketing project by focusing on your customers and what they need, not the visual design of your website. Your website should be a sales tool that answers customers questions and solves their problems, not just a catalog of your products.
You need a shift in perspective from “product-first” to “customer-first” thinking in everything you do online. If you can do that, you will be well on the way to success with all of your digital marketing activities.
Become more involved in the process of building your website and executing your digital marketing, use this simple guide to help you stay on the right track:
1. Understand who your customers are
Before you write a single word of website content, you need to truly understand your customers. What challenges are they facing in their business that your products can solve? I have seen too many Taiwanese manufacturers create websites that talk about their own achievements and awards, but fail to address the real problems their customers are trying to solve.
You need to think about what information your customers need at different stages of their buying process. Early on, they may not even know what solutions exist for their problem. Later, they will be comparing different suppliers and trying to work out who can best meet their needs. At each stage, they have different questions and concerns. They will also research many manufacturers before they contact any one of them for further information too.
2. What Questions Do Your Customers Ask?
I always tell potential customers that their best source of information for this is to look at their inquiries and other communications from customers. Apart from pricing issues, what do customers often ask about? How do they ask the questions, what words do they use? What technical specifications mattered most to them? What proof did they need that you could deliver quality and reliability? Putting this information on your website will help customers to view your company as not just knowledgeable, but also an attractive company to deal with as you will appear to understand their needs.
Your sales team can be invaluable at this stage of the process. They hear the same questions from potential customers again and again. These are exactly the questions your website should be answering clearly and thoroughly.
3. Take a Careful Look at Your International Competitors
Many years ago, when I worked for a large local marketing company, I dealt almost exclusively with Taiwanese machine tool manufacturers. I designed and produced product videos, catalogs, and occasionally some website content. Even back then I never thought that the websites we made were good, which was one of the reasons I left to start my own company in 2016.
Skip forward to 2023 and I was doing some competitor research for a new potential customer who is in the machine tools industry. I was stunned to discover ALL of the websites of the biggest Taiwanese machine tool manufacturers were not at all acceptable and most of them didn’t appear at all in search results outside of Taiwan. How could this be? After more than a decade, the industry was still using the same outdated catalog websites they had always used. The only thing that had changed was that the industry was struggling to win orders in the new digital market place. They had failed to look at what their competitors were doing and were paying the price for that.
Looking at what your international competitors are offering and what they are not offering, is a great way to start your digital marketing research. There is a saying in business which basically says:
“There are great opportunities to be found in the things which other people are not doing well”
I think this is very true and it is a great approach to build up a list of information, questions and other content that would be very helpful to customers visiting your website or searching for your products and services.
Unfortunately for many large web design companies, investing time in research and planning for content is something they rarely do, often expecting customers to provide all of the content to them to put on the website. This is not the right approach at all.
Design Your Website Around How Customers Think
Your website should be organised around how your customers think about their problems and solutions, not around how your company is structured. I have seen countless Taiwan manufacturer websites with navigation menus that list company departments, management structures or product model numbers that mean nothing to customers. If customers can’t find what they are looking for rapidly, they will leave and find somewhere else where they can get that information.
Instead, think about the customer’s sales journey and make it easy for them to find the information they need at each step. Your website should guide them naturally from initial research through to making an inquiry, answering their questions and addressing their concerns along the way. You can include FAQs on important pages and maybe an AI website chatbot to help them answer any questions they may have and hopefully shorten the sales process at the same time.
So What Can You Do Now?
The manufacturers who are willing to take a step back and really think about their customers first will be the ones who succeed online. It’s not complicated, but it does require you to be more involved in the process than you might be used to. Don’t just hand everything over to a web design company and hope for the best. Your business deserves better than a template website that looks like everyone else’s.
Take the time to understand your customers, listen to your sales team, and look at what your competitors are doing. Your website should work as hard for your business as you do.
About Us
All of the articles in this blog are written for you, the Taiwanese manufacturer. I wrote them all with the intention of providing useful information to help you avoid poor digital marketing choices and educate you on the things that you really need to know to make the best possible decisions for your business.
Here are some related articles that you might find useful:
B2B Website Content Creation – How to Get Your Digital Marketing Right
Read This Before You Sign a B2B Website Design Contract
2025 Website Design Guide for Taichung Manufacturers – What to Watch Out For
At GlobalSense, our international team helps customers research, write and design websites and run all of their digital marketing in the best way we know how. If you would like to discuss your current marketing challenges or would like a free SEO audit, then please contact us.