Why Isn’t Your Taiwan B2B Website Getting Any Inquiries?
Taiwan’s manufacturing sector is strong, with companies producing world-class products and maintaining strong international relationships built over decades. In Taiwan, we are the center of the global AI and chip manufacturing industry and develop some of the most advanced electronics available, but the traditional manufacturing sector is falling behind in the race for new customers due to weak digital marketing.
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The Challenge in The Taiwan Manufacturing Sector
Many of these traditional manufacturing companies invest millions in international exhibitions and even in print advertising but still fail to properly understand the importance of digital marketing to their businesses.This problem becomes even clearer in larger companies with larger, multi-layered management teams. Some of the smaller, family owned businesses are coming around to the necessity of a robust digital presence, but many companies are still suffering from an inertia that is crippling their future in the digital marketplace.
In this article I will share some insights from visiting and interacting with hundreds of Taiwan manufacturing companies of all sizes in the last 20 years that I hope will encourage you to make the right marketing decisions for your manufacturing business.
Digital Marketing Messages for Company Managers
One of the major challenges that manufacturing companies in Taiwan face is that the decisionmakers are still Baby Boomers or Generation X. This usually means that they are not familiar with digital marketing, and prefer to trust exhibitions and paper catalogs for most of their “Marketing”.
Smaller companies may have an advantage in that the second generation has taken over most of the sales and marketing functions and they are forging ahead with much more effective digital marketing strategies than their larger competitors, but in the larger companies, the changes are coming too slowly.
Here are some messages I try to convey to potential customers when I visit them for the first time:
1.Digital marketing is complex and poor choices will cost your company money
Digital marketing agencies have teams of specialists to understand and execute marketing strategies. You don’t have that expertise within your company so you need to seek advice from multiple experts before making important digital marketing decisions or you will waste money and time as well as losing potential customers.
2.Competitors with better websites are taking customers who could be yours
On the internet potential customers are attracted by websites that answer their questions and make them feel comfortable with your business. In the B2B space most potential customers will visit up to 7 websites before sending an inquiry to any of them. If your website does not attract them, you will lose them to your competitors. It does not matter how big your company is, if the competitor has a better website, they will win the new business 99% of the time.
3.Your website tells customers exactly what to expect from your business
Poor English and outdated design on your website is a clear indication to a potential customer that you do not really care about quality. This might be uncomfortable to hear, but it is true.
I often tell customers that if the Chinese on their website was as bad as the English, they would not dare to allow anyone to see it as it would be too embarrassing for the company. In 2025 with AI translation and grammar checking, there is no excuse for this kind of poor language so when potential customers see this they will leave your website and give their business to your competitors instead.
Taiwan manufacturers make amazing products and are incredibly innovative, but they are often sabotaging their business opportunities with a poor quality website. These websites are often templates that make them look the same as their competitors, have no useful content for customers, and are reusing the words from old company catalogs they have been using for years. To succeed in the digital world, things need to change and my mission is to help Taiwanese companies make this change in the right way.
A Website Has To Be Planned Properly for it to Succeed
Just like any project, a new company website needs to be discussed and planned properly by people who understand digital marketing and website design. Important note: Don’t hire a website design company, you need a marketing agency that does website design.
Your company website is the critical foundation of your digital marketing and will be the target for all of your advertising too, so making sure you take time to get this right and also invest properly in it is worthwhile.
You might find this article useful in explaining website planning:
Website Construction: A Practical Guide for Manufacturing Leaders
Your website is a type of production machinery, just like any machine tools in the factory. The website helps you to “produce” new customers so making sure it is high quality and reliable is very important for your business. Cheap, low quality tools, produce cheap, low quality products. That is not the way to attract the customers that you need to keep ahead of the competition.
SEO Is a Part of Your Website – Not Something You Can Add Later
Companies call us every week asking about doing SEO optimization for their company website. If a website is already well built with great content and structure, this can be done, but that is usually not the case. Often we have to tell potential customers that their only option is to start from scratch with a properly structured and written website that customers will want to visit and spend time on.
Think of a website as a little like a car, once you have bought it, it is too late to change the engine. SEO is the engine that drives your website to be found by potential customers.
Three things your website needs to rank highly in search engines:
- Correct and well written meta data for the search engines: These are the words you see that summarize the contents of the page when you search in Google. You read these to decide if you want to visit a page or not.
- Well written content that is useful to customers and answers their questions: Google and AI search engines can read your content and if there is not much of it, or if it is low quality, why would they choose to show it to someone in search results?
- Regular and Fresh Content: In 2025 this is usually in the form of a company blog, but all of the blog posts also need to be optimized too with the correct meta data and useful information (Just like this article).
Learn More About Digital Marketing For Your Business
Every week I write a new article about digital marketing for Taiwan manufacturers and my goal is always to help you make better marketing decisions for your business. Please sign up for our blog so that you are notified whenever one of these new articles comes out.
Below are a list of some articles that will help you to understand a little more about digital marketing and hopefully help you to deliver a great website for your business:
- 2025 Website Design Guide for Taichung Manufacturers – What to Watch Out For
- Read This Before You Sign a B2B Website Design Contract
- 10 Proven Steps to Build a B2B Website That Attracts Inquiries
At GlobalSense, we help Taiwan manufacturers attract new international customers with great websites, content and strategies that really work. If you have some questions about your company’s marketing, or would like a free consultation, please contact us.