Seven of the 55 businesses I audited were manufacturers. Injection moulding, lifting equipment, heating systems, joinery, containers. Businesses where the product is physical, the expertise runs deep and the words "digital marketing" can feel like they belong to a different world entirely.
What I found was that manufacturers don't have the same digital problems as other businesses. They have different ones. And in some ways, harder ones.
The website as afterthought
In most of the manufacturers I worked with, the website had been built years ago, usually because someone said they should have one. It showed the products, listed a phone number and hadn't been meaningfully updated since. It wasn't bad exactly. It just wasn't doing anything.
One manufacturer had been trading for over fifteen years and had a website that looked like it was from the first five. The product range had expanded, the client base had grown, the business had changed completely. The website hadn't kept pace. A new customer arriving on the site would have no sense of the scale or capability of the actual business behind it.
Another had product pages with barely any text. One page had 127 words. Competitors with worse products but better descriptions were outranking them in Google. The quality gap between the product and the website was enormous.
The operational problems
This is where manufacturing audits diverged from the rest. Most businesses needed help with visibility: getting found, getting enquiries, converting visitors. Manufacturers often had plenty of work. Their problems were operational.
Stock management held together with spreadsheets. Quoting processes that involved printing PDFs, annotating them by hand and posting them. Customer accounts that existed only in email threads. One business was spending hundreds a month on external software subscriptions for systems that could have been consolidated into a single platform. Nobody had ever mapped out all the tools they were paying for and asked whether they actually needed them all.
A lifting equipment company had multiple business lines and needed its website to handle hire enquiries, custom manufacturing requests, stock availability and testing services. The existing site treated them all the same way, which meant none of them worked particularly well.
The outlier
One manufacturer stood out because they were already ahead of everyone else. Number one in their sector nationally. Turnover that had grown from eight million to thirty million in five years. They didn't need a basic audit. They wanted to understand what world-class customer experience looks like online: real-time order tracking, customer account areas, proactive communication at every stage.
The gap between that business and the one with 127 words on a product page tells you everything about the range within manufacturing. The sector isn't uniformly behind on digital. It's wildly uneven.
What manufacturers should focus on
If you run a manufacturing business and your website is an afterthought, here's where to start.
Product pages need depth. Specifications, applications, lead times, minimum order quantities, case studies showing the product in use. Think about what a buyer needs to know before they pick up the phone, and put it on the page.
If your quoting process is manual, look at whether it could be partially automated. Even a simple enquiry form that captures the right information upfront (product type, quantity, timeline) saves time on both sides.
Map your software. Write down every tool your business pays for. What does each one do? Is there overlap? Could two or three tools be replaced by one platform?
And take your website seriously. It's not a brochure. For an increasing number of your customers, it's the first impression of your business. Make it worthy of the quality you actually deliver.
This article is part of a series based on findings from 55 digital audits. Read the full case study for the complete picture, or get in touch if you'd like an honest look at where your business stands.