manufacturer.lighting is like no other online B2B platforms out there. We are NOT a product of the fucking fake and unrealistic virtual economy. We're with you - brave entrepreneurs, diligent sales guys+girls, creative marketers, skilled engineers, and all lovely people working in the lighting industry. We're new, but nearly two thousands of professionals in this industry can testify this brand new portal was built by people from the lighting industry, not by an internet company. These professionals, from the largest QQ social group (214416643) for the lighting export business in China, witnessed how Excell Wang, founder of manufacturer.lighting, grew from noob to pro in three years. In a nutshell, we feel with you the same pulse of the lighting industry and market.
What We Do
manufacturer.lighting was born to address the realistic expectation from lighting suppliers - more high quality RFQs from credible buyers. Just like an ancient Chinese saying goes that "Any mountain can be famous with the presence of a saint and any river can be holy with the presence of a dragon." While attracting a huge pool of buyers is our ultimate goal, manufacturer.lighting will always be a supplier-driven B2B marketplace. We will never put the cart before the horse and attempt to make money with hypes by hiring a big sales team, doing excessive promotions and making door-to-door persuasions. We invest in fostering a powerful online presence for reliable suppliers by truely making sense of internet marketing and generating high quality traffic to your web property. Dear members, you're the majestic saints and dragons, our success relies on your growth!
B2B ≠ B2C
Virtually no current B2B export marketplaces understand the difference between B2B and B2C, including Alibaba.com. Admittedly, Jack Ma is a great marketer for his products, but his B2B platform does not market products for its members. The essential difference between B2B and B2C marketplaces is that the core value of a B2B marketplace lies in its capability of MARKETING products for its members and a B2C marketplace concentrates on SELLING member's products. Marketing and selling are completely different things when it comes to the characteristics of member service. Unfortunately, B2B members are being treated as B2C members - they enjoy very limited and dwindling benefits and privileges as a B2B platform customer but are required to pay more for the oversold service and take more responsibilities as a B2C seller!
We Do Marketing
In manufacturer.lighting, we work closely with our suppliers to build full-fledged storefronts (your membersites). The storefront is a basic building block for a B2B marketplace where a member's company profile, product listings, and other related information are published. Internet marketing for a business is the extension of its sales marketing to the web world. A storefront is the place where your internet marketing campaign starts. It's essentially similar to your corporate website in functionality. In fact if your corporate website works well it's not necessary to pay for a membership here. You're here basically paying for what you have never cared about - attitude. Marketing products online equals selling yourself in an offline meeting with your customers. We help you "market" your "products" instead of "selling" the "goods" the way like a street vendor do. A marketer communicates the intrinsic value of a product to his customers whereas a vendor is only interested in figuring out how much people will pay for his goods. The former wins big markets with his product knowledge and the latter makes small money with his bargain tricks.
It's not a hype! manufacturer.lighting is your online stage and our team is your intimate counselor to help you speak out proudly about your products. Marketing is the activity of communication between you and your customers with the goal of selling your products to them as well as building a long-term relationship with them. Delivering the value of your product or service is a key aspect of marketing. The tangible understanding for B2B marketing is product presentation which employs a variety of means, e.g., text, photo, video, to deliver the specifications, features, benefits, and all other related product information to your customers. This is exactly what we ask and help you to do here.
What Our Competitors Don't Care about is What We Do
Our competitors might be laughing that we're merely indulging in an empty talk about B2B marketing. You might be an industry giant with billions of revenue collected from your members, but did you ever write such a piece of guide for them? Does your platform provide informative product-specific knowledge like we do here? Does any one in your team have professional marketing expertise for a specific manufacturing industry? By taking advance of your strong cash pool and the trained web developing team, you can clone horizontally unlimited projects. Nevertheless, B2B marketing for the manufacturing industries demands highly vertical investment of industry-specific knowledge and expertise, which you have never cared about and therefore you never know how to do marketing for your customers from the manufacturing industries.
We, at the time of writing, are one-man business and have very pitiful financial investment. Yet we did an intensive and extensive industry research for three years by truly networking with people from the lighting industry. manufacturer.lighting was built from scratch and took a full year to conceive and give its birth. We're not financed by any VC but proudly backed by the support from lighting suppliers who enthusiastically shared their industry knowledge and expertise in our lighting community!
Training Your Staff into Marketing Gurus
Entrepreneurs from the manufacturing business are obsessed with lack of marketing personnel. It is said that a qualified marketing professional should have academic backgrounds in the marketing field and is able to play with marketing strategies such as "Seven P Formula" like a duck to water. We'd incline to take such views as a pile of shit. Chinese universities manufactured a great number of academic noobs who are far from qualified as a marketing expert for the manufacturing business. They lack technical and engineering training which is essential for B2B marketing. In fact, your team members are the best candidates for the marketing positions in your company. A good marketer for the manufacturing industry is not necessary to be eloquent and talkative. The best marketing is echoing with your customers and touching them with your insightful comprehension of their needs. This necessitates technology accumulation and engineering experience, which are the inherent advantages for your team members.
In manufacturer.lighting, we have different training channels to help transform your sales team into marketing gurus. Our strict review standards require our members must have a complete knowledge of their products before they submit product information to our Products channel. That being said, a salesperson who can not do a basic product presentation, specifically the incapability of writing a product description, is not qualified for his/her position. If a salesman never gets down to the mechanical structure, thermal management, electrical and optical performance, and product application of an LED luminaire, he is not able to provide information what his customers deeply care about. Hence he can not do marketing because he's unable to present to the buyers the value of your product and, more importantly, the competence of his company.
Networking and Improving Yourself
B2B marketing is such simple but not that easy. It's all about a saleman's commitment to his job and this industry. It's a very interesting phenomenon that many customers prefer to talk with an engineer rather than a salesperson when they visit factories in China. The intrinsic cause is that many salespersons have very limited product knowledge and they subliminally make a clean break with engineering because they think their responsibilities of the sales position are selling products. They throw the technical stuff to their engineering colleagues, simply playing a role as a translator. In the manufacturing industries, the language level of many salespersons are poor. In some situations they're providing customer disservice instead of customer service. The poor language skill and engineering knowledge lead to the poor communication between the engineers and customers. Tragedy!
In manufacturer.lighting, we encourage dynamic interactions between our members for knowledge sharing and occupational networking so as to improve both the language skill and engineering knowledge for our members. Our forum-featured community allows members to showcase their companies and products, meet industry peers, talk business, explore technical stuffs, and help each other. Our Ask & Answer channel is a place for noobs to submit bravely any question related with the lighting business. Knowledgeable pros will be rewarded with system credits for sharing their knowledge and experience. Members that make the best product listings in storefronts or contribute most informative knowledge sharings will be recommended if they need referrals from us for assistance with job applications.
As is clearly visible, manufacturer.lighting is a marketing + networking portal for the lighting industry. We're with you!