Capt'n on deck! You're at the helm of your brand-new manufacturing business. But, being the eager entrepreneur that you are, you've decided to set sail without even checking if your business is seaworthy. You launch, but quickly your company begins to take on water. You're able to steer your way through the problems even though water is pouring in. But eventually, as you reach deeper seas, you continue to sink under the waves until your business is submerged and lost to the murky waters of bad business planning. You don’t have to abandon this metaphorically sinking ship, by understanding manufacturing challenges that could befall your company and having the solutions in place before they occur will help you overcome the treacherous seas and find those calmer waters. So, consider this article your lighthouse and let’s delve into the ten manufacturing challenges makers face and how you can overcome them in your business. In this article, we cover the lack of skilled workers, inventory and project management, consumerism trends, selling direct to consumer, scaling your business, globalization, attracting qualified leads, increasing revenue and sales, maintenance and overheads, and automation.

Your website’s Home page design represents the online equivalent of a shop window and virtual front door to your business. Like a shop window, what you sell – whether products or services – needs to be obvious at a glance. Visitors also need to see why it would benefit them to step inside. To be truly effective, a website’s Home page design is about more than looking good. It has to work well, provide a great user experience (UX) and convert visitors into paying customers. So, what do you need to include to make sure your website’s Home page achieves this?

At Intercom, we place a lot of time and resources on crafting beautiful, thoughtful landing pages. But they didn't always convert as well as they could have for paid traffic. Learn how we approached personalizing our landing pages for PPC campaigns, resulting in a 3X increase in our conversion rates.