Manufacturing Marketing Strategy

Manufacturers are traditionally not marketing-driven companies. Its time for manufacturers to embrace marketing, shift the mindset from expense to revenue generator and put together a Manufacturing Marketing Strategy and action plan. The context of this detailed article is based on the following guiding principles that are now well established in 2022.

The need to understand and recognise that there has been a power shift
Who is part of the decision making unit
Knowledge is power and you need to know how to exploit
Sell to those who want to buy
Demand needs to created and this takes time
Communication both internal and external has never been more important
Create value in what you do, this will translate into trust and attention
Be patient in how you measure results

Manufacturing companies who have created more active business development functions have tended towards being sales-oriented (rather than marketing-oriented).

For many manufacturers when the word “marketing” is spoken it’s often in the context of an expense, along the lines of designing printed materials for the sales team to leave behind after meetings, or posting photos on social media.

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1: There’s been a power shift from seller to buyer

Think back 20-ish years, in the office there would be a big clunky off-white computer monitor, you would be waiting on your dial-up connection to lock in before you could Yahoo whatever you were looking for.

So much has changed, and so fast, now come back to the present day. It’s so easy to collect information about anything now. Whether you’re starting the search for a new laser, deciding which camera you want to spend your salary on or simply looking for a list of holiday options, the buying power is in your hands. Not the seller’s.

As a manufacturing organisation what doe’s that mean for you?

Your prospects are actively looking for answers to their questions online
- How do I …?
- What is the…?
- Can I connect a ….?
Your prospects are consuming written, video, audio and visual content, as they seek to have their questions answered and learn
Your prospects can easily compare their purchasing options
They’ve evaluating prospective partners and vendors
They are getting an idea of pricing options
Once they have gathered some information, then, they get ready to make a sales call

So while a majority of manufacturers are still busy with printed brochures and product catalogues, the smart manufacturers are looking at the digital world to provide answers to prospects questions. They are talking about solutions to common industry problems, comparing process methodology for doing it alternative ways, educating about timeline to ROI and total cost of ownership and sharing success stories to make everything more tangible.

The smartest manufacturers are recognising that they’re not going win solely based on their historical reputation, their existing customer base and referrals as these alone aren’t sufficient anymore.

Manufacturers with a marketing perspective are adapting to how buyers are buying right here and right now. Most importantly they’re meeting these prospects where they are inhabiting.

2: Who is part of the decision making unit

If you are manufacturing a product there are potentially 3 sets of buyers

Group 1: – Those people who will actually be using your product as part of their daily activities ( e.g. machinists , operators, technologists, engineers)
Group 2: – These people are trying to solve problems on the factory floor / within the organisation
Group 3: – The people who have control of the budget and ultimately authorise any purchases ( but only after group 2 have had their say)

If you can learn what matters to each of these key buying process influencers and earn their attention and trust by helping and guiding them, they’ll be your advocates when the buying process eventually does move into procurement’s hands.

Warning– if you only focus group 3, you’ll brand your company as a commodity and find yourself in a race to the bottom on price.

3: Knowledge is power

The best content comes from the brains of your company’s subject matter experts. When I talk to Managing Directors or Engineering Directors I often have to remind them that are a valuable source of information and knowledge and things they take for granted are of high value to a prospect.

We’ve already talked about identifying the challenges, common questions and desired future states of your prospects. And we’ve talked about tactical ways to create content that will address those things (written, video, webinar, audio, etc). The likelihood is that whilst the knowledge may be within the manufacturing business, getting the information out in order to create content assets is always a challenge?

Employees are always too busy working in the company to spend time writing a 2000-word blog post? The approach we take is t talk to company subject matter expert within the business. Ahead of the interview we’ll do the preparatory work, so we’re asking the right questions. Then we’ll conduct a 30-minute interview to extract the key insights around the topic from that person. Following the interview, we’ll often do more research to help clarify points that were made and send a draft article for the client to review.

Importantly the insights come from the brain of the subject matter expert who understands the sector issues / pains.

4: Sell to those who want to buy

The majority of your total addressable market is not in buying mode at this exact moment in time

If there are 100 companies that could conceivably be your customers, maybe 1 to 3 are actively looking for a solution currently. This number is likely to increase the closer your product approaches commodity status. Equally, this number shrinks the more specialised, complex and bigger-ticket your product is.

When active buyers are looking for a solution, they go to places like:

Their network
Google
Industry resources or organizations

So the challenge is that we may not know exactly which businesses are buying right now, but we want to make sure they know about you. This is called “capturing existing demand”.

This is where both search engine optimisation (SEO) and paid search (ads) enter the picture.

SEO is a very long game. You need to build authority in the eyes of Google (or other search engines) just as you build authority in the real world requiring

Time.
High-quality, genuinely resourceful content.
Credible inbounds links from authoritative relevant sources to your website
A sound strategy to pull all of this together.

SEO is important but difficult

SEO matters. But it’s hard to win in the short term if you’re just getting started.

The compliment to SEO (and in most cases, a way to move more quickly toward meaningful results) is paid search. With paid search (think Google Ads), you’re essentially paying for website traffic by selecting and bidding on keywords. So the more popular and higher converting keywords will cost significantly more money

It’s very easy to waste money doing lead generation with pay-per-click (PPC) ads. One of the most strategic pieces of advice I can offer is to focus your PPC spend on high-intent keywords. Let me illustrate with an example:

For Blue Dolphin, we would bid on keywords like “manufacturing marketing agency” — not “manufacturing marketing strategy”.

Why do we do this?

The reason is that those companies who are specifically searching for an agency are exhibiting signs of buying intent whereas those researching strategy are probably looking to learn. While we welcome manufacturing visitors from both categories, we don’t want to pay for non converting traffic. To educate those who want to learn about marketing strategy we would rather gain their attention organically and through other lower cost marketing approaches.

Aside from going to Google (other search engines), prospects who are actively looking to buy will use other approaches. Don’t overlook referral networks and visit industry forums, directories and/or associations websites.

5: Create demand with your Manufacturing Marketing Strategy

Revisiting our hypothetical total addressable market of 100 customers that we described in point 4. If 1 to 3 of those 100 might be active buyers at this moment in time, that means 97 companies that fit your Ideal Customer Profile remain.

These businesses are not in buying mode right now, but many of them will be at some point ( a week or a month or a year) , but right now, they’re not.

So a “Buy Now” message doesn’t resonates with that vast majority of your audience? At best they’re ignoring you, at worse, they’re blocking you because all you do is blast unwelcome sales messaging continually.

Just because someone in your target audience isn’t buying right now doesn’t mean they’re a “bad” prospect or lead, it just means that they’re not ready for sales messaging “YET”.

Lets briefly revisit the approaches already covered:

Knowing who the buying process influencers are ( they may have multiple personas)
Understanding what matters to them ( they may have different issues of importance and value)
Creating amazing content that earns their trust and attention

Now it’s time to go actively distribute this content to them to assure that the messaging is actually consumed by the right people from the right companies.

You are probably like most manufacturing companies in that you don’t have the luxury of just waiting for future customers to knock on your door. You need to proactively get out into the world, build personal connections and earn trust. For most, these are sales activities, but we believe marketing has a significant role to perform here as well.

Content distribution can take on many forms. Here are a few worth noting, Email ( great for distributing helpful / thought leadership resources) , You Tube ( create some video resources), paid social media.

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6: Communication – Internal & External

Having worked with numerous manufacturing organizations over the past twenty plus years, when visiting initially very few have successfully created any kind of meaningful or productive alignment between their marketing and sales personnel.

As someone who has worked on both sides (as an ex engineer before I transferred over to the dark side of marketing) I believe the core of this problem lies in what I stated at the very beginning of this article.

Manufacturers are traditionally not marketing-driven companies.

If a manufacturer’s sales team has always viewed marketing as the folks who make brochures, update the website and post on Facebook, what motivation will they have to spend valuable hours (or even minutes) of their week with the marketing people? Marketing – that’s just the crayoning department – correct?

We wouldn’t suggest that you create a Marketing Plan. We would always suggest that you create a Marketing & Sales Action Plan and that requires marketing and sales working together. This means changing dialogue with your sales team from a tactical to a strategic conversation:

What are the new sales targets for this year (or quarter)?
Where do the biggest growth opportunities lie?
Where can the company be most profitable?
What’s the current sales pipeline look like?
Where are future customers getting stuck?
How are they tracking deals in the CRM (or elsewhere)?

It’s easier said than done, but marketing-sales alignment has to start somewhere. Making sure your not seen as the colouring department will get you moving in the right direction.

7: Create value in what you communicate

In our communication with prospects we could do a couple of things:

Try to sell them stuff
Earn their attention and trust by being their best resource

Now number one is the end goal and we need to get your sales team to that place. But right now we’re talking about marketing for manufacturing companies and marketing is not the same thing as sales.

Think for a moment about those early-stage influencers in the buying process (often engineers or other technical professionals).

Then ask these questions:

What challenges are they facing that your experts know how to solve?
What questions are they trying to get answered?
What do they need to know to help them advance the buying process?

The best sales professionals understand that you have to connect with the pains and desired futures states of prospects. The same goes with marketing. If you talk all about yourself first, no one listens.

If you talk about what your prospects care about, genuinely help them and demonstrate thought leadership along the way, you’ll then earn the right to talk about yourself.

Developing a content strategy as a manufacturing organisation can help you identify the content that will be most valuable to your target audience

Written blog content (educational in nature)
Videos of your experts talking about key topics, showing how to do something
Webinars where you’re actively answer prospects’ questions in a live setting
In person / on site technical training

Decisions about which channels to use should be made based on how your audience prefers to consume information.

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8: Be patient with measurement

Marketing takes time and you don’t grow an effective marketing program from the ground up overnight. Patience is the number one ingredient missing from most manufacturing marketing programs

Ultimately, marketing success should be measured on the basis of contribution to pipeline.

Its important to remember what we covered earlier: the majority of your total addressable market is not actively buying at this moment in time. For manufacturers effective marketing is a process that involves:

Incrementally generating awareness
Building trust by establishing a position of thought leader in your space
Capturing demand where it exists while building demand where it doesn’t
Analysing your marketing KPIs to create a flywheel of continuous improvement
Rinsing and repeating

Marketing Measurements will include

Organic search rankings
Website traffic growth
Volume of form submissions on your website
Engagement rates with content
Consumption of video content on YouTube or LinkedIn

These marketing KPIs will serve as barometers for you. Are we moving in the right direction as we build this sustainable revenue marketing engine?

More information on marketing metrics and measure, analyse and refine are covered in these articles

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