Strategies for Manufacturing Marketing

As a B2B manufacturing marketer, you uniquely understand that manufacturing marketing can be extremely challenging, time consuming and resource-intensive. You don’t have the luxury of targeting thousands of prospects with general marketing messages and hoping a small percentage will convert. You have precisely defined targets and need to reach them cost effectively.

Manufacturing Marketing – Good content marketing is key

The requirement for a successful online presence including your website and customer-focused content marketing is driven by your manufacturing customer’s behavior. Today’s manufacturing prospects are much like prospects in other industries – they don’t want to be marketed to with disruptive messaging and vehicles (email blasts, cold emails, cold calls, etc.). They are in perpetual self-serve and educational mode – learning more about their issues and your and your competitor’s solutions without ever reaching out.  In fact, according to Google, today’s B2B industrial manufacturing customers complete nearly 60% of their buying journey without ever contacting a supplier.

But in 2017, just having a blog with several posts per year and an irregular social media program isn’t going to cut it. According to Content Marketing Institute, 68% of manufacturers plan on creating more content in 2017 than they did in 2016. As the focus on content marketing for manufacturers increases, so will the budget and resources allocated to marketing functions. A high-quality content marketing program is critical to reaching your prospects faster and more cost-effectively than your competitors.

Manufacturing Marketing – How to develop good content marketing

• Develop a content marketing strategy. 85% of content developed is never used! Prior to considering what content to create, you should develop a structured process for evaluating and prioritizing new content creation needs.
• Identify your content needs. Once you have a process for evaluating content, consider leveraging a one-upper approach to developing content. At a high level, this means identifying successful content that already exists, making your content even better and then promoting it.
• Ensure your manufacturing marketing program objectives and mile markers includes specific content development metrics.

Manufacturing Marketing – Relationships are critical

Although the customer buying journey has evolved, one thing hasn’t changed – relationships are still critical to manufacturing sales. But how those relationships are uninitiated and nurtured is where leading marketers in manufacturing businesses are excelling.

Manufacturing Marketing – RH Blake can help.

Are you generating expected results and leads from your manufacturing marketing efforts? Download our ultimate guide for manufacturers looking to build an effective digital marketing roadmap!