Implementing successful inbound marketing tactics can help you drive high-quality leads and grow faster.
Elevate your manufacturing marketing with engaging content that boosts brand credibility and positions you as a thought leader.
Invest in personalized email targeting to increase your lead generation and conversion rate.
As per a recent study, 94% of B2B buyers research a product before purchasing it. So, we can say customers are shifting their buying behavior and looking for you online.
Ideally, manufacturing industry companies spend around 8% of the overall company budget on marketing.
Many manufacturers have started implementing strategies like email campaigns, social media presence, paid advertising, etc.
However, to acquire more high-quality leads and expand businesses into new markets, a well-planned manufacturing marketing strategy is essential.
Sounds right?
Let’s study the step-by-step process of an effective manufacturing marketing strategy to grow your business.
How to build a successful marketing strategy – 7 Simple steps!
The modern way of marketing is beyond promoting your product. You need to understand your prospect’s pain points and present your brand as a solution to them.
Let’s dive into the steps of crafting a strong marketing strategy for manufacturing industry.
Step 1: Conduct a SWOT analysis
SWOT analysis helps to evaluate your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the industry.
The analysis helps build an effective manufacturing marketing strategy as you can identify growth and drawbacks, discover opportunities, and recognize potential threats.
Additionally, it will help you understand your business position in the industry.
Here’s how you can run a SWOT analysis for your manufacturing business.
Let’s say you manufacture tires and want to run the company globally. Upon analysis, you discovered that your strength is material quality and tires’ durability.
Your weaknesses are a lack of higher manufacturing costs and poor supply chain management.
So, you can now create your marketing campaigns around the value you offer to persuade your potential buyers.
Additionally, you can work on improving your weaknesses to boost your business sales.
Remember that a SWOT analysis is dynamic, so timely review and update your business analysis to adapt to changing manufacturing industry trends.
Step 2: Identify target markets and segments
Once you’ve discovered your business’s strengths and weaknesses, determine what your ideal target market is.
To determine your target market, consider finding answers to the following questions:
What is the demographic of your target audience? (Like age, qualification, gender, etc.)
Where are they located geographically?
What industry do they work in?
What are their hobbies or interests?
What are their thought processes and behaviors?
How do they communicate?
What challenges do they face?
What motivates the decision-maker to buy?
Have they purchased from competitors before?
Discovering the answers to the above question will tell you what is your ideal target market and ICP (ideal customer profile) to implement manufacturing marketing strategies.
Further, you can develop buyer personas based on factors like demographics, interests, motivations, and behaviors. This will help you craft personalized marketing messages.
Step 3: Choosing the marketing approach: Outbound, inbound, or both?
Broadly, we’ve two marketing approaches: Inbound and outbound.
Here’s a table to help you understand both approaches precisely:
Factors
Inbound marketing
Outbound marketing
Definition
It involves efforts such as attracting and engaging potential customers through valuable content. Often, the interaction is initiated by the customer.
It involves sending marketing messages directly to a broad audience, which can interrupt their current activities. Here, the marketers initiate the interaction.
Example
Blog posts, social media posts, and webinars.
Magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail.
Strategy approach
Pull strategy where you draw customer’s attention by providing helpful and relevant information.
Push strategy where you send marketing messages to a large audience, hoping to capture their attention.
Measurement
It is easy to measure inbound marketing using various KPIs.
It is primarily done in non-digital form, so measuring it becomes challenging.
Hope the above table offered helpful insights into both inbound and outbound marketing methods.
As 94% of buyers are researching products online, the buying behavior indicates the need for a strong online presence. So, with an inbound marketing approach, it would be easier to drive searchers to your site.
Inbound marketing is powerful as it is a highly targeted approach, drives high-quality leads, and builds brand awareness faster.
If you still have any doubts, look at the below stats:
About 68% of B2B buyers make purchases online, indicating the effectiveness of inbound marketing in driving revenue growth.
Furthermore, 57% of B2B buyers make buying decisions before picking up your rep’s phone and talking with them.
Inbound marketing for manufacturers can benefit your business in various ways:
It enables cost-effective lead generation with content marketing.
Inbound marketingaligns marketing, sales, and service teams as you need all these department experiences to craft a marketing strategy.
Targeting with content that resonates with your audience’s preferences helps you gain their trust and position yourself as a thought leader.
Inbound marketing drives qualified leads as they focus on specific and personalized targeting.
Step 4: Determine your ideal inbound marketing channels
By determining the right channel, I meant discovering top marketing platforms where your target audience leverages or is present.
You must select the channel that is used the most by your target audience.
Developing your strategy around the ideal channel is a good approach for a successful marketing plan.
Shown in the image below are some popular marketing channels used by industrial marketers:
So, concisely, you can consider key channels such as email marketing, social media, and websites for manufacturing marketing.
The only motive for using these media is building a unique brand identity that your target audience can resonate with.
Further, crafting a compelling message that communicates your value proposition is essential. And, hence the next step is to strategize your content.
Step 5: Create a content marketing plan
Content has become an inseparable element of every kind of marketing. It serves as a bridge between businesses and their prospective customers, guiding them through the marketing funnel.
Your content can persuade your target audience, whether it is an email campaign, landing page, paid campaigns, social media posts, webinar presentations, etc.
Manufacturing businesses implementing industrial marketing rely extensively on content to promote their business in a better way.
Crafting successful content marketing strategies for manufacturing requires addressing industry-specific pain points while presenting value.
Check out these stats to get more insights into how content is helping in marketing for manufacturers:
93% of manufacturers produce videos on their website, making it the top-created type of content.
87% of marketers produce blogs every month and many posts once a week.
70% of industrial marketers have websites with three or more gated content.
So, when you leverage content effectively to showcase your manufacturer’s product value, you can get crazy success.
Here are some tips for leveraging content and generating leads:
Define your ideal customers and craft engaging content specifically for them.
Provide valuable insights through gated content to generate leads easily.
Brainstorm and maintain your content with fresh ideas. This helps in building thought leadership content.
For instance, B2B manufacturing marketers can do LinkedIn marketing to drive business leads.
You can leverage key inbound marketing channels like social media, email, and ad campaigns, which are great ways to generate leads.
Convert your web traffic into leads using Web Forms. You can introduce a Live Chat system to your website to handle web queries and capture leads.
Further, utilize CRM for manufacturing to quality, assign, and nurture them.
Step 7: Monitor and optimize your performance
The beauty of inbound marketing is that you can measure your campaign’s performance with tools and optimize them to grow faster.
So, use analytical tools to track and evaluate the performance of marketing initiatives.
Define KPIs for each marketing campaign and evaluate their efforts.
The campaign data can help you make informed decisions to build or refine your strategy.
Ensure you consistently track your progress and stay informed about your customers’ preferences.
Additionally, keep up with the latest manufacturing marketing and leverage new technologies like automation and AI to grow faster.
Many manufacturers lack in-house digital marketing talents, so it would be great for them to hire skilled marketing professionals.
The above marketing strategy for a manufacturing company can drive promising results with the right efforts.
5 Best marketing strategies for manufacturing companies: The inbound way!
We’re focusing on top manufacturer marketing strategies to generate more leads, promote better, and establish brand credibility. So, let’s dive deep in.
1. Email marketing
Manufacturers find email marketing helpful as it allows targeted communication. You can select the list of audiences and the content to deliver the same.
In fact, 59% of B2B marketers cite email as their top revenue-generating channel simply because email marketing offers affordable and effective customer interaction.
You can add relevant CTAs, generate leads, build brand image, and increase brand awareness. You can produce engaging content and build lasting relationships.
You can leverage email campaigns to share product updates, industry insights, and exclusive offers, keeping subscribers engaged and informed.
However, the key to effective email marketing is personalization and segmentation. In fact, 73% of industrial marketers segment their email marketing lists.
You must tailor emails based on customer preferences, purchase history, or location. The icing is that you can automate your email campaigns with a powerful tool like email automation.
Moreover, you can make the email marketing results better with A/B testing. Plus, you can easily track your email campaigns’ performance using metrics like open and click-through rates.
Here are four proven email marketing ideas for your manufacturing business:
Welcome emails
Welcome emails are a great way to start communication. Whether they have downloaded your e-brochure, signed up for an RFQ (Request for Quote) form, or downloaded a gated resource, sending these emails creates a good brand image.
Promotions and offer emails
60% of subscribers join your email list to receive great offers and deals. When you offer promo codes and discounts, your audience is more likely to choose you over others. This creates a positive image.
Product and progress updates
Many subscribers look forward to knowing about your nearly launched products and the latest developments in your premium products. When you send these emails, your subscribers feel valued and look forward to future purchases.
Rewards programs
A reward program (commonly known as a loyalty program) is a way to incentivize and retain existing customers. Under a reward program, you can offer them various benefits, discounts, or special perks in exchange for their ongoing engagement and repeat business.
Also, offering personalized rewards, such as custom t-shirts embroidered with customers' names, can elevate their overall experiences, making them feel more valued and appreciated.
Implementing a quarterly reward email series as a manufacturing business can be highly advantageous for revenue growth. This approach not only encourages customer loyalty but also reinforces the sense of value among your subscribers.
2. Content marketing
With a strong content marketing strategy, you can improve web traffic, boost lead generation, and build a loyal customer base. It reaps rich fruits in the long run.
You can offer valuable insights through informational blogs, industry reports, product videos, etc. All this results in building trust among your prospects and positioning yourself as an industry leader.
Here are the best forms in which you can leverage content marketing for manufacturers:
Product catalogs & brochures
A product catalog consists of various products, their features, their usage, prices, etc.
Here’s an example of how you can produce and publish various catalogs & brochures.
Blogs
Blogs are mostly used by the manufacturing industry. It is a long form of content that provides helpful insight into a specific topic. Its main purpose is to educate and turn the reader into your leads.
Educational videos
Videos are one of the powerful content forms to entertain, educate, and engage.
Since the manufacturing industry usually deals with complex products, using videos simplifies your work. It effortlessly explains your ideas and thoughts to the target audience.
This is why many manufacturing companies, including one of the biggest conglomerates, L&T Values Ltd, use videos.
3. Search engine optimization
53.3% of total website traffic comes from straight from organic searches. This explains the importance of SEO practices for the manufacturing industry.
Manufacturing marketers must practice SEO as it increases their rankings in search results, promotes brand awareness, provides long-term value, and builds domain trust.
Researching and practicing SEO rightly is the key. You should strategize your on-page and off-page SEO effectively.
Focusing on using keywords efficiently, using meta titles, and optimizing internal links are some of the ways to practice on-page SEO.
Further, building backlinks, encouraging brand searches, and increasing engagements and shares on social media are some of the activities to practice for off-page SEO.
Technical SEO is responsible for the responsiveness of your site. It includes optimizing site speed and performance, having a mobile-friendly website, having a convenient site structure, etc.
All these practices build your website authority and bring tangible results to your organizational goals.
Also, if you are targeting a local audience, consider investing in local SEO, such as Google My Business listing, utilizing local keywords, and more.
Social media marketing is a must-do manufacturer marketing strategy. A study revealed that 69% of manufacturing professionals follow social media channels in their field.
It offers benefits like increased brand awareness, better customer engagement, is cost-effective, generates leads, etc.
In the realm of digital marketing, using social media marketing is a mandate for manufacturing businesses.
And you must smartly strategize your social media activities. You need to start by understanding your prospects and the platform they are most active on.
Then, develop a strategy by considering your business objectives, content creation, scheduling, and platform algorithms.
You can even run paid ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram to spread brand awareness.
All this enables you to focus efforts on maximizing engagement and reaching a wider audience base.
In all, by effectively utilizing social media, you can connect with potential customers and drive business growth.
Here are the key social media marketing channels for manufacturing marketers:
LinkedIn platform to build a strong brand identity and engage decision makers through sharing valuable content. You can join and connect with relevant audiences by using its filter feature.
Twitter to share your product updates and industry news and increase customer engagement.
YouTube leverages its videos to demonstrate the product’s value and features.
Facebook to connect with a wider audience and grow brand value. You can create your business page to attract the right audience.
Instagram to market your products by keeping with the latest trends.
5. Paid advertising
Paid advertising is one of the fastest marketing strategies for manufacturing brands to drive MQLs.
Paid ads like PPC or social media ads allow you to target prospects with specific demographics, interests, and locations. This ensures that your message reaches the right audience.
It also gives valuable insights into target audiences. This targeted approach leads to increased brand exposure, website traffic, and potential conversions.
As a manufacturer, below are the platforms you can use to run paid ads: Google, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Therefore, consider running targeted ad campaigns on the platforms where your prospects spend their time majorly to attract more business opportunities.
7 Best manufacturing marketing practices to boost results
Your business growth is at risk if your manufacturing company still follows outdated marketing practices.
So, to walk with the industry trends and achieve your marketing goals, you must follow these 7 best practices for manufacturing marketing to achieve success.
1. Use an empathy map to define your buyer persona
A buyer persona is like a made-up character that represents the perfect picture of your ideal customer.
Defining a comprehensive and realistic buyer persona helps you to tailor your marketing message accordingly.
You can define your buyer persona with details like the customer’s age, interests, goals, and pain points that they want to solve.
The empathy map is a tool to deeply understand users by dividing their data into four quadrants that reveal their needs and motivations. Here’s an image for you to better understand:
In an empathy map, the “SAYS” quadrant includes the reviews and interviews from the users.
The “THINKS” quadrant infers what the users think but isn’t vocalizing.
The “DOES” quadrant refers to the action taken by the users. For example, users leave the site due to poor experience or shop around after comparing the prices.
Lastly, the “FEELS” quadrant considers the users’ emotional state. Once you fill out the empathy map, use your inferences to decide on goals.
To help you clearly define your potential buyers, we have a free Buyer Persona Template available.
2. Have a customer-centric approach
Today’s customers prefer to be well-informed about your products or services before making.
So, it is crucial to educate your prospects about the uses and benefits of your manufactured products, helping them in purchase decision-making.
This is why 87% of marketers prioritize the audience’s informational needs over the organization’s promotional and sales messages.
Hence, to enhance your inbound marketing strategies or any digital marketing campaign, you must adopt a customer-centric approach.
3. Enhance your website visibility with SEO
SEO strategies can help manufacturers attract more business opportunities.
Here are some stats revealing the power of SEO for manufacturing:
98% of manufacturing marketers have a dedicated landing page on their website to convert visitors into leads.
79% of marketers have implemented a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to improve their brand visibility online.
This means having an SEO-optimized website is crucial for attracting potential clients and generating leads.
The below image presents the top practical SEO practices that can increase your business visibility:
4. Snag account names on key social media platforms and start marketing
Secure your business username on all platforms to prevent deceptive marketers from creating fake accounts in your name.
Securing account names on key social media platforms for manufacturing businesses has some key benefits:
Brand consistency: Consistent use of the same usernames or handles across social media platforms can establish a strong and recognizable online brand identity for manufacturing companies.
Preventing impersonation: Registering account names protects the brand from impersonators and competitors, avoiding confusion or misinformation.
Search engine visibility: Optimizing social media profiles with relevant keywords and securing account names can improve brand visibility in search results, attracting potential customers and partners.
Getting early account names on key platforms allows manufacturing marketers to build followers, engage their target audience, and share content before competitors, boosting competitiveness.
5. Leverage account-based marketing (ABM)
Rather than using generic marketing strategies, account-based marketing focuses on engaging and nurturing specific target accounts.
Account-based marketing for manufacturers can help to identify your high-ticket accounts and develop deeper connections with them by delivering tailored content.
Here’s the simple ABM strategy for manufacturing marketers:
This, in turn, can significantly enhance lead generation, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction, making ABM one of the best manufacturing marketing practices.
An effective account-based marketing strategy can enhance your customer experience by crafting tailored solutions to target accounts.
You can implement ABM in any marketing initiative, such as email marketing, advertising campaigns, social media, content, or more.
For instance, you can identify and segment an email list of high-value accounts from your client data. Then, you can build personalized email campaigns targeting those high-value accounts to drive conversions.
6. Enhance your marketing effectiveness with external insights
To achieve optimal marketing results, leverage external insights and data.
Imagine you’re a manufacturer aiming to boost sales through a new product launch. While your in-house data provides valuable information, external insights can be a game-changer.
Collaborating with market research firms, industry experts, or even customer surveys can offer fresh perspectives.
These external insights can help you:
Refine targeting: By understanding your audience’s evolving preferences and behaviors, you can tailor your campaigns for better engagement.
Competitive advantage: Stay ahead by monitoring competitors and market trends and adapting your strategies accordingly.
Risk mitigation: External insights can uncover potential pitfalls and opportunities, enabling proactive adjustments to your marketing plans.
Customer-centricity: By incorporating external customer feedback and insights, you can align your offerings with their needs.
In summary, don’t limit your marketing efforts to internal data alone, and embrace external insights to refine your strategies.
7. Leverage an advanced marketing automation tool
As a manufacturing marketer, you must execute various marketing activities, from strategizing to allocating and implementing. These activities are time-consuming and lead to less productivity.
To eliminate the manual hustle and boost productivity, you must leverage Marketing Automation CRM.
There are various benefits of marketing automation for manufacturers, like increased efficiency, powerful nurturing, enhanced customer experience, reduced cost, and many more.
Now, to improve your manufacturer marketing strategies, leveraging marketing automation software can be a game-changer:
Automatic lead scoring
You can prioritize leads through automated lead scoring model. Salesmate CRM with marketing automation capabilities lets you build a custom lead scoring model to score and qualify leads automatically.
Personalization at scale
Marketing automation enables you to personalize your communications and campaigns at a scale, making each customer feel valued.
Streamlined workflows
With marketing automation, you can simplify complex processes, and it helps you schedule and manage repetitive tasks, ensuring growth.
Lead nurturing
You can drive more conversions and nurture prospects with drip campaigns. Salesmate CRM with email campaign software can help you boost your email marketing with pre-made templates, easy drag-and-drop email builder, and campaign reports.
Data-driven decisions
A powerful marketing automation platform provides in-depth analytics and insights, supporting you in data-driven decision-making.
In all, by utilizing a robust marketing automation platform, you can enhance marketing efficiency, build strong relationships with personalization, and improve decision-making.
These tips will enhance your manufacturing marketing strategies for faster and more effective growth.
Let’s dive into the top marketing tips for manufacturing companies to drive more leads:
1. Prioritize customer education
Educating your customers about your products or industry trends helps you gain their trust and establish brand credibility.
When developing content, consider addressing common pain points and challenges your prospects may face. This approach adds value to their knowledge by presenting your product as a solution to them.
2. Use website design to keep leads engaged
Today, customers engage with brands that deliver great user experiences.
Therefore, try to build a fast, user-friendly website with clear calls to action to guide your web visitors seamlessly throughout their buying journey.
Moreover, with billions of mobile users, make your manufacturing website mobile-friendly.
3. Leverage testimonials
Social proof is powerful in establishing trust and brand credibility among your potential customers in the first place.
So, try to build trust and credibility by showcasing customer testimonials that highlight positive experiences with your products.
4. Implement clear call to action (CTAs)
Encourage your web visitors to take the next step by incorporating clear CTAs throughout your manufacturing website and marketing materials.
This could be filling out a contact form or RFQ (Request for Quote) form or subscribing to your newsletter.
5. Create interactive content for engagement
Enhance social media engagement by producing interactive content such as quizzes, polls, and surveys.
This approach not only boosts web engagement but also provides valuable insights into your prospects’ preferences.
6. Optimize your content for search engines
All content creation efforts go wasted if they don’t reach your target prospect.
So, optimize your website content with SEO tactics like keywords, meta descriptions, and header tags for effective digital marketing.
This will boost your online visibility, drive more organic web traffic for lead generation, and improve your brand awareness.
7. Quick response times
To never miss an opportunity for lead generation through your website, introduce a Chatbot/Live Chat system to your manufacturing website.
Answering inquiries and requests from potential customers promptly reflects that you value their time and are committed to providing an excellent customer experience.
8. Utilize remarketing techniques
Ever happened that you checked a product online and later saw the suggestion in your social media apps?
Well, that is what we call a remarketing strategy, and it’s one of the effective marketing tips for manufacturers.
It is powerful to regain the attention of those prospects who’ve visited your website but haven’t taken action yet with remarketing campaigns.
9. Leverage industrial directories and listings
You can increase your brand’s online visibility and reach a vast audience by listing your business in relevant industrial directories and listings. This tip works better for manufacturers in the B2B space.
10. Invest in video marketing to showcase your products
Video marketing is one of the top channels for manufacturers to showcase their products visually appealing and engagingly.
Creating educational and informative videos to engage and educate your prospects about your manufactured product values would be great.
11. Email personalization
Did you know? 82% of marketers stated that personalization increases email open rates.
Consider personalization as one of the best manufacturing marketing tips to boost your content engagement.
When using email marketing, you must segment your customers into specific groups and build personalized campaigns based on their interests, preferences, and behaviors.
Tailoring marketing messages and product recommendations based on prospects’ preferences can boost your customer loyalty.
Appeal to environmentally conscious consumers by emphasizing sustainable practices in your marketing efforts.
These days, manufacturing industries are greatly adopting eco-friendly products and methods.
So, as a manufacturer marketer, you need to highlight your good doings towards saving mother search and thus will easily attract prospects that are environmental savers,
13. Offer limited-time promotions
If you’re selling B2C through platforms like BigCommerce or Shopify, consider creating a sense of urgency and encourage potential customers to act by flashing lucrative deals.
Moreover, you can shoot abandoned cart emails to regain lost opportunities by offering limited-time promotions and discounts.
14. Use geofencing ads to reach prospects at different locations
Geofencing ads are a geographical-based marketing tactic. These ads let you advertise your product or service to prospective clients in a specific geography.
It’s like setting up a virtual “fence” around a defined area. Once potential customers enter your fence, they become part of your marketing strategy.
You can use this tool as a manufacturer to target trade shows or conferences. Further, you can attract and generate more leads.
15. Publish social media posts at the best times
Do you want to increase your reach and engagement on social media platforms?
Research, test, and discover the best time to post. You must research your prospects’ engagement habits and timing with analytics tools.
Then, try to test positing on the best time discovered with data. Soon, you’ll crack the best timing for posting for your business and boost your social media engagement.
Marketing automation with Salesmate: Your game changer!
Salesmate is a one-stop solution facilitating marketing, sales, and customer service activities.
It helps you communicate your prospects through omnichannel such as:
Salesmate is a unified customer platform to skyrocket your business growth.
Here’s how Salesmate can be a game changer for you:
It offers built-in tools to generate leads, such as Web Forms and Live Chat/Chat Journeys from your website.
Identify and prioritize high-quality leads by building a custom lead scoring model.
You can store and manage your leads, prospects, and customers in a centralized database with contact management.
You can effectively segment contacts based on various criteria, such as lead source, industry, etc., for account-based marketing.
Tailor your marketing messages and campaigns based on customer behavior and preferences and automate your lead nurturing process.
Automate your marketing workflows with triggers and actions to save time.
Your sales team can visualize their customer buying process with a sales pipeline management feature.
Save more time and automate follow-ups with email and text sequences.
It helps you improve decision-making with smart sales reports.
Always Remember!
You can integrate Salesmate with various third-party applications and services as per your business needs.
Conclusion
To achieve your marketing goals in this digital era, consider investing in tactics like content marketing, SEO, and paid online advertising.
Now, a planned manufacturing marketing strategy highlights all the details, like how your business can be a solution in the target market, who is your ideal customers, what type of content you should build, and your top marketing channels.
Also, you can easily track and optimize your marketing activities with tools like Ahref, Google Analytics, Semrush, etc.
You must implement the above-mentioned marketing tips for manufacturing companies to improve your marketing strategies and boost business.
To begin with your marketing for manufacturing business, follow the below steps:
Research your target market and competition
Define clear marketing goals
Establish an online presence with a manufacturing business website
Create valuable and engaging content
Target prospects by utilizing key digital channels such as email, social, and PPC
What are the top digital marketing strategy for the manufacturing industry?
The top digital marketing strategies for manufacturing business are:
Content marketing
Website and SEO (Search engine optimization)
Email marketing
PPC advertising
Social media marketing
What do you mean by B2B manufacturing marketing strategy?
B2B manufacturing marketing strategy focuses on targeting and engaging other companies as customers. The marketing efforts are to build relationships and gain trust to get high-ticket clients for business.
What are the steps of a successful industrial marketing strategy?
These are the steps to an effective industrial marketing strategy:
Conduct an in-depth market research to identify your target audience
Conduct your product analysis and propose value propositions
Discover your potential offline and online marketing channels
Create technical and educational content to demonstrate expertise
Implement account-based marketing for personalized impact
Measure your marketing campaign results and optimize for success
Sonali Negi
Sonali is a writer born out of her utmost passion for writing. She is working with a passionate team of content creators at Salesmate. She enjoys learning about new ideas in marketing and sales. She is an optimistic girl and endeavors to bring the best out of every situation. In her free time, she loves to introspect and observe people.
Share this article
Close deals faster with the CRM designed for sales success.Try Salesmate FREE
Key Takeaways
As per a recent study, 94% of B2B buyers research a product before purchasing it. So, we can say customers are shifting their buying behavior and looking for you online.
In fact, most of the manufacturing marketing trends indicate the need for digital transformation.
Ideally, manufacturing industry companies spend around 8% of the overall company budget on marketing.
Many manufacturers have started implementing strategies like email campaigns, social media presence, paid advertising, etc.
However, to acquire more high-quality leads and expand businesses into new markets, a well-planned manufacturing marketing strategy is essential.
Sounds right?
Let’s study the step-by-step process of an effective manufacturing marketing strategy to grow your business.
How to build a successful marketing strategy – 7 Simple steps!
The modern way of marketing is beyond promoting your product. You need to understand your prospect’s pain points and present your brand as a solution to them.
Let’s dive into the steps of crafting a strong marketing strategy for manufacturing industry.
Step 1: Conduct a SWOT analysis
SWOT analysis helps to evaluate your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the industry.
The analysis helps build an effective manufacturing marketing strategy as you can identify growth and drawbacks, discover opportunities, and recognize potential threats.
Additionally, it will help you understand your business position in the industry.
Here’s how you can run a SWOT analysis for your manufacturing business.
Let’s say you manufacture tires and want to run the company globally. Upon analysis, you discovered that your strength is material quality and tires’ durability.
Your weaknesses are a lack of higher manufacturing costs and poor supply chain management.
So, you can now create your marketing campaigns around the value you offer to persuade your potential buyers.
Additionally, you can work on improving your weaknesses to boost your business sales.
Remember that a SWOT analysis is dynamic, so timely review and update your business analysis to adapt to changing manufacturing industry trends.
Step 2: Identify target markets and segments
Once you’ve discovered your business’s strengths and weaknesses, determine what your ideal target market is.
To determine your target market, consider finding answers to the following questions:
Discovering the answers to the above question will tell you what is your ideal target market and ICP (ideal customer profile) to implement manufacturing marketing strategies.
Further, you can develop buyer personas based on factors like demographics, interests, motivations, and behaviors. This will help you craft personalized marketing messages.
Grab the free buyer persona template to understand your potential buyers better.
Step 3: Choosing the marketing approach: Outbound, inbound, or both?
Broadly, we’ve two marketing approaches: Inbound and outbound.
Here’s a table to help you understand both approaches precisely:
Hope the above table offered helpful insights into both inbound and outbound marketing methods.
As 94% of buyers are researching products online, the buying behavior indicates the need for a strong online presence. So, with an inbound marketing approach, it would be easier to drive searchers to your site.
Inbound marketing is powerful as it is a highly targeted approach, drives high-quality leads, and builds brand awareness faster.
If you still have any doubts, look at the below stats:
About 68% of B2B buyers make purchases online, indicating the effectiveness of inbound marketing in driving revenue growth.
Furthermore, 57% of B2B buyers make buying decisions before picking up your rep’s phone and talking with them.
Inbound marketing for manufacturers can benefit your business in various ways:
Step 4: Determine your ideal inbound marketing channels
By determining the right channel, I meant discovering top marketing platforms where your target audience leverages or is present.
You must select the channel that is used the most by your target audience.
Developing your strategy around the ideal channel is a good approach for a successful marketing plan.
Shown in the image below are some popular marketing channels used by industrial marketers:
So, concisely, you can consider key channels such as email marketing, social media, and websites for manufacturing marketing.
The only motive for using these media is building a unique brand identity that your target audience can resonate with.
Further, crafting a compelling message that communicates your value proposition is essential. And, hence the next step is to strategize your content.
Step 5: Create a content marketing plan
Content has become an inseparable element of every kind of marketing. It serves as a bridge between businesses and their prospective customers, guiding them through the marketing funnel.
Your content can persuade your target audience, whether it is an email campaign, landing page, paid campaigns, social media posts, webinar presentations, etc.
Manufacturing businesses implementing industrial marketing rely extensively on content to promote their business in a better way.
Crafting successful content marketing strategies for manufacturing requires addressing industry-specific pain points while presenting value.
Check out these stats to get more insights into how content is helping in marketing for manufacturers:
So, when you leverage content effectively to showcase your manufacturer’s product value, you can get crazy success.
Here are some tips for leveraging content and generating leads:
If you want to learn more about content marketing for manufacturers, click the blog link.
Step 6: Implement inbound lead generation and prioritize
There are various ways to generate leads for a manufacturing business using inbound marketing methods.
For instance, B2B manufacturing marketers can do LinkedIn marketing to drive business leads.
You can leverage key inbound marketing channels like social media, email, and ad campaigns, which are great ways to generate leads.
Convert your web traffic into leads using Web Forms. You can introduce a Live Chat system to your website to handle web queries and capture leads.
Further, utilize CRM for manufacturing to quality, assign, and nurture them.
Step 7: Monitor and optimize your performance
The beauty of inbound marketing is that you can measure your campaign’s performance with tools and optimize them to grow faster.
So, use analytical tools to track and evaluate the performance of marketing initiatives.
Define KPIs for each marketing campaign and evaluate their efforts.
The campaign data can help you make informed decisions to build or refine your strategy.
Ensure you consistently track your progress and stay informed about your customers’ preferences.
Additionally, keep up with the latest manufacturing marketing and leverage new technologies like automation and AI to grow faster.
Many manufacturers lack in-house digital marketing talents, so it would be great for them to hire skilled marketing professionals.
The above marketing strategy for a manufacturing company can drive promising results with the right efforts.
5 Best marketing strategies for manufacturing companies: The inbound way!
We’re focusing on top manufacturer marketing strategies to generate more leads, promote better, and establish brand credibility. So, let’s dive deep in.
1. Email marketing
Manufacturers find email marketing helpful as it allows targeted communication. You can select the list of audiences and the content to deliver the same.
In fact, 59% of B2B marketers cite email as their top revenue-generating channel simply because email marketing offers affordable and effective customer interaction.
You can add relevant CTAs, generate leads, build brand image, and increase brand awareness. You can produce engaging content and build lasting relationships.
You can leverage email campaigns to share product updates, industry insights, and exclusive offers, keeping subscribers engaged and informed.
However, the key to effective email marketing is personalization and segmentation. In fact, 73% of industrial marketers segment their email marketing lists.
You must tailor emails based on customer preferences, purchase history, or location. The icing is that you can automate your email campaigns with a powerful tool like email automation.
Moreover, you can make the email marketing results better with A/B testing. Plus, you can easily track your email campaigns’ performance using metrics like open and click-through rates.
Here are four proven email marketing ideas for your manufacturing business:
Welcome emails are a great way to start communication. Whether they have downloaded your e-brochure, signed up for an RFQ (Request for Quote) form, or downloaded a gated resource, sending these emails creates a good brand image.
60% of subscribers join your email list to receive great offers and deals. When you offer promo codes and discounts, your audience is more likely to choose you over others. This creates a positive image.
Many subscribers look forward to knowing about your nearly launched products and the latest developments in your premium products. When you send these emails, your subscribers feel valued and look forward to future purchases.
A reward program (commonly known as a loyalty program) is a way to incentivize and retain existing customers. Under a reward program, you can offer them various benefits, discounts, or special perks in exchange for their ongoing engagement and repeat business.
Also, offering personalized rewards, such as custom t-shirts embroidered with customers' names, can elevate their overall experiences, making them feel more valued and appreciated.
Implementing a quarterly reward email series as a manufacturing business can be highly advantageous for revenue growth. This approach not only encourages customer loyalty but also reinforces the sense of value among your subscribers.
2. Content marketing
With a strong content marketing strategy, you can improve web traffic, boost lead generation, and build a loyal customer base. It reaps rich fruits in the long run.
You can offer valuable insights through informational blogs, industry reports, product videos, etc. All this results in building trust among your prospects and positioning yourself as an industry leader.
Statistics reveal that 66% of manufacturing marketers have adopted a content marketing strategy for their businesses.
Here are the best forms in which you can leverage content marketing for manufacturers:
A product catalog consists of various products, their features, their usage, prices, etc.
Here’s an example of how you can produce and publish various catalogs & brochures.
Blogs are mostly used by the manufacturing industry. It is a long form of content that provides helpful insight into a specific topic. Its main purpose is to educate and turn the reader into your leads.
Videos are one of the powerful content forms to entertain, educate, and engage.
Since the manufacturing industry usually deals with complex products, using videos simplifies your work. It effortlessly explains your ideas and thoughts to the target audience.
This is why many manufacturing companies, including one of the biggest conglomerates, L&T Values Ltd, use videos.
3. Search engine optimization
53.3% of total website traffic comes from straight from organic searches. This explains the importance of SEO practices for the manufacturing industry.
Manufacturing marketers must practice SEO as it increases their rankings in search results, promotes brand awareness, provides long-term value, and builds domain trust.
With 79% of industrial marketers having an SEO strategy, it is highly beneficial for your business.
Researching and practicing SEO rightly is the key. You should strategize your on-page and off-page SEO effectively.
Focusing on using keywords efficiently, using meta titles, and optimizing internal links are some of the ways to practice on-page SEO.
Further, building backlinks, encouraging brand searches, and increasing engagements and shares on social media are some of the activities to practice for off-page SEO.
Technical SEO is responsible for the responsiveness of your site. It includes optimizing site speed and performance, having a mobile-friendly website, having a convenient site structure, etc.
All these practices build your website authority and bring tangible results to your organizational goals.
Also, if you are targeting a local audience, consider investing in local SEO, such as Google My Business listing, utilizing local keywords, and more.
4. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a must-do manufacturer marketing strategy. A study revealed that 69% of manufacturing professionals follow social media channels in their field.
It offers benefits like increased brand awareness, better customer engagement, is cost-effective, generates leads, etc.
In the realm of digital marketing, using social media marketing is a mandate for manufacturing businesses.
And you must smartly strategize your social media activities. You need to start by understanding your prospects and the platform they are most active on.
Then, develop a strategy by considering your business objectives, content creation, scheduling, and platform algorithms.
You can even run paid ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram to spread brand awareness.
All this enables you to focus efforts on maximizing engagement and reaching a wider audience base.
In all, by effectively utilizing social media, you can connect with potential customers and drive business growth.
Here are the key social media marketing channels for manufacturing marketers:
5. Paid advertising
Paid advertising is one of the fastest marketing strategies for manufacturing brands to drive MQLs.
Paid ads like PPC or social media ads allow you to target prospects with specific demographics, interests, and locations. This ensures that your message reaches the right audience.
It also gives valuable insights into target audiences. This targeted approach leads to increased brand exposure, website traffic, and potential conversions.
As a manufacturer, below are the platforms you can use to run paid ads: Google, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Therefore, consider running targeted ad campaigns on the platforms where your prospects spend their time majorly to attract more business opportunities.
7 Best manufacturing marketing practices to boost results
Your business growth is at risk if your manufacturing company still follows outdated marketing practices.
So, to walk with the industry trends and achieve your marketing goals, you must follow these 7 best practices for manufacturing marketing to achieve success.
1. Use an empathy map to define your buyer persona
A buyer persona is like a made-up character that represents the perfect picture of your ideal customer.
Defining a comprehensive and realistic buyer persona helps you to tailor your marketing message accordingly.
You can define your buyer persona with details like the customer’s age, interests, goals, and pain points that they want to solve.
The empathy map is a tool to deeply understand users by dividing their data into four quadrants that reveal their needs and motivations. Here’s an image for you to better understand:
In an empathy map, the “SAYS” quadrant includes the reviews and interviews from the users.
The “THINKS” quadrant infers what the users think but isn’t vocalizing.
The “DOES” quadrant refers to the action taken by the users. For example, users leave the site due to poor experience or shop around after comparing the prices.
Lastly, the “FEELS” quadrant considers the users’ emotional state. Once you fill out the empathy map, use your inferences to decide on goals.
To help you clearly define your potential buyers, we have a free Buyer Persona Template available.
2. Have a customer-centric approach
Today’s customers prefer to be well-informed about your products or services before making.
So, it is crucial to educate your prospects about the uses and benefits of your manufactured products, helping them in purchase decision-making.
This is why 87% of marketers prioritize the audience’s informational needs over the organization’s promotional and sales messages.
Hence, to enhance your inbound marketing strategies or any digital marketing campaign, you must adopt a customer-centric approach.
3. Enhance your website visibility with SEO
SEO strategies can help manufacturers attract more business opportunities.
Here are some stats revealing the power of SEO for manufacturing:
This means having an SEO-optimized website is crucial for attracting potential clients and generating leads.
The below image presents the top practical SEO practices that can increase your business visibility:
4. Snag account names on key social media platforms and start marketing
Secure your business username on all platforms to prevent deceptive marketers from creating fake accounts in your name.
Securing account names on key social media platforms for manufacturing businesses has some key benefits:
Getting early account names on key platforms allows manufacturing marketers to build followers, engage their target audience, and share content before competitors, boosting competitiveness.
5. Leverage account-based marketing (ABM)
Rather than using generic marketing strategies, account-based marketing focuses on engaging and nurturing specific target accounts.
Account-based marketing for manufacturers can help to identify your high-ticket accounts and develop deeper connections with them by delivering tailored content.
Here’s the simple ABM strategy for manufacturing marketers:
This, in turn, can significantly enhance lead generation, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction, making ABM one of the best manufacturing marketing practices.
An effective account-based marketing strategy can enhance your customer experience by crafting tailored solutions to target accounts.
You can implement ABM in any marketing initiative, such as email marketing, advertising campaigns, social media, content, or more.
For instance, you can identify and segment an email list of high-value accounts from your client data. Then, you can build personalized email campaigns targeting those high-value accounts to drive conversions.
6. Enhance your marketing effectiveness with external insights
To achieve optimal marketing results, leverage external insights and data.
Imagine you’re a manufacturer aiming to boost sales through a new product launch. While your in-house data provides valuable information, external insights can be a game-changer.
Collaborating with market research firms, industry experts, or even customer surveys can offer fresh perspectives.
These external insights can help you:
In summary, don’t limit your marketing efforts to internal data alone, and embrace external insights to refine your strategies.
7. Leverage an advanced marketing automation tool
As a manufacturing marketer, you must execute various marketing activities, from strategizing to allocating and implementing. These activities are time-consuming and lead to less productivity.
To eliminate the manual hustle and boost productivity, you must leverage Marketing Automation CRM.
There are various benefits of marketing automation for manufacturers, like increased efficiency, powerful nurturing, enhanced customer experience, reduced cost, and many more.
Now, to improve your manufacturer marketing strategies, leveraging marketing automation software can be a game-changer:
You can prioritize leads through automated lead scoring model. Salesmate CRM with marketing automation capabilities lets you build a custom lead scoring model to score and qualify leads automatically.
Marketing automation enables you to personalize your communications and campaigns at a scale, making each customer feel valued.
With marketing automation, you can simplify complex processes, and it helps you schedule and manage repetitive tasks, ensuring growth.
You can drive more conversions and nurture prospects with drip campaigns. Salesmate CRM with email campaign software can help you boost your email marketing with pre-made templates, easy drag-and-drop email builder, and campaign reports.
A powerful marketing automation platform provides in-depth analytics and insights, supporting you in data-driven decision-making.
You can measure campaign performance, customer engagement, and ROI with these 19 important marketing automation KPIs you need to measure.
In all, by utilizing a robust marketing automation platform, you can enhance marketing efficiency, build strong relationships with personalization, and improve decision-making.
15 Best manufacturing marketing tips to learn
These tips will enhance your manufacturing marketing strategies for faster and more effective growth.
Let’s dive into the top marketing tips for manufacturing companies to drive more leads:
1. Prioritize customer education
Educating your customers about your products or industry trends helps you gain their trust and establish brand credibility.
When developing content, consider addressing common pain points and challenges your prospects may face. This approach adds value to their knowledge by presenting your product as a solution to them.
2. Use website design to keep leads engaged
Today, customers engage with brands that deliver great user experiences.
Therefore, try to build a fast, user-friendly website with clear calls to action to guide your web visitors seamlessly throughout their buying journey.
Moreover, with billions of mobile users, make your manufacturing website mobile-friendly.
3. Leverage testimonials
Social proof is powerful in establishing trust and brand credibility among your potential customers in the first place.
So, try to build trust and credibility by showcasing customer testimonials that highlight positive experiences with your products.
4. Implement clear call to action (CTAs)
Encourage your web visitors to take the next step by incorporating clear CTAs throughout your manufacturing website and marketing materials.
This could be filling out a contact form or RFQ (Request for Quote) form or subscribing to your newsletter.
5. Create interactive content for engagement
Enhance social media engagement by producing interactive content such as quizzes, polls, and surveys.
This approach not only boosts web engagement but also provides valuable insights into your prospects’ preferences.
6. Optimize your content for search engines
All content creation efforts go wasted if they don’t reach your target prospect.
So, optimize your website content with SEO tactics like keywords, meta descriptions, and header tags for effective digital marketing.
This will boost your online visibility, drive more organic web traffic for lead generation, and improve your brand awareness.
7. Quick response times
To never miss an opportunity for lead generation through your website, introduce a Chatbot/Live Chat system to your manufacturing website.
Answering inquiries and requests from potential customers promptly reflects that you value their time and are committed to providing an excellent customer experience.
8. Utilize remarketing techniques
Ever happened that you checked a product online and later saw the suggestion in your social media apps?
Well, that is what we call a remarketing strategy, and it’s one of the effective marketing tips for manufacturers.
It is powerful to regain the attention of those prospects who’ve visited your website but haven’t taken action yet with remarketing campaigns.
9. Leverage industrial directories and listings
You can increase your brand’s online visibility and reach a vast audience by listing your business in relevant industrial directories and listings. This tip works better for manufacturers in the B2B space.
10. Invest in video marketing to showcase your products
Video marketing is one of the top channels for manufacturers to showcase their products visually appealing and engagingly.
Creating educational and informative videos to engage and educate your prospects about your manufactured product values would be great.
11. Email personalization
Did you know? 82% of marketers stated that personalization increases email open rates.
Consider personalization as one of the best manufacturing marketing tips to boost your content engagement.
When using email marketing, you must segment your customers into specific groups and build personalized campaigns based on their interests, preferences, and behaviors.
Tailoring marketing messages and product recommendations based on prospects’ preferences can boost your customer loyalty.
And the best part about emails is that you can boost your marketing success with a powerful email marketing automation platform. Explore 14 Best email automation tools to enhance your campaigns.
12. Highlight sustainability
Appeal to environmentally conscious consumers by emphasizing sustainable practices in your marketing efforts.
These days, manufacturing industries are greatly adopting eco-friendly products and methods.
So, as a manufacturer marketer, you need to highlight your good doings towards saving mother search and thus will easily attract prospects that are environmental savers,
13. Offer limited-time promotions
If you’re selling B2C through platforms like BigCommerce or Shopify, consider creating a sense of urgency and encourage potential customers to act by flashing lucrative deals.
Moreover, you can shoot abandoned cart emails to regain lost opportunities by offering limited-time promotions and discounts.
14. Use geofencing ads to reach prospects at different locations
Geofencing ads are a geographical-based marketing tactic. These ads let you advertise your product or service to prospective clients in a specific geography.
It’s like setting up a virtual “fence” around a defined area. Once potential customers enter your fence, they become part of your marketing strategy.
You can use this tool as a manufacturer to target trade shows or conferences. Further, you can attract and generate more leads.
15. Publish social media posts at the best times
Do you want to increase your reach and engagement on social media platforms?
Research, test, and discover the best time to post. You must research your prospects’ engagement habits and timing with analytics tools.
Then, try to test positing on the best time discovered with data. Soon, you’ll crack the best timing for posting for your business and boost your social media engagement.
Marketing automation with Salesmate: Your game changer!
Salesmate is a one-stop solution facilitating marketing, sales, and customer service activities.
It helps you communicate your prospects through omnichannel such as:
Salesmate is a unified customer platform to skyrocket your business growth.
Here’s how Salesmate can be a game changer for you:
Conclusion
To achieve your marketing goals in this digital era, consider investing in tactics like content marketing, SEO, and paid online advertising.
Now, a planned manufacturing marketing strategy highlights all the details, like how your business can be a solution in the target market, who is your ideal customers, what type of content you should build, and your top marketing channels.
Also, you can easily track and optimize your marketing activities with tools like Ahref, Google Analytics, Semrush, etc.
You must implement the above-mentioned marketing tips for manufacturing companies to improve your marketing strategies and boost business.
Lastly, leveraging a marketing automation platform with manufacturing CRM software can help you drive more business opportunities and scale your business.
Frequently asked questions
How to do marketing for manufacturing?
To begin with your marketing for manufacturing business, follow the below steps:
What are the top digital marketing strategy for the manufacturing industry?
The top digital marketing strategies for manufacturing business are:
What do you mean by B2B manufacturing marketing strategy?
B2B manufacturing marketing strategy focuses on targeting and engaging other companies as customers. The marketing efforts are to build relationships and gain trust to get high-ticket clients for business.
What are the steps of a successful industrial marketing strategy?
These are the steps to an effective industrial marketing strategy:
Sonali Negi
Sonali is a writer born out of her utmost passion for writing. She is working with a passionate team of content creators at Salesmate. She enjoys learning about new ideas in marketing and sales. She is an optimistic girl and endeavors to bring the best out of every situation. In her free time, she loves to introspect and observe people.