For years, manufacturers have been marketing to downline businesses in the supply chain. Like many popular lifestyle brands, YBG Marketing understands the importance of incorporating marketing strategy into our business practices.
A decade ago lead generation was a job for their sales staff, and they were sent out to connect directly with potential customers through meetings, trade shows and more. But in today’s competitive climate, even manufacturers are on the hook for marketing. The new landscape of digital media has allowed companies like YBG Marketing to connect with target consumers in new and efficient ways.
Precision Marketing Group notes, “Manufacturers, both buying and selling, tend to stay within small circles of existing relationships”.
In the past it was all about your connections, and while this is still true to some extent today, social media, content marketing, and other inbound marketing methods have made it possible to grow your business in new ways.
Let’s take a look at some current manufacturing marketing strategies and ways to create your own.
In order to create a marketing plan, it is essential you understand your client. It is important to consider the differences between your audiences and decide if you’re marketing to B2B or B2C clients.
1. Manufacturing Marketing
Manufacturing marketing, also known as B2B marketing can be more complex and have a longer sales cycle than B2C.
- Target audience: Other businesses including retailers, downline supply chain manufacturers, wholesalers, or business end-users. It is vital to know which industry you’re targeting, the size of the company and types of companies interested in your products. It is also important to know who within those organizations make the purchasing decisions.
- Customer needs: Business customers are searching for quality products that match their processes and budgets. Their goal is to supply their clients with peace of mind while making a profit.
- Drivers: Price, credit, and terms: what consumers think of your brand; how much technical support you provide, marketing, and other resources affect whether or not a business chooses your products.
- Purchase process: The process of business procurement is a complicated one that includes discovery and pricing comparisons, quotes, demos, and final purchase decisions. Depending on the size of the purchase, you may have to prove your worth to more than one level of decision-makers.
- People involved with the purchase: Managers, purchasing agents, executive decision-makers, accounting or finance teams, and other experts.
2. Consumer Marketing
B2C marketing is when you promote your products directly to the consumer.
- Target audience: The demographics of your target audience depend on the product you’re promoting. You should be aware of factors like age, interests, geolocation, income, and family status of your target consumers.
- Customer needs: Customers want to purchase items that can make their lives easier and more enjoyable. In some cases, they want a product for the message it sends or status it communicates such as luxury items.
- Drivers: Price, brand reputation, quality, how likely consumers can see themselves using the item, and referrals or reviews are some of the factors that drive consumer purchasing decisions.
- Purchase process: All consumer purchases follow a process that involves awareness, consideration, and decision making. The speed at which a consumer moves through the purchasing process depends on how large or important the purchase may be. When shopping for electronics, consumers take longer to research to ensure they are making the best decision.
- People involved with the purchase: Typically it’s just the consumer and a significant other. However, lenders may also be involved in larger purchases.
Advantages to Using Marketing for Manufacturers
Data shared by Chief Marketer shows that B2B marketers often have trouble getting prospects to engage or finding high-quality leads. This is where a strong marketing strategy comes in.
1. More Lead Conversions
According to Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark report, nearly 70% of the most successful B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. Only 16% of the least successful firms can say the same.
Other traits of successful B2B companies include the use of KPIs to measure marketing success and prioritize educating the target audience instead of selling to them.
2. Brand Awareness
Online marketing is a proven approach to improve customer loyalty, build brand awareness and help convince multiple stakeholders that you’re the right company to work with.
When you invest in social media marketing, quality website content, PPC advertising, and SEO efforts, you invest in growing your brand. Here are a few returns you might get on your investment:
- You’re the first manufacturer who comes to mind when someone realizes their company has a need. Brand awareness puts you ahead of the competition from the start.
- As the relevant purchasing decisions are being discussed, business stakeholders recognize your company name. Again, this puts you ahead of competitors, because buyers (even business ones) are more likely to purchase from the brand they know.
- Your client’s consumers might be aware of your brand and ask for your products. Or, your client can use your name in their marketing message because you have a good brand reputation, and that adds value to working with you.
3. Position Your Business as a Thought Leader
Thought leadership positions you as a resource the client can turn to for expert advice or training and education. It’s a requirement if you’re selling high-end or sophisticated goods, but content marketing that includes thought leadership is beneficial for any manufacturing company.
Blogs and social media are a great place to demonstrate your position in the industry by sharing your content or adding value to someone else’s with comments.
4. Enhance Customer Loyalty
The right type of marketing can enhance customer loyalty. All of the above benefits work toward creating a culture of trust with your brand. If middle management can trust your company, executives are more likely too. Brand awareness helps drive that trust.
After capturing and converting a lead, engaging with the consumers on social media, sending well-planned emails, and offering promotions through online marketing are all ways you can increase the chances that clients will return for a future purchase.
Challenges in B2B Manufacturer Marketing
B2B marketers face many challenges that the majority of B2C marketers don’t. Relationships within your own organization with sales and outside of the manufacturing firm, like with vendors and supply chains can be complex.
For example, data sourced by Hubspot states that only about fifty percent of B2B marketers feel confident collaborating with the sales teams effectively.
Let’s identify other challenges manufacturers might face when marketing.
1. Very Specific Needs
Manufacturing marketers have particular needs, especially compared to B2C marketers.
For example, website traffic is one of the biggest KPIs for consumer marketing. If you can direct enough of your target audience to a consumer ecommerce site, it is assumed that you’ll reach your sales numbers.
But it’s not that simple. Manufacturers can’t just drive vast amounts of traffic to a well-built site and hope for the best. You might not even have that much traffic to leverage, depending on your business’ niche.
You also need to balance the information you want to share on your public website with how you want to manage client relationships. In some cases, you might need to limit access to information about your goods to best support your business partners.
2. Long Sales Cycles
Manufacturing often includes long sales cycles. A PPC ad campaign isn’t going to drive the same results in B2B marketing as it does in B2C marketing because you may not see immediate conversion results.
Instead, your marketing tactics may be more about lead generation and awareness. These leads are then sent to the sales department for weeks, months, or even years before the deals close.
3. Complex Products
Manufacturing businesses that sell complex products aren’t likely to see great success in marketing direct online sales to B2B buyers. For example, if your product costs $3,000 and is customizable then a client is unlikely to click on a “buy now” button and enter business credit card information.
It is important to determine how buyers interact with your products and what they need from you throughout the buying journey. Some companies meet this need by using a quoting tool supported by Quote Ninja, allowing potential clients to request a quote based on their unique needs.
4. More People to Convince
B2C marketing can rely on some tried-and-true tactics to connect with consumers at just the right time to promote a purchase. Creating a sense of urgency to spark an impulse buy is a proven B2C marketing method that can fall short in manufacturer marketing.
The main reason many of these tactics don’t work when marketing to other businesses is that there are more stakeholders to convince. Business buying decisions in medium and large companies may include:
- Someone in middle management becoming aware of the need and has to convince others it’s important.
- The original person may do some research to demonstrate what products meet the need.
- Executive decision-makers may appoint someone to continue with research.
- The options are narrowed down and presented to leadership.
- Leadership asks questions to learn more, and the field is further narrowed down via demos, quotes, and discussions.
- Finally, a decision is made.
This presents a challenge in the way your marketing efforts must continue to support your chance at making the sale throughout the entire process.
Manufacturing Marketing Strategies
Now that you know why manufacturing marketing is important, it is important to know how to start. These seven strategies for manufacturing companies will help jump start your marketing efforts.
1. Publish Written Content
The content on your website is the main contributor to all of the following efforts:
- Search engine optimization, which ensures you show up when potential clients search online.
- Position you as a manufacturer that can be trusted. Close to 50% of people read three to five pieces of content from a business before reaching out to learn more.
Sites that use multiple forms of content have a higher chance of increasing sales because people engage with different types of content. For example, one person might want to read about your product while another wishes to view a video. Sometimes, you need to supply both to help educate the potential client, especially in the case of complex manufacturing products.
Consider including video content, whitepapers, case studies, blogs, infographics, and slide presentations on your site. Remember that you’re not the only one trying to convince someone to make a purchase; your contact at a business might be trying to convince stakeholders.
2. Email Marketing
As previously stated, manufacturing marketing is often a long game. It’s easy for your message to get lost in the shuffle potential clients review options and get caught up in managing daily operations.
Email marketing newsletters let you capture interested leads so you can show up in their email inboxes periodically keeping you fresh in their minds.
Email is also a great tool for marketing automation because you can create drip campaigns to send a series of messages to prospective clients when they take a specific action. For example:
- Someone downloads a whitepaper on a piece of restaurant equipment and enters their email to do so.
- You send them emails over a few weeks that might cover information like how much the product can save them over time and how the equipment improves quality.
- Every email offers another touchpoint letting the potential client know you’re available to provide a quote or additional information.
3. Employ SEO
Even Google admits that the path to purchase can be long, but many people start the shopping process with an online search. Close to 90% of purchases start online, and most marketers believe that SEO is one of the top five traffic drivers.
In short: If you’re not showing up in search engines, you’re missing out on potential leads.
4. Effective Google Ads and PPC
Unfortunately SEO isn’t guaranteed. You can’t buy your way into the top organic page results in Google, and getting there takes a commitment to content. This is why many organizations also invest in Google and PPC ads.
Marketing campaigns that include paid efforts can get your manufacturing company on search results pages in minutes, but your ads have to be effective. That means understanding which keywords to target and how your buyer personas might search online.
5. Test Your Website
Once you have content on your site, you must test it. It doesn’t matter how great your content is if the site provides a poor user experience. If you can’t offer an easy-to-use site experience, people may doubt your credibility.
Make sure:
- All links, buttons, and other functionality on your site work. Check them on multiple devices and browsers.
- The pages load quickly. 40% of people will simply leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- Ensure your site is mobile-friendly. Sites that don’t function on mobile might be buried or even delisted from SERPs.
6. Trade Shows
Note every B2B marketing effort should be online. It’s still beneficial for manufacturers to be present at trade shows and other industry events to increase brand awareness and support for others in the industry.
Meeting prospects at a trade show is also good for the bottom line because you’re meeting a number of potential clients while also engaging in networking and education events.
7. Integrate Social Media
Social media is another tool to help you increase brand awareness, credibility and customer loyalty. It also lets you connect with potential clients in an organic way and give your company a persona customers feel comfortable engaging with. While Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are powerful channels for B2B marketing, manufacturers may want to start with LinkedIn.
In 1977, Harvard Business Review asked, “Can Manufacturing and Marketing Coexist?” More than 40 years later, the answer is clear. These two can and must exist together. If you are not engaging in manufacturer marketing, you’re putting your business at risk of being buried in the past.