Marketing has always been a hard sell in the manufacturing world. For decades, firms had their trade shows, word-of-mouth referrals, and sales teams that “knew a guy” to keep their pipelines full of leads.
Then, in the last few years, everything changed when buyers started researching their solutions online before speaking to anyone in sales. Manufacturing companies that weren’t visible during those early-stage conversations were suddenly out of the picture.
What has changed is that many manufacturing companies have finally learned how their buyers behave. They are moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach to marketing that has never worked for them and introducing strategies designed for complex B2B selling.
Understanding The Manufacturing Buyer’s Journey
Here’s what makes marketing manufacturing buyers different than other markets. The buying journey takes six months to a year or more, especially for major equipment and enterprise solutions. There’s no single buyer. Stakeholders are involved. Engineers care about specs. Plant managers care about efficiency. Procurement specialists care about costs. Even the C suite wants to know the ROI of significant purchases. All need their concerns addressed, and they all need different information at different times.
In this scenario, generic marketing approaches will not work. Brand-awareness campaigns do not delve into the specific technical requirements of solutions. Pretty creative does not impress the decisiveness that comes with significant capital investment, and generic content does not engage engineers who are typically responsible for specifying solutions.
The manufacturers that finally get it right acknowledge the complexities and build their marketing around them. They create technical content that genuinely helps buyers understand their solutions. They map out their content for each phase of the buyer journey and for each stakeholder needed to make a joint decision. Companies looking to make this shift often work with the best manufacturing marketing agencies who understand these nuances rather than trying to educate general marketing firms on manufacturing specifics.
Content That Actually Reflects Expertise
One of the most significant changes regarding manufacturing companies getting their marketing right is the type of content companies produce for use in their marketing campaigns.
Instead of bland and generic blog posts about trends in the manufacturing sector, the firms getting it right create in-depth technical content, detailing case studies with relevant performance data, and white papers that address specific engineering challenges.
This content does two important things:
- It helps buyers understand their potential solutions.
- It positions a manufacturing firm as a credible source that deeply understands these challenges.
The difference these days is authenticity
Engineers and other stakeholders can sniff out lackluster content from a distance. They want to see specifications. They want to see implementation challenges. They expect evidence of solutions that performed well under real-world conditions. Manufacturing firms that invest the time and energy it takes to create this caliber of content still attract the interest of their intended audience. They experience higher engagement rates and stronger leads. Prospects enter discussions with sales already informed, rather than needing an elementary level of qualification.
Video content is surprisingly effective in these cases
Tours of facilities and detailed demos of equipment and production processes allow important stakeholders to assess an entire manufacturing company’s capacity and capability, even if they are unable to travel in person.
With such extensive video content readily available during the early stages of the buyer journey, firms are now able to compete with suppliers hundreds of miles away.
When prospective clients can see equipment in action and understand manufacturing capabilities through the content on these videos, it builds the confidence they need to make a decision long before they ever land on a static website.
SEO Built for Technical Searches
Manufacturing SEO is entirely different from consumer-focused SEO. Buyers are not searching for “the best CNC machine” on Google. They are searching for specific technical terms, material specifications, compliance requirements, and solution parameters.
The successful manufacturing companies know how to identify these types of queries.
This level of complexity requires a different approach to SEO than manufacturers used in their early forays into marketing. Gone are the days of optimizing for broad industry terms or even keywords related to high-level uses for solutions they made available.
The engineers making these searches want highly technical insights into the challenges they face in using creating or utilizing the solutions they envision.
Manufacturers that play the new SEO game know how to create pages filled with long-tail keywords that prospective clients actually use when crafting queries.
Such manufacturers identify queries related to specific use cases and industries served by the solutions they sell. The companies focusing on this level of detail gain far more visibility in search results than others.
SEO produces a slow but steady stream of leads rather than rapid gains
The gains, however, come gradually even with highly competitive terms. However, manufacturers that invest the time and energy needed to perfect this approach still see it as the leading source of qualified leads over time. This occurs even years after initial implementation.
Lead Nurturing For Long Sales Cycles
Perhaps the most significant shift in lead nurturing in manufacturing firms is how those firms have started treating leads after they have been generated. In the past, firms acted as though every person who expressed interest was ready to buy and immediately placed them into the hands of their sales teams.
Such practices resulted in several problems
Sales teams ended up spending time pursuing leads that were not qualified. Many genuinely interested prospects fell through the cracks when they needed sales team attention well before they were ready to talk to anyone in sales.
Manufacturers that have figured it out create nurturing paths for leads that consider the actual time it can take for prospects to complete their buying journey.
They provide value through educational content, regularly remind prospects of their firms, and use other touch points — spread over the lengthy periods it takes for their prospects to figure out what they need to do.
Market automation allows manufacturers with even the smallest teams to build and deploy these marketing campaigns by handling hundreds (or even thousands) of prospects at a time while still allowing for personalization based on how prospects interact with content sent to them.
These firms build interest by encouraging good prospects to become qualified leads without compromising potential clients who enter the funnel still trying to figure out what they want.
By the time prospects are ready to take the plunge to purchase new equipment, they don’t need any additional education about what the manufacturing company can do for them.
Companies implementing this best practice draw so many good leads their sales teams won’t know what to do with themselves. As a result, team members also expend less energy and time pursuing unqualified leads.
Measuring What Matters
Finally, manufacturing companies are now aware of appropriate metrics to measure manufacturing and determine the return-on-investment such campaigns generate.
Instead of focusing on generic metrics, like website traffic, social media followers, or other vanity metrics that tell marketing teams nothing about the value they generate, companies focus on metrics associated with high-quality leads over time.
The companies measure metrics like:
- The number of qualified leads their marketing efforts generate over time
- The paths those leads take through the sales funnel
- The role their marketing efforts play in those journeys
- The contribution of their different marketing strategies toward revenue generation
Manufacturing firms focusing on this method of building the case for marketing can directly see which activities create value for prospective clients and which don’t.
Teams that once viewed marketing as an arbitrary use of resources within their organizations can now consider it a valuable domain. With metrics, it’s easy for directors to justify marketing budgets using sound reasoning rather than gut feelings.
None of these tactics are revolutionary or uncommon. None are recent additions to other manufacturing companies seeking value through their marketing departments. They are all tactics any company can reasonably consider adding to its playbooks.
Yet, many manufacturing companies are getting it right only because they have stopped attempting to fit a square peg in a round hole.
If you want your company’s marketing activities to be successful rather than failing in every endeavor, stop trying to force playbooks created for simple buying environments into your complex, natural, buying ecosystem as a seller!
