If you're new here, you're about to learn a whole lot about digital marketing for manufacturers. If you're not new here, then you know we've been working with manufacturers since day one. In all of the years we've been supporting manufacturing companies with digital marketing services, we've used what we've learned to develop, publish, edit, and republish dozens of blogs about digital marketing best practices for manufacturers.
In this Exhaustive Guide to Digital Marketing for Manufacturers, we've gone ahead and pulled out just the very best blogs from our years of experience, and combined them into one comprehensive guide.
How to Use The Guide: It's comprehensive. That also means it's long. Read through it from start to finish, or use the menu below to jump to the topics you're most interested in.
A Quick Note: The Exhaustive Guide to Digital Marketing For Manufacturers is split into inbound and outbound marketing sections. If you know us (Inbound + Outbound = Evenbound) you know that we believe inbound and outbound marketing together produce the highest quality results for our clients. Check out this blog for more info on the Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing debate.
All right, let's get to it!
Menu: Digital Marketing for Manufacturers
Word of mouth marketing just isn't doing it for manufacturers anymore. I'm willing to bet that's why you're here. Maybe your company was the first to develop a revolutionary part or component. Maybe you've been on top of the industry for decades, but are starting to see the leads dry up. Whatever your concern, most manufacturers struggle with a common issue — your leads are looking for your products online now, and you just don't have an online presence you're proud of. That's where inbound marketing comes in. Inbound marketing:
If you've ever asked someone:
Then inbound marketing is your answer. This guide to digital marketing for manufacturers starts with inbound marketing because that is the methodology that will set you apart online and help you draw in more of the right leads. Each of these resources will help you improve on a specific part of your manufacturing company's inbound marketing strategy, starting with how you define your buyer personas.
It's hard to have a good digital marketing strategy if you don't know who you're marketing to.
If you're not very familiar with buyer personas, start with the first blog. If you've heard of them, but want help figuring out how to define them, go with the step-by-step guide.
Now that you know who you're marketing to, you can dive into the how-tos of inbound marketing. Remember that inbound marketing is all about working smarter, not harder. The goal here is to draw more of the right leads to your website and manufacturing company, so your marketing and sales team can focus their efforts on converting those leads to sales. Here are some of the basics to know about inbound marketing: Why Inbound Marketing:
Inbound Marketing Tips & Tricks for Manufacturers:
Inbound marketing revolves around your website. Why? It's the only space you own on the internet. Your website is the place where you can convert all of those visitors into leads. To do that, it needs to be functional. A mix of lead generation strategies and website design tips can help you draw more of the right visitors to your site, and then convert them into leads.
Bringing the Right People in With Lead Generation Strategies for Manufacturers:
Why Your Manufacturing Website Isn't Working:
Website Design Tips and Tricks To Boost Lead Gen:
If your website is where you convert leads, your content marketing strategy is what gets them to your website in the first place. There's no doubt about it — content marketing is one of the most successful ways to draw the right leads to your site. When you put out high-quality content consistently over time, it has the added bonus of boosting your manufacturing company's digital presence. (That means you rank higher than the competition.) Here's how you do it: Content Strategy for Manufacturers:
How the Sausage is Made — What Makes Great Manufacturing Marketing Content:
The first section of this Exhaustive Guide to Digital Marketing for Manufacturers covered inbound marketing — how to pull in more of the right leads. This section will cover outbound marketing for manufacturers. This section is all about how to get the word out about your company, in a way that makes sense to today's consumer. In the past, especially for manufacturers, outbound marketing had to do with a lot of cold sales calls and visits, and a lot of print marketing. Today, almost none of that is effective, and it's a time drain for your sales team. The new age of outbound marketing is all about getting your manufacturing company in front of the right leads in non-disruptive ways.
And you do that with modern marketing techniques like social media marketing and advertising, paid search advertising, and the big one — sales and marketing alignment. As always, let's start with the basics:
If you're new to modern outbound marketing, these blogs will help provide a better picture of what great outbound marketing looks like and give you some tools to try out first:
Too often, we hear that social media just isn't for manufacturers. Your product isn't sexy or cool, and none of your leads are on social media. Fortunately, you're wrong. Social media has a range of uses for manufacturers, from helping you build brand awareness, to putting you in front of legitimate buyers and leads, to helping you hire more of the right people for your growing team. If that's a new thought for you, these blogs have a lot of helpful information that will show you not just why you should be using social media, but how you can leverage it for success.
Inbound marketing is remarkably effective, but it can take some time to gain traction. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, has the potential to deliver immediate results. PPC advertising, done right, is a great way to a) get your manufacturing company ahead of the competition in search results, and b) start drawing in more of the right leads, right now.
When your manufacturing company has a solid digital marketing strategy rolling, the final step is bringing the sales team on board. Aligning your sales and marketing teams to one set of goals will deliver significant ROI.
When both marketing and sales are working to the same goals, your efforts are laser-focused on just the tactics you know will pull in and convert more of those deals you're looking for. Start with marketing and sales alignment:
Then implement these manufacturing sales strategies to shorten the sales cycle:
And that's it! With more than 35 resources and plenty of help on everything from defining your buyer personas to enabling your sales team, I hope you found a few blogs that helped you finesse your manufacturing company's digital marketing strategy.
If you're not sold on digital marketing, or if you want to see some of these tips and tactics in action, check out these case studies. Each highlights how these digital marketing tactics produced significant results that contributed to a different manufacturer's growth:
Sales enablement and HubSpot services came together to help shorten the sales cycle for this industrial service provider. In one quarter, Vanguard Fire & Security saw 921 new leads, 96 new customers, and $2.8 million dollars in closed-won sales.
Consistent, ongoing inbound marketing combined with HubSpot's robust CRM helped this cleanroom manufacturer see a 75% increase in new users, a 355% increase in conversions, and 337 new conversions — all contributing to overall company growth.
If you're interested to see how a complete digital marketing strategy can produce results for manufacturers in niche industries, this is the case study to see. In the course of an initial 12-month engagement, this manufacturing consultant saw 241 new conversions, a 166% increase in sessions, and a 178% increase in new users.