Industry 4.0, also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is transforming the manufacturing and industrial sectors through the integration of advanced technologies like AI, automation, and data analytics. These innovations enable smart factories where machines, systems, and human workers seamlessly collaborate for maximum efficiency.
But the benefits of Industry 4.0 shouldn’t be limited to your facility floor—your marketing and sales strategies should also embrace these advancements. At Evenbound, every industrial marketing strategy we create embraces an Industry 4.0 mindset. I’ve personally executed these tactics and see our clients achieve significant cost savings, improved efficiency, and higher-quality leads. I’m here to share how your company can achieve the same success.
The Rise of Automation for Industrial Efficiency
Industrial companies have long leveraged automation to streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve productivity. Automated machinery, AI-driven quality control, and predictive maintenance have saved manufacturers significant time and labor costs. These technologies aren’t just a trend—they’re the future. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t love cutting costs while making life easier?
Companies investing in automation on the production side are seeing massive returns. While many businesses have optimized their processes with Industry 4.0 technologies, they’re still relying on outdated marketing tactics.
Imagine if your marketing and sales efforts could operate as efficiently as your factory floor. Sounds nice, right? Well, the good news is, they can. The same philosophies can be applied to these departments. Automation can reduce time-consuming manual tasks, improve engagement rates, and generate better leads without requiring additional labor force.
Industry 4.0 Tactics for Your Industrial Marketing Strategy
The results might sound great—but how do you actually achieve them? When putting together your industrial marketing strategy, I recommend outlining specific tactics that align with the pillars of Industry 4.0. For clients at Evenbound, I’ve proposed, executed, and tracked performance for these highly-effective tactics:
#1. Data-Driven Personalization
Industry 4.0 leverages data to drive efficiency in manufacturing. At Evenbound, we similarly use CRM data to personalize industrial B2B marketing efforts. I’ve worked with clients to segment customers based on industry, company size, and behavior and other categories, enabling me to develop hyper-targeted campaigns. For example, I’ve crafted sales sequences and marketing workflows that align with the specific needs of a niche audience. Higher click-through rates? Check. Better engagement? Absolutely. More marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)? You bet.
Aside from segmentation, I use other demographic CRM data to deepen content personalization. For example, I often include customer names, company names, geographic locations, job titles, or other personal details in sales sequences. This information adds a human element to content, establishing a 1:1 relationship with a current customer or prospect.
Besides, the numbers don’t lie. Personalization isn’t just a feel-good strategy; it’s a proven revenue driver. These tactics are proven to:
- Reduce customer acquisition and retention costs.
- Improve customer retention and repeat purchases.
- Increase brand loyalty.
- Meet customer expectations for personalized experiences.
- Outperform generic calls to action (CTAs).
- Contribute to faster revenue growth.
#2. Marketing and Sales Automation
Automation in marketing isn’t just about saving time—it’s about making your processes smarter. With the right CRM, you can automate both simple and complex tasks. I’ve created follow-up emails that automatically send to customers and prospects after they submit a form. Instead of leaving them hanging, this ensures your customers are immediately contacted with valuable information and a personalized greeting.
I’ve also written sales sequences that are automatically sent to specific contacts over designated intervals (such as every three days), cultivating a relationship and keeping your brand top of mind. Aside from sequences, I’ve written marketing newsletters that are sent to auto-enrolled contacts.
The opportunities don’t end there. Automation can directly impact your sales process. For example, you can automate deal status changes in your pipeline. Some CRMs can automatically create tickets for new prospects, move deals into the next stage (i.e. Closed Won 🎉), and even assign new leads to your sales reps.
At Evenbound, we’ve implemented AI-driven chatbots that assist with initial customer inquiries. By taking care of these manual, administrative tasks, automation frees up your sales team to focus on high-value activities.
We recently helped leading manufacturer Etna Supply implement more than 14 workflows that automated manual marketing tasks. With repetitive tasks out of the way, the team is able to focus on other strategic growth initiatives.
#3. Real-time Campaign Adjustments
Industry 4.0 relies on data-driven decision-making, and marketing should be no different. After all, why guess when you can know what works? At Evenbound, I work closely with account strategists to make adjustments to ongoing campaigns based on performance metrics. To optimize our results, we:
- A/B test subject lines, headlines, CTAs and other copy.
- Shift campaign timing based on engagement.
- Increase ad spend for the highest-performing channels.
- Refine audience segmentation to reach more relevant leads.
- Periodically swap out messaging to provide new value.
By utilizing data insights, we ensure your marketing dollars are spent more efficiently—pivoting our approach versus remaining stagnant if a campaign is ineffective. Our data-informed content and paid media strategy for The Lane Law Firm recently led to a 135% increase in qualified leads. Plus, the paid media campaigns alone generated an impressive $1.28 million in revenue!
#4. AI Assistance for Content Creation
AI is revolutionizing content creation just like it’s optimizing industrial processes. I use several AI tools, such as Jasper.ai and HubSpot’s Breeze Content Agent, on a daily basis to produce high-quality industrial B2B marketing content for Evenbound clients. These tools can save time by providing background on a topic, brainstorming content ideas, providing headline options, generating outlines, and creating copy that serves as a starting point.
By producing some of the foundational elements of our content, I'm able to focus on the more high-value aspects of the content—conducting in-depth research, infusing creativity and nuance, utilizing SEO, including relevant internal and external links, and more. In the end, I'm able to produce content at a much higher caliber in the same amount of time.
Beyond content creation, AI is my secret weapon for competitive analysis, helping me identify gaps in our clients’ industrial marketing strategies. By leveraging AI-powered insights, we ensure that the content we produce not only ranks highly, but that it also meets audience demand in a way that competitors just aren’t addressing.
#5. Sales, Marketing, and Service Integration
A fully integrated system—where sales, marketing, and customer service share insights—is the backbone of effective Revenue Operations (or RevOps for short). I’ve seen how the right CRM can lead to better collaboration and efficiency among teams. In particular, these RevOps capabilities make a big difference:
- Lead Scoring: Evaluates lead engagement by assigning points to their interactions with marketing content, enabling sales to focus on the most promising prospects.
- Lifecycle Stages: Establishes clear stages of the customer journey—such as awareness, consideration, and conversion—ensuring alignment between teams.
- Unified Contact Database: Provides teams with shared access to lead details, including their past interactions, engagement, and activities, offering a comprehensive view of each customer or prospect.
This full-team visibility reduces tension, streamlines the handoff process, and improves customer transitions between departments. Recently, we helped a global chemical company consolidate its CRM insights for cross-team collaboration. With tracked activities visible across departments, the company was able to improve the customer experience and sales outcomes—resulting in $8 million of deals in one year.
HubSpot is Made for Industry 4.0 Marketing—Here’s How
HubSpot is the most powerful CRM for implementing Industry 4.0 principles. Here’s how it supports your industrial marketing strategy:
Customer Segmentation:
What it is: Customer segmentation in HubSpot is like giving your contacts VIP treatment. It allows you to categorize your contacts into distinct groups based on various criteria. By enabling you to tailor your marketing content to specific audiences, this is one of most impactful industrial B2B marketing tools.
How it works: To create lists, navigate to the “CRM” section and select "Lists." Here, you can create both active and static lists based on your segmentation criteria. Active lists update automatically as contacts meet the defined criteria, while static lists remain unchanged unless manually updated. You can also utilize HubSpot's filtering options to segment contacts by properties such as lifecycle stage, engagement metrics, or custom properties you've created.
Personalization Tokens:
What it is: Personalization tokens in HubSpot enable you to dynamically insert personalized information, such as a contact's first name or company name, into your emails and content. By adding this personal touch, I am able to make content more relevant to each recipient—improving engagement rates for our clients.
How it works: When composing an email, click on the personalization icon and select the appropriate token (i.e. First Name, Company Name). HubSpot will automatically replace the token with the corresponding contact property when the email is sent. Similarly, you can insert personalization tokens into landing pages or website content to display customized messages to visitors based on their stored information.
Deal Pipeline Automation:
What it is: HubSpot's deal pipeline automation streamlines your sales process by automating routine tasks and ensuring deals progress smoothly through the sales stages. This feature helps maintain consistency and efficiency within your sales team. In other words, nothing slips through the cracks!
How it works: Navigate to the “Workspaces” section and then "Sales" to create or modify deal pipelines to reflect your sales process stages. Within each pipeline stage, you can set up automation to trigger actions such as sending follow-up emails, creating tasks for sales reps, or updating deal properties when a deal enters or exits a stage.
Automatic Enrollment:
What it is: Automatic enrollment in HubSpot allows new contacts to be seamlessly added to workflows or sales sequences based on predefined criteria. This way, you can quickly reach your audience with relevant content, all without needing any manual intervention.
How it works: In the "Automations" section, you can select "Workflows" to define specific enrollment triggers for your workflows, such as form submissions, contact property changes, or website activity.
Campaign Reporting:
What it is: Get real-time insights into the performance of your industrial B2B marketing efforts, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. You can track metrics such as email opens, click-through rates, form submissions, and even overall campaign ROI, plus others.
How it works: Navigate to the "Marketing" section and select "Campaigns." Here, you can click “Analyze” and then “Campaign Analytics” to view a dashboard summarizing your campaign’s performance. You can also compare campaigns in HubSpot. These metrics can help you identify areas for improvement.
A/B Testing:
What it is: A/B testing in HubSpot is like a friendly showdown between two versions of your content. It allows you to experiment with different versions of your emails, landing pages, or website elements to determine which performs better. I often use this optimization technique to refine content and increase engagement rates.
How it works: When creating an email or landing page, select the option to run an A/B test. Create variations by altering elements such as subject lines, headlines, images, or call-to-actions. After the test runs for a sufficient period, review the performance metrics to identify the winning version, which can then be used as your primary content.
Breeze Content Agent & Copilot:
What it is: HubSpot's Breeze is an AI-powered engine designed to assist with content creation and task automation. It offers features like AI-generated content suggestions, content creation, customer engagement scoring, and automated reporting.
How it works: You can utilize Breeze Content Agent to generate blog posts, landing pages, website pages, and other content based on your inputs and CRM data. You can turn to Breeze Copilot with questions, for content suggestions, or even to re-write or expand on content. Plus, you can set up Breeze Agents to automate repetitive tasks, such as data entry or follow-up communications, allowing your team to focus on more strategic activities.
Lead Scoring:
What it is: You can assign values to your contacts based on their interactions with your brand, demographic information, and other criteria. This prioritizes leads so your sales team can focus on the most engaged and qualified prospects.
How it works: In the "Contacts" settings, set up lead scoring rules by assigning positive or negative points to various contact properties and behaviors, such as email opens, website visits, or specific form submissions. Use the lead scores to segment contacts, trigger workflows, or notify sales reps when a contact reaches a certain score threshold.
How to Apply Industry 4.0 to Your Marketing Strategy
Unsure how to implement these tactics or leverage these tools? To apply Industry 4.0 principles to your industrial marketing strategy, start here:
- Hire Agency or In-House Expertise: If your team doesn't have the knowledge to effectively implement these tools, don't be afraid to turn to an expert who can help you make it happen. I've heard too many clients regret not getting started sooner—and they're so excited to see how quickly we can transform their CRMs!
- Invest in a Powerful CRM: Your CRM is the data powerhouse you need to make all other decisions. I specifically recommend HubSpot due to its robust automation, AI, and data capabilities, enabling your departments to collaborate and reach your company's growth goals. Our clients see the ROI almost immediately.
- Document Your Processes: This is something Evenbound can help with, but a great starting point is producing detailed documentation about your current processes. This allows us to identify friction, inefficiencies, or gaps that can be remediated within your CRM, plus we can recommend where AI and automation can streamline your activities.
- Listen to Your Customers: Have you heard feedback from customers about a clunky part of the sales process? Or about which marketing materials resonate with them the most? You should leverage these insights to help you prioritize which areas of your business need optimization first.
- Listen to Your Team: Similar to your customers, have your team members shared frustrations with your current systems or processes? These insights can also help you figure out which optimizations should happen first and will have the biggest impact on productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth.
Ready to Introduce Industry 4.0 to Your Industrial B2B Marketing Strategy?
Evenbound specializes in helping industrial businesses implement data-driven, automated marketing tactics that drive real results. If you’re ready to optimize your industrial marketing strategy with Industry 4.0 principles, contact us today to start driving measurable growth!
