3 Manufacturing Marketing Strategies That Drive Sales
Quality manufacturing marketing strategies can be a struggle to find and implement. For many manufacturing companies, marketing is only recently necessary. In decades past, you probably relied primarily on word-of-mouth referrals, and for the most part, you still do today. The problem is that fewer of your ideal buyers are relying solely on word-of-mouth referrals.
Maybe you've recognized that you need to grow your position and presence in your market. Maybe you've noticed that competitors have a more prominent digital presence than you.
Whatever the reason, there are a range of manufacturing marketing strategies you can use to draw in more of the right leads and shorten the sales cycle. If you're looking for ways to grow your manufacturing company, these three manufacturing marketing strategies are proven to help you close more of the right deals, faster. Let's take a look.
3 Manufacturing Marketing Strategies That Drive Sales
01. Align Sales and Marketing Teams
Marketing isn't a new concept for most manufacturers, but it does tend to be a tricky one. Many of the manufacturers we've worked with here at Evenbound either:
- Don't have a marketing team. They have a few sales people who take the lead on some marketing initiatives, like developing mailers, brochures, or updating the website, but they don't have a dedicated team of marketers supporting the manufacturing company.
- Have a marketing team that functions separately from the rest of the company. Marketing has its own department that doesn't often interact with sales reps, product engineers, and more.
Both of these strategies are understandable — in the past they've worked well. But neither strategy is winning you sales today.
Today, any consumer, including the buyers and purchasers your manufacturing company so often sells to, is inundated with marketing and sales messaging. That means it's more important than ever for you to absolutely nail any marketing message that's going out into the world.
Sales and marketing alignment is the first step to setting your manufacturing company up for marketing that drives sales.
Since we have so much content out there already, I won't go too far into it. When you're on board, check out some of these other blogs we've got up on the site:
- How HubSpot Helps Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams
- Marketing and Sales Alignment Strategies that Cut Time and Boost Growth
- Getting Started with HubSpot Series: Sales and Marketing Alignment
I will mention a few key points though.
Sales and Marketing Alignment: Why it Works for Manufacturers
Sales and marketing alignment isn't some huge, scary thing. It's just getting your marketing and sales team in the same room, so they can share their separate experiences and expertise with the other team.
When your sales and marketing teams are in the same room they can decide together:
- Who to market to
- What a good lead looks like
- The best methods to draw those great leads in
- How to work together to nurture and close those ideal leads
With both teams on the same page, your marketing and sales teams will spend less time working leads and prospects that aren't a good fit for your manufacturing company, and more time closing the deals you actually want.
Sales and marketing alignment is a manufacturing marketing strategy guaranteed to boost sales.
When you have a dedicated marketing team who understands what leads are the most attractive to your sales team, they can implement manufacturing marketing tactics and strategies that work to pull that ideal lead in.
02. Account-Based Marketing
When it comes to manufacturer marketing, it's not uncommon to market to a small pool of companies. We often find our industrial manufacturing clients know exactly who they want to sell to. Especially if you're selling a niche product for a specific market, you likely already know the key industry players.
That's why Account-Based Marketing is such a useful manufacturing marketing strategy.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a hyper-specific marketing strategy that focuses on targeting marketing efforts to key accounts, rather than marketing to a large group of potential prospects or to a more general industry. Check out this handy ABM diagram from the team at Intercom for a visual:
When you use account-based marketing as a manufacturing marketing strategy, you do the work of identifying key companies and accounts that you know would be a great fit for your product or service.
Then, your marketing team gets to work developing highly-targeted marketing content that's addressed to the five or six stakeholders at that company. These are the people who are most likely to make the decision to go with your product over a competitor's.
Why is Account-Based Marketing An Ideal Manufacturing Marketing Strategy?
While ABM doesn't work for everyone, it's a great manufacturing marketing strategy, especially for heavy industrial manufacturers who know exactly where they want their products placed. The benefit for companies like this is that you're putting all of your marketing efforts into accounts that you know can deliver significant returns. When you close, ROI is known and significant.
The benefit of ABM for manufacturers is that you're only spending time and resources on the accounts you know can convert and deliver ROI for your company.
03. Inbound Marketing for Manufacturers
The third manufacturing marketing strategy here won't come as much of a surprise if you're familiar with the Evenbound team.
We're all about inbound marketing, especially for manufacturers. Why?
Inbound marketing is a smart, cost-effective, and proven manufacturing marketing strategy.
If you're implementing the other two manufacturing marketing strategies mentioned earlier, inbound marketing is only more effective.
When your sales and marketing teams are aligned, and you have a clear picture of who exactly you want to market to, inbound marketing is a powerful tool for manufacturers.
How Does Inbound Marketing Pair with ABM & Sales and Marketing Alignment?
Inbound marketing works to draw in the right, qualified leads to your website. By developing and putting out content that your ideal buyers are searching for, you pull them into your site in a way that's helpful, rather than disruptive. Let's take a look at how HubSpot visualizes inbound marketing:
For more information about HubSpot's Flywheel, check out our blog: Understanding the HubSpot Flywheel.
When you become a part of your lead's researching phase, you can then nurture that lead with more content and marketing and sales contact that helps them through their buyer's journey.
Then, when that lead is ready to make a purchasing decision, you're top of mind. If you've been nurturing that lead, answering their questions, and providing the resources they need to make the right decision for their company, they'll choose to buy from you.
Does Inbound Marketing Actually Work for Manufacturers?
So that was a lot of information, but not a lot of data. Let's look at some numbers to see if inbound marketing actually does work for manufacturers.
This graph shows the number of sessions of a company that sells a very niche industrial manufacturing product.
As the Evenbound team began to publish content and optimize the client's website for search engines, you can see that their sessions — or the number of people coming to their website — began to rise. From October to March, that traffic more than doubled.
Since we're optimizing their site for keywords that are relevant to that manufacturing client's ideal buyer, that increase in sessions represents a significant increase in the number of qualified leads making it to that client's site.
With more qualified leads coming to them, that client can now nurture those leads with email marketing, retargeting, and personalized sales interactions, to close more of the right deals, faster.
I get it, that's just one example. If you're not sure these manufacturing marketing strategies really work, take a look at our previous work. We have a range of case studies that showcase exactly what we've done to deliver quality results for manufacturers. All of our case studies are ungated and free for you to look at whenever is convenient for you.
I recommend this one as a starting point: Implementing HubSpot Sales to Shorten One Industrial Service Provider's Sales Cycle
But you can also check out this one and many others on Our Work page.
And if you have any questions about implementing marketing strategies like Account-Based Marketing or Inbound Marketing to drive sales for your manufacturing company, just give us a shout. We are pros at marketing industrial manufacturers, and we'd be more than happy to help you too.
