Manufacturing Marketing
Unlike traditional consumer marketing, manufacturing marketing focuses on marketing to other businesses.
Anyone in the business world is probably already educated on the importance of creating a solid marketing strategy. We all want to attract new customers. For manufacturers or distributors, their approach to building a marketing strategy is different. Unlike more traditional businesses that primarily market directly to their customers, marketing for manufacturers focuses on marketing to other businesses or retailers.
Why Manufacturing Marketing is Unique to the Industry
Target Audience
As a manufacturer, one of the challenges with targeting your audience is that you’re likely to be targeting different groups of employees from within the same target company. For example, you may need to target both an engineer and a buyer, each of whom is going to require a very different approach. This is because their interest and knowledge of the product is going to vary greatly.
Sales Process
The sales process has definitely changed for manufacturers. It wasn’t very long ago that salespeople still knocked on doors, or companies advertised in the Yellow Pages. While there are still occasional door-to-door salespeople, the digital world has eliminated many of these outdated sales practices.
How to Strengthen and Improve Your Manufacturing Marketing Strategies
- Build a solid website design
- Use inbound marketing techniques
- Create content marketing
- Consider paid marketing
- Be social on social media
- Reignite your passion
1. Build a Solid Website Design
Your website should be functional, easy to navigate, search engine optimized or SEO, content rich, engaging, and responsive to all types of mobile devices or platforms.
In order to create an ideal website, it’s important to know who your target audience is. This is where creating a buyer persona can be helpful.
2. Use Inbound Marketing Techniques
Marketing for manufacturing companies can be improved using inbound marketing techniques. With inbound marketing, the goal is to drive traffic to your website, encourage engagement, and convert leads into customers. It’s also more about helping companies get connected to people looking for their unique products or services.
Inbound Marketing Tools
- Blogging
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Email marketing
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Infographics
- E-courses
- Webinars
- E-books
- Social media posts
3. Create Content Marketing
While content marketing is very similar to inbound marketing, it’s not exactly the same thing. Content marketing is a component of inbound marketing, while inbound marketing includes so much more than just content.
With content marketing, the ultimate goal is to create and distribute high quality, relevant, and engaging content to attract potential customers to your industrial company.
Helpful Tips When Using Content Marketing…
- Have some brainstorming sessions with your team to create a broad range of exciting new topic ideas for content.
- Do some competitive research to find out what your competitors are up to. It’s always a good idea to stay one step ahead of the competition.
- Find out what’s trending and create content that is relevant and current to align with the latest trends.
- Incorporate your customers’ thoughts and ideas. This can be done by conducting surveys or engaging with customers on social media to figure out what makes them tick.
4. Consider Paid Marketing
There are many different types of paid marketing, including Pay-Per-Click or PPC advertisements. PPC ads work by strategically placing them along search engine results. They are fairly inexpensive ads because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
You can also set a budget and control the amount of money spent, and easily track the results. Another bonus with PPC ads is they deliver immediate results, from the moment the ad goes live, leads are being directed to your website.
A couple of other ad options to consider are online banners or social media advertisements.
5. Get Social on Social Media
Social media continues to rise in popularity, so focusing on improving your social media marketing strategy is a must. When it comes to using social media for manufacturing marketing, focus on creating professional looking profiles, filling out all of the informational sections, and set your company logo as your profile photo. The main thing to consider with social media is being consistent. If you want to establish an online presence, then you need to be social, and frequently engage with your audience.
6. Reignite Your Passion
It doesn’t matter how fancy or rock solid your marketing strategy is, if you don’t have passion for what you do, then it will leak out into other areas of your business. Your passion affects the quality of your product as well as the level of customer service you’re able to provide.
If you’ve found that you’ve already lost some of your passion, don’t fret. Creating a new manufacturing marketing strategy is the perfect opportunity to cultivate a renewed sense of interest, motivation, and purpose.
Neon Goldfish works with manufacturing companies just like yours, and we know how to create stunning marketing strategies that pay off big. Give us a call today for help with your manufacturing marketing strategy.