The manufacturing industry is changing fast – faster than any time in modern history since the first Model T rolled off the assembly line. Technology is advancing, breaking down barriers to market entry that once looked unassailable.

Recently, the Content Marketing Institute released its 2015 B2B Manufacturing Content Marketing Report. The Institute discovered that businesses are developing new, sales-focused marketing approaches – but need to find innovative ways of attaining their goals!

Forms are your interface for getting information about prospects, clarifying their expectations, and discovering how to serve them better.

Data from a form is better than ordinary feedback:

• It helps you develop “buyer personas” to improve your market segmentation;
• It helps sales and marketing teams follow up, using their resources to best effect, we call this Smarketing;
• It helps build trust between your enterprise and your prospect, leading to a sale.

To get visitors to fill out forms, we suggested tailoring “top of the funnel” and “bottom of the funnel” offers to their needs. There's one challenge, though: Even those who love your offer won’t always fill out your form!  

Quality Control Through Responsive Data Collection

Someone has come onto your website and has clicked a Call-to-Action, now they are directed to a landing page with a form that asks them information.  But what information is important to your sales team to help them talk to this prospect?  

What is this prospects persona?  You want to ask them valuable questions and get unique information.  What if this prospect has already filled out a different form?  You want to ask them new questions, right?  To do this, use smart fields.

Inbound Marketing takes great content as well as carefully gathered and cultivated data to help businesses build-marketing plans based on bringing customers IN. 

This is quite the opposite of traditional types of advertising that reach OUT to customers. In this data driven, search based age, it is important to engage your prospects and clients by publishing content, such as blogs, infographics, articles, videos, how-to’s, checklists, and eBooks.

Attract:

As you know, the key is not just attracting any visitors to your website, but attracting visitors that may wind up working with you to build a beautiful home!. That means using the RIGHT kind of tools for attracting these buyers. Attracting means putting out that useful content like eBooks, blogs, and articles. If you are working in the contracting industry, you may think about “how to” content of high-level instructional information that will bring in those who are interested in home repairs. Remember, the content does not have to be just written content either—video and audio content is useful too.

Traditional marketing has its place, and can be effective. However, it is simply not as efficient or as organized as modern forms of marketing. Consider these reasons why traditional marketing is not as desirable for your custom home building/contractor company.

Traditional Marketing is Expensive:

Think about the costs of a television ad or even a yearlong spread in the Yellow Pages. The fees that you pay for these marketing solutions are only good for a short time. Once that commercial is no longer aired, or the Yellow Pages is outdated, your advertising expenditure is virtually wasted.

We get many questions from B2B companies about our inbound marketing services. Unfortunately, a common misconception is that inbound marketing is only for companies that market directly to the consumer. This could not be further from the truth; Inbound is an incredible asset for both B2C and B2B markets.  As a corporation that mainly sells to other businesses, you do have a few unique considerations—meaning your need for exceptional content and education is even more significant than it is for a B2C firm.  According to HubSpot, B2B companies place a higher value with search engines on educational formats like blogging and webinars, whereas consumer businesses are slightly more willing to experiment with advanced digital formats like interactive content and online tools.  Learn a bit more about how inbound marketing works for organizations like yours today.

While an attorney likely enters into the study of law because of a passion for justice or an acute love of legal jurisprudence, they still need clients in order to pay the bills. Attorneys that ignore the importance of online marketing are failing to tap into one of the best resources for finding new clients to represent. Thanks to efficient online attraction methods like eBooks, blogging, and social media attorneys can promote their law firms online in ways that will bring clients into their office and grow their firm's bottom line.

No matter your day-to-day experience or success level as a salesperson, there’s one task that never ends: improving your effectiveness. Sales people who let themselves stagnate and dead-end at merely ‘satisfactory’ eventually fall behind as sales methodology, technology, and customer expectations move onward. So how does a modern salesperson set about this task of self-improvement and achieve satisfactory, even exceptional results? These seven tips should set you on the right path: