We are assuming that you, like most other manufacturing companies, gather most of your leads through avenues such as trade shows, referrals, and word-of-mouth? You probably spend money on outbound marketing, but don’t really understand what the ROI is, if there is any at all? And, it’s probably near impossible for you to have success with cold calling because your product or service is too complicated to explain in such a brief conversation. Right? That is exactly why an inbound methodology for your manufacturing company is what you need – setting yourself up as an educational resource with useful content is the perfect way to explain your complicated widget or product.

Believe me.  We get it.  It’s not easy to make the long-term investment over the short-term, instant spend when it comes to marketing your manufacturing company.  Don’t you feel that way?

Seeing your logo on a web banner, your name on a billboard, or even hearing your voice in a radio ad can make you feel like you are doing something impactful to promote your business – plus it kinda makes you feel cool.  So many eyeballs! So many ears!

But what really matters? The mother driving her kids to school seeing your billboard or hearing your radio ad?  Or getting your message in front of actual potential customers? (Spoiler: It's the second one)

I am sure that there are a ton of people thinking… what the hell is a buyer persona and why is this important to me? Well, honestly, those are great questions. Kudos to you for admitting that you don’t know and taking a step towards enlightening yourself.  Trust me – this topic is worth the read!

When someone is online searching for answers, they want the most relevant information possible.  When you are online, isn't that what YOU want? Well, in order to make sure your marketing investment is being spent on providing and pushing out relevant information to attract the right people, first you need to know exactly who those RIGHT people are.

A B2B marketing strategy for a manufacturing business HAS to utilize premium content such as eBooks! It allows your website to become your #1 salesperson, all while providing the exact knowledge about your service or product that you want to be sharing.

If your manufacturing company’s website isn’t utilizing premium content guarded by forms, YOU ARE MISSING OUT ON POTENTIAL QUALIFIED LEADS! I can break this down to two main reasons to jump on board:

One of the single largest opportunities that you have for improving performance in the modern business environment involves aligning marketing and sales. This is a decision that brings with it a host of different benefits that can't be ignored, from dramatically improving your marketing return on investment to an increase in sales productivity. Misalignment between sales and marketing technologies and processes cost B2B companies 10% of revenue or more a year according to HubSpot, and they found that when smarketing occurs (sales and marketing alignment) companies see 38% higher sales win rate.

No matter how big or small your sales force, your website can be working around the clock to attract leads. To do it, however, your B2B site needs great content and an effective content strategy with messaging that connects to your target clientele.

This is the final part of our 4-part series on specialized construction marketing plans. Particularly when it comes to content marketing, you have 4 steps to see success:

Earlier this week, I wrote about why inbound marketing works for manufacturing. I walked through the buyer’s journey, from discovery, to consideration, to making a decision about a solution for a problem they’re facing. In the case of manufacturing, the buyer always feels an acute need for the solution prior to purchasing; buying a huge piece of machinery is not a week-long decision. The process could take months, with input from many other decision-makers in the company.

Once a potential solution has been identified, the buyer is ready to talk to a sales professional at your manufacturing business. Here’s how a sales team enabled through inbound succeeds more often.

The Internet exists for only a few purposes: Curating a perfect life on social media and videos of people being scared by other people!  Ok...that’s not the real reason obviously. The internet actually exists to get the best, most relevant information to people searching for it.

There are a few “search engines” that exist to help people find this information. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are some of them. When you search for something using the search engine, it crawls the web (it’s actually called “spidering”) and “reads” all of the information on every website.

Marketing for manufacturing companies is not an easy job. Traditional marketing methods focuses on the seller - what you have in stock, what you need to move, what’s been popular most recently, and where you think the buyers ought to be. While that method may work for some companies, manufacturing companies are a different case.