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.

This is part 3 of our series for marketers creating a marketing plan. Check out part 1: create a defined strategy and part 2: create relevant content.

Blogging: that time-consuming writing practice of innermost thoughts flowing onto a digital forum to be read by strangers you’ll never meet. Or is it?

Blogging as a practice has transformed over the years from an anonymous online journaling endeavor to one that helps establish individuals - or businesses - as thought leaders and influencers through providing much-needed insight into their expertise. 

High-value publications and ebooks are (or, should be) the bread-and-butter of an inbound sales strategy for your B2B business. Not sure why? From a prospect's point of view, you're empowering them - the buyer - to learn more about your solution or product in a low-pressure way, while they research and educate themselves (read more about this inbound method for manufacturing marketing).

From your sales point of view, you're gathering information about the prospect's interests and pain points based on what they download, as well as receiving their contact information and more for additional communication.

For some of you I can understand how you might scoff at the words “social media” and “easy” in the same sentence.  It can easily feel like a young man’s game. (Or woman’s game – didn’t mean to exclude – its just an expression.) You have to keep up with the trends and the lingo… tweeting, sending snappers, likes, pokes, bitmojis, blocking, hide from newsfeed, stop sending me game invites, I don’t want to play Farm Heroes so STOP ASKING!

When you’re looking for the results of this year’s marketing budget for your specialized construction business, can you easily show what’s happened with that money? Can you show the money spent, the content produced, the leads brought in, and results of those sales opportunities?

As a CEO, you have a specific way of looking at your company’s success. You see the big picture: where you are, where you’re going, and how you need to get there. That view hinges on the ability to look at each facet of your business and see the value it brings to your company’s bottom line. A data-centric inbound marketing strategy can give you the data you’ve been looking for from your marketing investments.

Sure, inbound marketing can be great for B2C companies. Creating interesting content for those companies is a great way to increase leads with consumers. But it’s just a waste of marketing dollars for your B2B manufacturing company… you’re looking to connect with other businesses, not people. Right?

Wrong. You know nothing, Jon Snow.