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.

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.