As I go around speaking attending conferences, and working with our manufacturing clients, I’m often asked questions about what marketing technology is best for a mdium-sized manufacturing firm. For context, I tend to think of companies with $25-100MM in revenues as medium-sized companies. There are SO many choices now, your head will spin. As you know, software as a service (SAAS) is now normal. With that normalcy has come a market inundated with constant new technology and software applications.
At this point, if you don’t have a good technology/software plan, you’re putting your marketing and sales team at a huge disadvantage. Before deciding on a platform, or platforms, though, consider all the processes that should be linked together. If one person handles your website, another takes care of all your marketing handouts, and you’ve given social media to the newest, youngest person on the marketing team, you’re doomed already
If you choose different software for all of your different needs, you’ll end up having to create a whole new position in your company just to manage the new software. Or, maybe you have an awesome software specialist on your team and they’ll figure out how to make all the software communicate. Sweet, right? It is until one of the platforms is updated and your software person has to redo everything.. With every update, there’s an opportunity for something to break. More money spent on software and coding fixing something that was already in place, aka the dead investment.
What are all the current pillars of marketing and sales at a manufacturing company?
If you choose different software to accomplish all these needs, you’re in for a lot of downtime, broken paths, extra training, technology chasing, and more. You’ll spin your wheels on the technology itself and not on producing the solutions you should be providing. Granted, it’s hard to find best-in-class software for managing all of this to fit your needs. But there are a couple that get pretty close.
Think of your marketing and sales as a production line. Your website is one machine, CRM is another, social is another, and so on. When you get different machines from different vendors, think about all the after-purchase work you have to do to get the machines to work together and generate the data you need for continuous quality improvements. Some of you even hire an outside company to engineer and align all the machines for you because otherwise it’s so time consuming and hard to keep up with.
You don’t need to turn your manufacturing company into a marketing company to accomplish this. Stick to producing and selling the widgets you’re good at and choose a platform to alleviate those other concerns.
Before choosing a platform, think about what you’re trying to accomplish with your website (and your other digital and automated marketing). There are really only two routes to choose from.
Sounds like an easy choice, but oddly, most people say that want option 2 but make decisions that will only accomplish option 1. The dynamic platform takes more investment of time and money in the beginning, but produces trackable ROI. Fifteen years ago, only the top Fortune 50 companies had technology available to help them accomplish option two. Today, it’s affordable for even small businesses.