The Best Marketing Strategy Guide for Manufacturing Companies for 2021

Marketing is a critical part of a manufacturing organization as it connects distributors, manufacturers, and wholesalers, ensuring your product reaches its end-user. On the other hand, determining the finest ways to promote your manufacturing company, can take more effort and time. Most of the companies still rely on outdated practices that don't produce results neither requires a ton of effort. Maybe that's why investing in a thorough B2B marketing strategy hasn't been prevalent as you'd expect.

However, with new marketing ideas for manufacturing companies like better inbound marketing that includes lead generation, social media, content, among others, manufacturers can reach their goals and connect with new audiences. Manufacturing companies are succeeding in attracting new prospects, retaining existing customers, and driving sales by leveraging content and thought leadership to promote their products and services online. Hosting/sponsoring a webinar, publishing a whitepaper that shows industry knowledge or product training, creating a company blog, and attending industry events and trade shows are recommended for a manufacturing company to develop its reputation as a thought leader.

The digital marketing strategy for manufacturers used in B2B is entirely different from the strategies used in other industries as the audience is unique. To get relevant traffic and to increase your ROI, it's essential to collect the following information from the client.

• A list of products or services that provide high ROI
• Competitors
• Target market and target audience
• Keywords of topics that they consider relevant
• New products or services
• Industries they serve
• Complementary services or products

In this article, we have listed out some of the marketing ideas for manufacturing companies.

Inbound Marketing

A far more effective and less expensive way of expanding your customer reach and promoting your existing one. With Inbound marketing, you can organically attract interested prospects through website optimization, produce content that educates, engages, and excites your audience, and promote it through the digital channels which they are using. You can convert visitors into contacts on your website with tactically placed Call-to-Action (CTA) and lead generation forms.

To get the right traffic, increase their lead count, and close more business, the manufacturers should use a certain marketing strategy in manufacturing company like:

"At Plant Automation Technology, we constantly look forward to receive your enquires, feedback, and suggestions and take the opportunity of servicing your requirements.

1) Provide educational content on a company blog

In the past, "blogging" has been stigmatized as superfluous marketing jargon, but in reality, it's one of those tactics and basic building blocks for a strong marketing foundation. A blog could be considered as a complimentary resource for your website visitors. It should not be just a means of writing to your audience about your company or promoting your products or services, but it should be used in a way from announcing company news and initiating staff members to discussing significant industry topics and publishing educational content that helps your audience solve problems.

The benefits of blogging are abundant. It provides website visitors with content that tackles their pain points, keeps your website fresh for search engines, helps you get found when prospects search online, shows your industry's expertise. Content must be published consistently like publishing one post per month and going further producing more content (perhaps weekly). It's generally advisable to create a quarterly blogging calendar that includes the writer, topic, keyword, and goal of every post. The results from blogging may however take time, but as you continue to publish more informative articles, ultimately you'll improve your company's ranking in search engine results pages, and the organic traffic you generate for your website increases.

2) High-Value Content Behind Forms

Positioning some of that content behind lead generation forms is equally important. A lead generation form is usually on a website landing page that promotes a content offer like a white paper, a webinar recording, or an e-book, etc. This lead generation form acts as a gate wherein once a visitor fills their contact information (demographics, other info, etc), they receive the content in exchange. And they become a lead.

"You could get in touch with us either by filling in the form or email, contacting us".

Facilitating visitor-to-lead conversions is the main idea behind creating gated content. Now that there's contact information, we can have the opportunity to follow up with the lead, give them related material, and develop their interest in your business or more. The lead generation forms can even help divide your possibly messy contact database, allowing you to sort contacts by their replies to a particular form filled queries!

Utilizing lead generation landing pages to promote gated content is a productive way to produce a similar amount at a much lesser cost. The more leads that you can generate depends on the number of landing pages that you have.

3) Use SEO to Increase Your Reach

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the marketing strategy in manufacturing company that's often used by manufacturers or distributors. By using SEO, one must ensure that the website can be easily found in searches by potential customers and that it outranks any competitors. When somebody enters a keyword related to your business search into a search engine, SEO makes your website more likely to show up and rank highly. It can vary from editing the titles of your pages to gathering more links to your site and it can be very simple or more complex.

Apart from the keyword optimization, there's a lot more to the process. Besides, it's necessary to see that your website is responsive, you can enhance the number of leads and ultimately close more deals by ensuring that people can access your site from a variety of devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

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If you are a beginner at SEO, the best way to start is to think about the phrases and words that potential customers would associate with your business/products. These may include very short or single words to longer phrases. You should then assess your website to see if these phrases/words (called "keywords") appear anywhere in your content. If they don't appear on your site, chances are poor for ranking. If the search engines couldn't find them, they cannot associate them with your website. But, if they are there, then there are chances for you to rank for them. Thus, adding keywords to your page copy, titles, etc is so important.

4) Brand Awareness and Visibility

Brand awareness is the level at which a brand gets acknowledged by potential customers and rightly associated with its particular product/service. When the clients have brand awareness, they usually learn more about your business as they know it exists and is actively looking out for information on it, instead of discovering it on search engines.

Remember that your business isn't likely to get very far if it doesn't have a brand to set itself apart no matter how much you post on social media, how much you spend on advertising or the quality of your products and services. Your brand turns up your company name, logo, content, into an experience for your clients and audience. Brand awareness places businesses ahead of their competitors.

Benefits of branding:

• customer recognition
• credibility
• consistency
• customer loyalty
• brand equity
• attracts talent

Having a brand is not simply enough. It's important to build that brand constantly and strengthening its associations in the minds of your target audience. The more well-known people are with something, the more they trust it and stick to it. Likewise, the more familiar the target audience gets with your brand, the easier it will be to -

• promote your business across various channels
• build a strong business reputation
• successfully introduce new products/services
• find and maintain loyal customers.

Brand awareness is important to achieve a range of marketing goals and objectives like generating more leads, staying ahead of the competition, and building an audience.

5) Convert Interest into Inquiry for Lead Generation

By focusing more on high-quality leads that have better chances of converting into pipeline opportunities and customers, the marketers can help sales perform better. Generating "high-quality leads" would usually be the B2B marketer's leading challenge. The more validated and verification of every lead/database, the better would be the quality of the lead.

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The best way for B2B marketers to capably verify the accuracy of their lead data captured online before turning the said inquires over to the sales force is by -

Creating a marketing funnel

Bringing inquires (leads) into one spot and qualifying them is the main purpose of the marketing funnel. It generates Sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren't Sales-ready. The lead qualification must first categorize leads as per their "Sales readiness" and business fit. Secondly, it must manage all the incoming leads.

It's essential to note down that most people visiting your website aren't coming to purchase right away. They visit your site for information. The same kind of details cannot be expected from a early-stage lead when compared to a later-stage lead. People begin to question the value of providing too much information on forms before you've earned their trust. You can start by requesting basic information such as an email address and later on in the next step ask the first and last name. As you earn trust, you can ask for more detailed insights going further.

Using inside sales team phone/email to qualify based on lead scoring

Few companies may use third-party list providers to verify the information. The best way to assess a company's interest is through a good conversation. An email could be an excellent way to create a one-on-one dialogue by asking queries as well. To have relevant chats with prospects, you can use data from your lead-nurturing and lead-scoring systems. You can ask questions that show you understand the challenges your prospects face depending on your company's value plan research. Initiate ideas about how your business can help them meet those challenges.

Doing this way will help earn trust more quickly, build relationships that can impact your sales pipeline.

6) Generate marketing qualified leads that need to be nurtured

The significance of an effective lead nurturing strategy becomes very clear, with companies adopting inbound marketing as a way to generate more leads. Executing an effective lead strategy can have a major impact on the results of your customer retention, inbound marketing strategy, customer loyalty, revenue, and more.

How to nurture leads?

Nurturing leads is vital to the success of your business as these tactics directly impact a customer's decision about whether or not they want to convert into paying customers. Purposefully engaging your target audience by providing related information, sustaining them in any way they need, and maintaining a sense of glee throughout every stage of the buyer's journey is the process of nurturing leads. Several ways can be used to nurture leads such as including targeted content, timely follow-ups, and multi-channel nurturing. No matter what type of business you work for, the below-ones are the most effective lead nurturing strategies.

• Leverage targeted content.

Identify the most qualified leads by tailoring entertaining, interesting, and delightful content to target audience members.

• Use multi-channel lead nurturing techniques

Rather than just email, reach, and nurture your audience where they are, on multiple channels.

• Focus on multiple touches

Increase touches with a mix of content channels and types to boost your interactions and commitment among target audience members.

• Follow up with leads on time

Follow up with your leads in a timely manner to keep them engaged and involved as well as keep your brand on top of your mind.

• Send personalized emails

To promote customer retention, you can personalize your emails (and all lead nurturing tactics, whenever possible).

• Lead scoring tactics

Implementing a lead scoring strategy can help determine which leads you should focus your time on.

• Align your sales and marketing strategies

To improve your lead nurturing tactics and increase customer retention, you can align sales and marketing teams.

7) Improve ROI

To catch the client's attention and make them more aware of your company, inbound marketing centers on providing directly useful, engaging content to prospective clients. The ultimate goal is to move them from one stage of the sales funnel to the next i.e. converting them from a website visitor to a lead and then from a lead to a paying customer.

"Use our top marketing strategies to make better decisions, engage your target audience and create a top-notch customer experience while driving revenue at various steps of your business journey".

So, how do you improve your inbound marketing ROI?

• Identify And Set Your Goals Up Front
• Determine your ideal buyer
• Categorize topics which appeal to your Target Audience's Problems
• Create Useful, Unique Content Marketing Assets
• Nurture Your Leads Through the Sales Funnel
• Elevate Your KPIs And Recognize Your Goal Metrics
• Report Your Findings Regularly To Track ROI

If you aren't able to see the ROI that you're expecting, work back through every step -

• Set new goals
• Continue to create quality content
• Connect with your prospects regularly
• Review your metrics and measurement