Manufacturing Marketing Trends

As you know, the manufacturing industry is constantly changing. From supply chain to regulations, processes or products, the digital thread has to run through all of it, including in marketing and sales. And, there are five important trends helping manufacturing marketers break through the noise. From rapidly intensifying customer experience demands to content expectations and marketing automation, this is what you need to know now to succeed in the modern world of manufacturing marketing. 

Trend #1: Customer Experience Demands Are Increasing for Manufacturers

Your customers now do a lot of the buying process without you. In fact, your sales team shouldn’t even see the prospect until they are invested in your company as an option, in most cases. That self-directed exploration is something that has to be so smooth, it eases your new customer right on into the contract. Because of this demand for a thorough, impactful customer experience, digital marketing, content, and marketing automation are more important than ever. 

In order to meet the customer experience demands of the people looking to buy your products, you have to be proactive and follow manufacturing marketing best practices, like:

• Have a clear, informative website
• Offer educational materials that provide value to your prospects
• Once your lead has converted on a content offer, nurture them with automated email
• Give, give, give valuable, accurate information
• Let the customer signal sales-readiness

Trend #2: Inbound Marketing is Table Stakes for Manufacturers 

Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach to marketing that focuses on generating leads through helpful, relevant content. At a very basic level, this is how you allow your customers to find you, rather than the other way around. 

Inbound aligns with the way industrial and B2B buyers operate in today’s world, as 57% of the purchase decision process is complete before a customer even calls a supplier.

Some of the most effective inbound marketing tactics for the manufacturing industry include:

• Content marketing
• Organic social media posting and community-building

Content marketing is one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies for the manufacturing industry. By creating helpful, relevant blog articles and other content, you can attract potential customers to your website and generate leads.

Social media marketing is another effective inbound marketing strategy for manufacturing businesses. By creating and sharing engaging content on social media, businesses can increase brand awareness and drive traffic to their website.

Trend #3: Expanding Attention to Content Strategy

As you can gather from our discussion of inbound marketing, you’re gonna need some content. The pandemic has underscored the need for companies to have a fresh content marketing strategy that is scalable and differentiates them from competitors. This has been shown to be particularly true in manufacturing, with 58% of manufacturing companies making moderate to extreme changes to their content marketing strategies.

Creating a content strategy that reaches buyers at each stage of the buyer’s journey is critical to success in today’s market. 78% of brands that were successful with their content in 2021 had a documented content marketing strategy in place.

When creating content, design pieces specifically for your target audience or buyer personas. Persona-based marketing helps you define your customer in detail, understanding their needs and what drives them to buy. And, as you plan out content, ask yourself how each piece provides value to the buyer at their particular stage in the journey. 

Additionally, consider using a mix of content types to reach buyers at various stages in their journey. Some popular content formats include:

• Blog posts
• eBooks and guides
• Videos
• Webinars
• Infographics

Trend #4: Using Way More Video for Marketing

In the U.S., adults spend an average of 3.5 hours per day watching videos, and many of us watch videos as part of the B2B discovery and buying process. Yes, even in manufacturing. Video marketing is more important than ever. It’s just how we like to see content now. And, manufacturing companies can use video to grow revenue faster than ever before.

There are a number of ways to use video for marketing, including:

• Product demonstration videos
• Customer testimonial videos
• Educational videos (such as how-tos that don’t relate specifically, or only, to your products)
• Company culture videos (like PR around social good initiatives)

Video is an effective way to reach buyers, because it’s a highly engaging format that can be consumed in a short amount of time. It is also versatile and can be used across multiple channels, such as social media, email marketing, and website content.

Most marketers feel that video is a brilliant investment for lead generation. 86% of video marketers say video has been effective for generating leads, up another 2% from 2021 and up 5% since 2019.

Video marketing is also a great way to show your company process and what makes you different from competitors. 94% of marketers agree that videos have helped increase user understanding of their product or service, which is great for manufacturers who historically needed in-person efforts to be successful.

Trend #5: Using Marketing Automation to Scale and Win

The pandemic has forced businesses to automate their marketing efforts at a faster rate than ever before. And, to be clear, marketing automation doesn’t just mean making marketing more “automatic.” It means scaling personalized, segmented marketing efforts in a way you just cannot do manually. Look into marketing automation for better: 

• Personalization
• Segmentation
• Automated Nurturing
• Lead Scoring
• Data

The benefits of marketing automation within the manufacturing industry encompass more than efficiency and sales productivity, it also includes increased lead generation—a goal for 61% of marketers.

Marketing automation is an important tool for manufacturers because it helps you scale marketing efforts without sacrificing quality. It also frees up time so that marketing teams can focus on other tasks, such as strategy and creating new content.

Invest in the Future of Manufacturing Marketing

Marketing in today’s manufacturing environment means finding unique ways to promote your business and generate new leads. It also means staying ahead of the competition by taking advantage of emerging manufacturing marketing trends.Even though each manufacturer is unique, knowing what works and what doesn’t in your sector is vital. If you’re not sure where to start, get our Ultimate Guide to Manufacturing Marketing for the A to Z on your best possible approach. If you’re already familiar with a lot of the techniques we’ve covered here, try the more advanced Manufacturer’s Guide to Data-Driven Marketing. Invest in your future by implementing some new ideas and following the most important trends in manufacturing marketing.

The first step, according to Matt Chilton, Founder of the manufacturing marketing media company Zenoot, is to do a content audit to understand what you have and what you must produce to meet your customers at the right time with the content they need to move through your sales process. 

Jason Cort, European Director Product Management & Marketing at Sharp Europe adds that content is the most agile way to meet rapidly shifting market demands.

Watch these four short video clips to get advice on:

• Making the content
• Executing the content
• Getting attention
• Gathering Data
• Analyzing that data and making pivots

B2B Content and the Manufacturing Buyer’s Journey

Zenoot Founder Matt Chilton explains that B2B buyers in the manufacturing industry consume an average of 13 pieces of content before making a decision. Not only do marketers have to produce enough content to keep up with that, they also have to understand the performance of that content at every stage. The only way to do that effectively is marketing automation. 

Content is the Most Agile Marketing Tactic for Manufacturers

Jason Cort, European Director Product Management & Marketing at Sharp Europe, explains why manufacturing marketers should lean hard into content. In a word, it’s agility. Whereas large, expensive advertising campaigns are often set months in advance and end up being rigid in many cases, content marketing can quickly pivot to meet emerging needs, or try exciting ideas. 

Planning Your Best Manufacturing Marketing Content

The first step toward planning your best manufacturing marketing content is to understand what you currently have that connects with your buyer personas. Knowing what you have and what is working provides the basis for planning what to create next. Additionally, look at what has inspired you recently. Where have you been motivated to give up your details to get a piece of content? Use that as a map to what you can create for your own manufacturing business.  

Pro Tip: Jason Cort’s favorite, most effective content type is case studies. So, if you are stuck on choosing the best path forward, start by telling the success stories of your most valued customers. 

Using Marketing Automation to Produce the Evidence-Based Stories Your Customers Need

Matt Chilton says we’d all be rich if we could truly target the exact right person at the exact right time. In reality, we can approximate the best content to send at the best time, and build relationships over time. Manufacturing marketing is all about telling the right, evidence-based stories backed up with marketing automation data.

Marketing Automation Delivers Brand Consistency

Most manufacturing marketers already understand the importance of brand and reputation. Even when it comes to seemingly small things like how your logo is used, brand consistency is incredibly important to making a good impression on your target market. 

Creating a brand guide is a good first step toward getting it right with logos, color use and button styles, but you’ve got to take it a step further to create and implement templates for emails, landing pages, forms, social content, blogs, eBooks and other marketing materials. The only way to do that effectively is with a marketing automation platform. 

Especially when working with a network of dealers, distributors or other partners, maintaining brand consistency is a top-of-mind concern. And, you can meet that need by building a functioning brand system and distributing it through a marketing automation network to your channel partners.

Marketing Automation Helps You Go Way Beyond Email

A huge part of marketing automation’s value for manufacturers is its ability to help you go way beyond email with your marketing campaigns. More than ever, your potential customers are expecting personalized, multi-channel engagement from your company, no matter what type of products you make or services you provide. You’ve got to engage across marketing channels, and have a system for tracking and scoring what people do with your content on all those channels. At its core, a marketing automation platform helps manufacturers scale the lead generation and nurture process and pass the most qualified possible leads to your sales team. 

Using features like automated customer journey building, lead scoring and campaign reporting allows manufacturing marketers just like you to step away from the batch-and-blast, and evolve toward the type of marketing your customers have come to expect.

What is a Marketing Automation Network?

Organizations that have multiple brands, numerous lines of business, distribution and dealer networks, franchises, or other partners have a bigger marketing challenge on their hands. One way to maintain consistency and make big impacts is to think of your partners as a marketing network. 

Imagine your corporate brand or main organization in control of a centralized hub for your channel partners to pull messaging, marketing campaigns, email templates, and offers to create a consistent brand experience, and move your metrics on lead generation and nurturing across your marketing channels. This is called a marketing automation network, or marketing network. 

A powerful marketing automation platform with parent-child account capabilities can create operational efficiencies and develop a center of excellence that powers your marketing network. By establishing a single origin for digital marketing efforts, manufacturers can easily track what is and isn’t working, which allows marketing teams to optimize their marketing program spend, and the OEM or parent manufacturing organization can make strategy pivots rooted in data.

How a Marketing Automation Network Helps Your Partners Succeed

It’s often the case that the bigger a company gets, the more removed it gets from its end consumer. That can be a real concern for brands that work through distributors, resellers and dealers (aka partners). By adopting a marketing automation platform, brands can empower their network to drive results with sales and marketing efforts that align with the brand’s message, and make sense in the context of the prospect’s journey. 

Rather than recreating the wheel at every turn, a franchisee, dealer, or other sales partner can leverage better information at the corporate level, whether that’s through sharing best practices, or taking part in the same branded campaigns. By capturing more insights about the end users, brands can better understand results and insights and feed those learnings back into their network – a real win-win.

Additionally, a marketing automation network increases accountability and operational efficiency, provides performance visibility, and helps drive “last-mile” sales performance through partners.

How Does a Marketing Automation Network … Work?

It would be easy to think that once a brand has reached the level of having other people resell or distribute their products that it’s “made it.” In the manufacturing world, many companies think their channel partners should “own” direct customer marketing and demand generation, but this is a short-sighted approach at best. When a brand can put the appropriate resources and guardrails in place, it can actually help resellers and dealers in a better position to increase volume and deal size. 

Keep in mind that smaller businesses often have smaller budgets and fewer resources, and many of the businesses in your channel partner network may need help with content and other marketing resources in order to really meet the collective sales goals. 

From a functional standpoint, a marketing network allows manufacturers to: 

• Create or remove managed accounts
• Assign or reassign account managers (as well as change managers’ access to sub-accounts)
• Configure sharing settings of marketing assets, including forms, landing pages, automated programs, and email with managed accounts

Operating a marketing automation network with shared and managed accounts helps you accelerate your channel partners’ adoption and use of marketing automation to improve business performance. In this universe of information sharing, manufacturers can control their branding, content, offers and product information, and channel partners can use it to their best advantage. 

Act-On Powers Your Marketing Automation Network

It seems like marketers are always asked to do more with the same resources, and it’s obvious that you need to find a way to make technology work for you. Marketing automation is the answer for manufacturers looking to optimize marketing spend while effectively guiding and supporting their entire network of channel partners. Act-On’s multi-tier capability is the answer for many large manufacturing companies who use it to engage in the best practices that make it possible to continue to grow well.

Pay Attention to Your Database

Databases have a reputation as soulless repositories of personal information, but “collecting data isn’t the goal. It’s a means to a specific end. The real opportunity is customer intimacy.”  

The truth is, your database is the only way to get to know what your customer cares about and find out exactly where they hope to go. That’s what makes it the launching point for your manufacturing marketing plan. To gain deep customer insights, manufacturing marketers need to keep a clean database, so the information is accurate and centralized. This starts with managing and updating email lists frequently throughout the year to ensure consistent deliverability.

Since up to 30% of email addresses are either deactivated or changed every year, it’s vital to know who is active in your list. Otherwise, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) decide who receives your messages. ISPs use sensors and spam traps like bouncers at the gate, rejecting even valid email addresses as low-quality or unwanted based on their inactivity.  

Improve Your Email Deliverability

When you have a clean, updated database, you can start to look at email deliverability. You can get the best possible email delivery rates and keep pace with manufacturing marketing trends by:

• Validating your email addresses with a list verification service to prevent hard bounces. Act-On has an effective integration with Neverbounce that cleans lists up, so you hit the inbox consistently.
• Leaning on real-time validation services to prevent bad addresses from getting on your lists. Act-On partners with Webbula to compare your email marketing lists to a historical database of known traps, reputation threats, and other delivery hazards.
• Minimizing spam complaints by making it easy to opt-out from your email list and ensuring the relevancy and frequency of your content matches the recipients’ expectations.

Plan and Create Relevant Content

Relevancy and curated content are where the rule of one comes in handy for your manufacturing marketing plan, because of all your customers, “62% prefer to interact with content that’s heavily research-based and tailored to their specific needs.” Remember, your content is consumed by one person, not a group. The best way to build the messages they, as individuals, want to hear, is to let a best-in-class marketing automation software solution to do the heavy lifting of…

●      research

●      reporting

●      distribution

●      lead generation

●      and data collection

…as well as segmentation, so you can focus on each component of lead nurturing. 

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your audience at every stage of their buying process, which is vital to your manufacturing marketing strategy because only 27% of B2B leads are ready for sales when first generated by marketing. To convert, you need to deliver the right kinds of content – segmented by demographic and behavioral data – at the right time. 

Since you’re in multiple relationships with leads and customers ­­­- each at a different stage – a message’s relevance is based on who you’re talking to, what they want and how long you’ve known them. Segmenting your lists allows you to send exactly what they want to hear exactly when they need to hear it. For example, a technical-minded message may resonate with an engineer but fail to connect with the COO. Two different people with two different worldviews and priorities demand two different, distinctly relevant pieces of manufacturing marketing content.  

Segmentation as a practice also provides the agility you need to respond to the manufacturing industry’s ever-changing market demands.  

Seize the Benefits of Marketing Automation Software 

Now that you can find your way to the rule of one, keep in mind context varies. The 21^st century means you’re a multi-channel marketer, adept at creating the messages your manufacturing customers want to hear through websites, landing pages, social media marketing, and (personalized) email automation. That’s a lot for anyone to handle, which is why it’s important to take advantage of manufacturing marketing trends like marketing automation software and make it the foundation of your manufacturing marketing strategy.   

The right software solution is your marketing concierge, armed with tools and analytics to help you enhance customer experience, increase engagement, collect in-depth information to interpret target audience behaviors, and deliver exceptional buyer journeys that nurture long-lasting customer relationships. Additionally, many manufacturing marketers are still taking their first steps toward using marketing automation software. If your organization is on the fence about implementing new solutions, consider the opportunity to gain a significant advantage over the competition by adopting a marketing automation platform.

Sharp Europe, for example, made marketing automation software the cornerstone of their marketing plan for manufacturing. It helps Sharp to execute marketing efforts across a broad and diverse B2B audience, unite distributed teams, and effectively manage inbound demand generation, lead nurturing, and segmentation – all while adhering to the rule of one.    

Stay Human and Implement Manufacturing Marketing Best Practices for Continued Success 

There are lots of leads out there, but you can only talk to one at a time, not business-to-business, but human-to-human, which may be one of the most important manufacturing marketing tips. Because reaching for the rule of one, with help from a robust marketing automation platform, means you can make the message matter.

What is Persona-Based Marketing?

A buyer persona is a representation of a real person with the decision-making power to engage your manufacturing services. And, the more detail you can build into your buyer persona, the better. That’s because you want to imagine a real person, with details like gender, age, job title, geography, family structure, likes, dislikes and needs. If you can better connect with a multi-dimensional persona, you can better structure your marketing programs to meet them where they are and provide the value they need to trust your business.

Persona-based marketing starts with a simple question. “What does this specific person need to see and hear in order to trust my company enough to be ready to buy?” At the most basic level, your manufacturing customer needs to know your company can solve their problem. They want to know you’ve done it for other customers. They want to know they can trust you. In order to go deeper than that, you need to build out deeper buyer personas.  

Buyer Persona Basics for Manufacturers

To better understand your ideal customer, start with market research around wholesalers, distributors and end-users of the products or components you sell. It’s important to think about the people who will make decisions about working with you, and not focus only on the products and services you need to sell. 

For example, if you make specific plastic components used in automobiles, medical equipment, and construction, your product might be the same across the three, but your buyer personas are very different. Each industry will have different goals, challenges, and needs that you can use to segment your marketing programs.

If you’re already successful in manufacturing, you can supplement your market research with real data about your best customers. Oftentimes, working backwards from a customer you already have and building a persona that helps you to attract more of that type of customer is a great way to grow. 

Buyer Persona Components

There are four main aspects to consider when building your buyer personas: demographics, behaviors, psychology and emotion. Again, the more detailed you get, the deeper your understanding, and the more likely your content and marketing programs are to hit the mark and generate business. Let’s explore the most important components of buyer personas. 

Demographic Traits

• Gender / Gender Identity
• Age Range
• Income Level 
• Occupation / Job Title
• Location 

Behavioral Traits

• Interests 
• Hobbies 
• Lifestyle 
• Watering Holes

Psychological Traits

• Attitudes 
• Preferences
• Desires 
• Needs 

Emotional Traits

• Emotions 
• Values 
• Preferences 
• Motivations

When deciding which type of buyer persona to create and which persona attributes are important, focus on the goals of your business and your marketing programs. In the B2B manufacturing marketing context, for example, business needs and behaviors will be more important than emotional needs. 

How to Create Buyer Personas for Your Manufacturing Business

 When creating a buyer persona, there are four main steps:

1. Identify and Research the Target Audience

To start off, identify who your target audience is going to be. 

If you don’t have any idea who they are yet, you should conduct some market research. 

Market research involves asking questions such as:

• “Who are our current customers?”
• “What does our competition look like?”
• ”Where can I find more information about them?”

Once you have identified your target audience, you will want to make sure you research everything about them thoroughly. You need to understand the details behind what makes your target audience your target audience.

2. Narrow it Down to the Common Details Between the Audience Members

Once you have identified your target audience, you now need to focus on the overlapping details between the members. Make sure to include any details that affect how you communicate with your target audience, like the websites they frequent, or the thought leaders they follow.

3. Create Separate Buyer Personas Based on Common Details

People who have similar interests or challenges should be grouped together. This helps you create content that resonates with each persona. Make sure each buyer persona you create includes their goals, challenges, motivations, personality traits, and demographics.

4. Name Each Persona and Give Them a Backstory

You should always assign names to your persona when creating with them. This helps you remember you’re talking to an actual human, and allows you to empathize better. 

Creating a story about your customer’s life will help you understand their situation more deeply, and create the type of automated manufacturing marketing programs that draw them to your company.

In B2B marketing for manufacturing, it is important to format the persona in a way that gives you the most knowledge of their responsibilities and job role, what success is to them, and every step of their purchase and decision-making process.

The Importance of Persona-Based Marketing for Manufacturing

By building detailed buyer personas, manufacturing marketers are able to improve understanding of the target audience. That is the key to providing value. When you know exactly who you’re trying to reach and what they want, you can serve up the content that nurtures them into becoming your best customer. Let’s review some of the benefits of persona-based marketing for manufacturers.

Improved Targeting

Creating buyer personas means that you know your target audience inside and out. So when it comes to marketing, you can be more targeted in your efforts and reach those who actually care about your product or service. 

Increased Personalization

The more personalized your marketing campaign, the better. Persona-based marketing allows for increased personalization since you know exactly who your audience is and what they want from you.

Lead Prioritization

When your persona-based marketing campaign brings in thousands of leads, you will know exactly which leads to score the highest and which to prioritize. The most successful manufacturing marketing teams use lead scoring to prioritize the leads that most closely mirror the buyer personas.

Overcome Customer Pain Points

Part of the buyer persona process is to identify any challenges (or pain points) your customers may experience. You can then solve for these problems by providing the products and manufacturing services that address these issues. 

Awareness of Negative Buyer Personas

Creating an ideal buyer persona means you are also aware of any potentially negative buyer personas. This doesn’t mean negative in the colloquial sense, but rather the traits that commonly indicate a bad-fit lead. You can then filter out leads that match these negative traits, freeing up your sales team to focus on the right contacts. 

More Effective Content

Creating effective manufacturing marketing content begins and ends with providing value. That means understanding what your audience needs, and providing it in a format they want. By engaging in persona-based marketing for manufacturers, you can craft content that actually leads to higher conversion rates. 

How to Implement Persona-Based Marketing for Your Manufacturing Business

Unfortunately, knowing about persona-based marketing is only the first step. Actually implementing it in your manufacturing business can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s go over some easy tips that will help you create the most effective persona-based manufacturing marketing campaign.

Begin With One Persona

As a manufacturing company, you may have personas relating to many different customer types. It can feel intimidating to try and work out what to say and where to say it when you have multiple targets. You may want to build out persona-based marketing campaigns for engineers, buyers, production managers or operations managers. And you may even want to target those types of customers across different industry verticals. The key here is to begin with just one choice and go for it. 

Use a Persona Template

A persona template is a document used to capture the key characteristics of each individual persona. Rather than starting from scratch, you can use this document to build out your persona-based marketing strategy. The more information you have about your customers, the better able you’ll be at targeting them effectively.

Create Customer Journey Maps

To create an effective person-based marketing campaign, you need to understand the entire customer journey, from initial interest through to post-purchase. Creating a customer journey map allows you to visualize this buying process and see where potential opportunities exist. Knowing your customer’s journey inside and out could even help you set up an affiliate marketing strategy that complements your persona-based campaign.

Persona-Based Marketing Results in Growth for Manufacturers

Continually Update Your Personas

As your company grows and your products or services change, so do your customers. Make sure you’re checking in consistently to keep your buyer personas updated. Set a schedule for yourself to analyze, compare, and test your buyer personas throughout your manufacturing company’s lifetime.

Match Your Marketing Efforts to Your Personas

There is no point in creating these personas, if they do not end up inspiring and informing your marketing efforts. Everything you do to market your manufacturing company and its products has to start with your ideal customer persona. Your personas will inform your messaging, channels, content types, pace of communication, and so much more. 

Create Content to Address Pain Points

Make sure your marketing content addresses any challenges flagged when creating your buyer persona. You need to show your ideal customers that your manufacturing company provides the solution they are looking for.

Be As Personalized As Possible

Everybody wants to feel special, which is why personalized marketing works so well. If you can personalize your messaging, then you’re much more likely to get conversions. Persona-based marketing can be very powerful because you can make sure that every message you send is tailored to the right audience and served on the right channel at the right time. 

Why Persona-Based Marketing for Manufacturers Works

As you’ve read throughout this entire article, personalization is absolutely expected by any consumer today – including B2B customers of manufacturing businesses like yours. In order to reach for customers that want you to know and understand them, you need to try and actually know and understand them. And that, friend, starts with personas.