Digital marketing is an essential tool for success in the modern business landscape, and it’s especially important for manufacturers.
As a manufacturer, you need to understand how to use digital marketing effectively to reach your target customers and grow your business. That’s why we at SnellMedia have put together this guide on B2B digital marketing specifically designed for manufacturers.
With the vast majority of buyers making their purchase decisions online, digital marketing allows manufacturing and automation brands to position themselves in front of these prospective customers at all stages of the buyer's journey.
When formulating a strategy, the essential element to success is comprehending your target market and molding accordingly. By creating relevant content that connects directly to your ideal customer persona, you can gain an advantage over competitors online while also amplifying brand visibility.
Strategic digital marketing can not only cultivate a powerful brand identity, but also drive new leads into your sales funnel and exponentially increase ROI. If you're aiming to amplify the reach of your business, then look no further than this modern form of advertising!
Although some manufacturers are hesitant to partner with marketing agencies, the truth is that digital marketing experts can bring a wealth of valuable insight and strategy to any company, especially when it comes to lead generation. With the assistance of a marketing agency, you can create campaigns customized to your unique needs and target market.
First and foremost, marketing firms bring a great level of expertise. A marketing agency has the resources and know-how to create campaigns that are tailored to your business’s specific needs—including the ability to analyze data quickly, identify target markets and segment audiences, as well as develop effective calls-to-action.
In addition, with a team of digital marketing experts on board, you can rest assured knowing that you don't have to manage every aspect of your digital ad campaigns yourself. From copywriting and graphic design to content creation and analytics tracking, an experienced firm will be able to handle all these tasks for you efficiently and effectively.
Here’s a few manufacturing-focused agencies that we recommend:
Digital marketing in B2B includes identifying ideal customers, tracking goals, maximising online experience, and acquiring high-quality leads to your sales funnel. Digital marketing firms for manufacturers shape high-performing campaigns that connect with niche audiences and drive quality leads to your sales team.
If you feel overwhelmed by the ins and outs of sales acquisition via digital marketing, be sure to keep reading. This article will give you all the tools and tips needed to get your in-house team started on your inbound marketing efforts.
Within the manufacturing sector, the best marketing agencies will incorporate the following strategies:
Who we are: With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, Manufacturing Automation and Healthtech. Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.
For your marketing efforts to be successful, any of the B2B marketing firms for manufacturers you’ll choose to outsource marketing activities to should provide strategies more substantial than sporadic posts on social media. Instead, you need a proven effective strategy that is executed consistently, taking into account both individual channels and cohesive messages across each of those channels.
Also, there’s a need to focus on forming connections with audiences for whom you can solve problems and provide solutions, with content that is tailored to offering value propositions specifically for that audience; i.e., Inbound marketing (and lead generation). The intention with inbound lead generation is to attract business rather than initiating contact yourself.
As a whole, inbound marketing is an effective strategy centered around producing educational content that appeals to your ideal audience.Marketing firms that adopt this strategy in their services allow your business to gain credibility with potential customers as an adroit market supplier. Then, you can attract those potential customers to your website, where they can learn more about the products and/or services you offer.
When implementing an inbound marketing strategy, it is important to keep up with trends within the digital sphere. Truth is, print and television ads are quickly losing popularity, and the most popular advertising and marketing formats are now found online.
There are several ways for you to create and promote educational content that resonates with and provides solutions for your ideal audience, for instance:
Below, you’ll find a breakdown of inbound marketing content, as well as some additional online marketing strategies that have proven effective in the digital marketing world:
Content marketing includes several of the items listed in the previous section, i.e., blog posts, e-books, and other informative content for your potential customers to consume. To successfully apply content marketing, there are two practices you need to master:
You may think that having a social media presence is only for B2C marketing, but if you allow that belief to deter you from the world of social media for your business, you will undeniably be missing out. Not only that, your competition will likely defeat you.
Unlike traditional advertising and business acquisition tactics, social media allows you to interact with and listen to your customers' feedback. It is also an important resource that your customers will look for to learn more about your brand, ask questions, leave reviews, and share experiences with others. To maximise your lead generation, It is crucial to show up where your customers are, and your B2B clients can inarguably be found on social media.
Social Media takes up more space in our lives every year. To address that, make sure you’re on top of the trends associated with this digital powerhouse. Not sure what we’re talking about? Head over to our latest social media marketing trends.
A major benefit of publishing content and promoting it on social media is that it has a significantly greater reach beyond other efforts. This is because your followers and others interested in the article can share it with their friends and followers with a simple screen touch. With frequent posting, you can remain top-of-mind for your audience members.
However, social media content can also be very time-limited in terms of remaining relevant, so unless it achieves a lot of engagement within the first 24 hours, it will stop showing up on the timelines of your followers. This is why having a blog optimized for search engine ranking is also important in addition to your social media presence as your blog content will be discoverable for months and even years after publishing. Checkmate.
There are many options to choose from when it comes to online ads. Every search engine and social media platform, including Google, Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest, offers options for purchasing ads on their platforms and sites, none of which are complicated to apply to your digital marketing strategy.
The best part of online ads is that they can be optimized based on location, age, and interests to effectively target your ideal customer. Based on the platform, the demographics or firmographics you can target are highly beneficial in making sure you only serve ads to prospective customers, keeping down click payments, and maximising conversions. The more niched you get, the more likely you are to approach and convert high-quality leads.
Remarketing ads are a type of online ad that will appear in front of individuals who have visited your website or researched your products. These types of ads will remind customers who have previously engaged with your brand or products, to revisit the site and make a purchase. Remarketing is an ideal part of keeping up brand awareness in your market.
However, you have to be careful not to use these types of ads too often, as some customers will find them exhausting, resulting in a negative view of your business.
Every marketing firm for manufacturers will agree that it is critical for B2Bs today to have an online presence. If you aren’t taking advantage of the many different online marketing opportunities for your business, you are inarguably losing clients to other manufacturing companies that are effectively taking advantage of the online world of sales and marketing. Even manufacturing buyers are online today, and more and more are using companies’ online presence as a vital aspect in purchasing decisions.
In today’s world, online platforms are the first place that your customers will look to learn more about your business, whether they find your website, your blog, or your social media accounts. You can effectively build trust by making information about your business and its products easily accessible in various places online. The reality of today is that millennials are becoming more and more influential in corporational decision-making, if not already becoming the authority, and this generation relies on the digital world.
So you should too.
Traditionally, manufacturing businesses have housed a sales department dedicated to connecting with potential clients, generating leads, which turn into sales, and then into repeat sales. Many marketing agencies, especially for those who serve high technical industries like the manufacturing industry, experience that their clients still believe that digital marketing is only for B2C companies and that it is not a strategy that should be used for businesses trying to reach and sell their products to business clients.
However, it doesn’t look like the progression of the digital age is slowing down anytime soon. Now, everyone is online, which means any business can find its ideal audience through digital marketing, whether that audience includes businesses, customers, or both. With that, manufacturers must transition to online marketing or implement a digital marketing strategy in addition to the efforts of the sales department.
Another factor that deters manufacturing businesses from pursuing digital marketing strategies is their budget. Some digital marketing software does come with a steep price tag, but many online tools are available for free or at a very low cost. In a monetary aspect, the truth is that the digital marketing world is versatile and flexible and there are ways for any business, regardless of budget, to build some kind of digital marketing campaign.
If you’re new to digital marketing, it is certainly best to begin with cheaper tools and then venture into more expensive options once you begin seeing leads and sales generated from your digital marketing strategy. You’ll find many free and affordable tools mentioned below.
Digital marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. Yet, with dedication and structure, you’ll be able to build a hyper-performing, well-formulated strategy making use of this simple and effective step-by-step guide to digital marketing success for manufacturing companies.
To understand the need for a digital marketing strategy and how to meet your customer online in a way that is most relevant to them, you first need to understand the industrial buyer journey that your customers will most likely be navigating through.
At any step, you must put your best foot forward to prove that you outrank your competitors. This includes gaining credibility, providing customers with the information they need through your content marketing, having an easy-to-navigate and updated website, and providing easy access to all your product’s most important details and specifications. The most important task is to make sure that there are no buyer journey disruptions.
Any digital marketing strategy will be ineffective if not targeted at the right audience. So, the next step in creating a marketing plan is to pinpoint the exact ideal customer you’d like to reach based on high-value demographic and firmographic segmentation.
Many businesses identify their ideal customer by creating buyer personas. This is a semi-fictional character that a business creates to provide a more tangible representation of the person that the business is trying to target. Here are some factors to think about when creating your buyer persona:
You may have more than one type of customer you’d like to reach, and you can create multiple customer personas—and specialized marketing strategies—for each one.
As a B2B company, there is also an opportunity in creating ICPs (ideal customer profiles) and pinpoint valuable firmographics relating to the type of account you wish to work with. Focusing on the company characteristics means setting up an account-based marketing campaign, a campaign strategy that has a 70% B2B popularity in 2023.
Follow the link in the paragraph above to discover the unleashed potential of targeting high-value accounts and boosting your account-based revenue.
Understanding your customers and their buyer journey is just the beginning of creating an effective marketing plan. Marketing is often experimental, and you may need to test a few different strategies to find the one that works for your business. Most importantly, the strategy you create and follow through should be aligned with your marketing goals and overall business objectives.
Any experiment requires quantifiable results, so you must set specific goals for your marketing strategy that are both reasonable and measurable within a given period. Here are some details that you can figure out with the help of a marketing agency for the manufacturing industry before implementing a marketing strategy:
Once you’ve identified your ideal customer and established clear, quantifiable goals, the next step is to decide which strategies to implement and plan them accordingly. Identifying your ideal customer will allow you to choose the campaigns that will reach them most effectively based on their roles and demographics.
These are some popular types of campaigns that manufacturers can use to reach their customers successfully on digital channels:
As a manufacturing company, your primary goal should be to have a steady influx of quality leads. Naturally, all investments in your marketing have the overarching goal to transition high-quality leads into paying (and even better, returning) customers.
When it comes to inbound lead generation, it’s important to make sure that lead-gen elements are brought into your marketing initiatives in an effort to leverage all marketing as a magnet for attracting prospects and means for bringing leads into a sales pipeline. This means ensuring consistent attention to the sales opportunities rooted in content marketing, email outreach, account-based marketing, and SEO or PPC campaigns.
Let’s talk about inbound lead-gen in a few examples:
The best way to manifest the purpose of acquiring quality leads is to create valuable content that answers the questions your buyers frequently ask. By becoming an ultimate resource with content that’s optimised to appear in search results, B2Bs have an incredible opportunity to attract leads and move them into a buyer journey.
The best content on the SERP targets the audience’s search intent, which is a key element in securing new business. Use our search intent article as a knowledge base to make sure you’re targeting the right intent that leads to sales.
Email marketing is proof that a winning concept can stay on top for a long time. This lead generation tactic remains a preferred method for businesses in B2B looking to attract new customers, and we understand why. One of the chief reasons for email marketing holding significant favor with B2B marketing teams is that this tactic has a high potential for building rapport and creating ongoing conversations.
Looking to make email your main lead-generating tool? Then follow these Email Marketing Best Practices to transform that goal into your reality.
We assure you, there will be prospects out there that are inevitable ideal matches for your company. Once you connect with them, prioritising them with ABM tactics allows you to secure top deals which in turn will significantly boost your business.
Uniting lead generation and ABM, the process goes like this: lead generation draws in the numbers, and ABM qualifies and targets those leads before you market to them. If you’re not familiar with Account-based marketing, check out the third trend in our breakdown of current digital marketing trends.
With paid campaigns, you have a unique opportunity to reach farther than most organic marketing initiatives. It’s money out of your pocket, granted, but if done right, it’s also abounding money poured straight back into your sales funnel.
By targeting keywords with transactional intent and setting up proper tracking, you’ll be able to send high-quality leads to a landing page with a compelling offer that stimulates the lead to take action.
Do you want to ensure your lead generation efforts pay off? Here’s one tip: Never, ever disregard the sway referrals have in B2B buyers deciding to make a purchase. Case studies are powerful, promotional mechanisms in the B2B buying journey and affirmative testimonials even have the power to cut the buying journey short. Leveraging existing business relationships to create brand advocates will lead to an improved reputation, with the potential to drive larger numbers of leads your way.
Pro tip: Ask your current clients if they know any business looking for services or products like the ones you offer.
When considering the amount of work to be done to maintain a robust and consistent marketing strategy, it may seem like a full-time job that will not be worth that amount of effort. You do have other important responsibilities within your manufacturing business, after all.
Luckily, technology has allowed the creation of many useful systems to automate your marketing strategy. This will allow you to plan campaigns and content and schedule them in advance. The system will then post your content on social media, send messages and emails, and publish blog posts automatically; this will save you time and make it much easier to execute a consistent marketing strategy.
These are some of the most popular digital tools for planning and scheduling content and advertising campaigns:
Another way that technology can work for you is by analyzing the success of your website and social media. Like the analytics mentioned previously offered by email marketing software, social media business accounts on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, will offer basic analytics on your social media posts, including the number of views and the rate of engagement with your post. This data is gold for understanding what works and what doesn’t, inevitably providing you with insights on the direction to move forward.
Google also offers several free tools to analyze your website’s performance and traffic:
In 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) has established itself as a fundamental part of digital marketing. AI-powered tools like chatbots are being used to quickly respond to customer inquiries 24/7 and lookalike audiences are making targeted marketing strategies more effective.
AI is also being used to analyze data faster and streamline routine tasks, making it easier for businesses to access useful insights. With these capabilities, AI is taking the modern marketing landscape by storm and allowing marketers to create campaigns that better reflect customer needs and preferences.
Using artificial intelligence in digital marketing provides numerous benefits that can boost the success of a campaign. Here's a list of 5 benefits if using AI for your digital marketing:
For your digital marketing, there are several ways that you can apply machine learning and AI, it can even be used as a strategy on its own. AI has the potential to revolutionize digital marketing and make campaigns more effective than ever before. Therefore, it is important for businesses to consider using AI to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced environment.
Utilizing AI will help you better tailor your marketing efforts to improve customer engagement and maximize ROI. Through leveraging analytics and data-driven insights, AI will give you a competitive edge in digital marketing for years to come!
As mentioned above, inbound marketing strategies, such as creating educational content, are a great way to meet your customers where they are. In the end, your customers will be conducting research, so a great way to provide them with an excellent customer experience is to meet them halfway and provide them with the valuable information they need.
However, it can be very tempting for companies and businesses with blogs to use this platform as a selling tool all of the time. If the sole purpose of your blog posts is to convince your customer to buy your product, your content will no longer be valuable to your customer, especially a potential customer that is brand new to your company.
Targeting superior customer experience is a must. In creating the best path for you, head over to our article on customer experience tactics, to get a head start on becoming a CX mogul, and building loyal customer relationships.
The key to a great customer experience when implementing a digital marketing strategy is to actually care about your customers’ needs. Providing them with the information they need, rather than simply pushing your own product, will show them that you have their best interests in mind, rather than only caring about selling. Becoming the solution provider for niche specific customers, is the most powerful way to beat competition and win business.
Because your goal is to generate sales and leads, there is still a place within your content to promote and provide information on your own products and services. This type of content should be directed towards customers with whom you’ve already gained credibility and built a relational foundation. Here are some examples of content to provide after you’ve built up customer relations:
Omnichannel marketing simply means integrating all of your different marketing strategies to maintain a unified voice and brand image that will be recognizable by your customers every time. This provides your customer with a more positive experience by giving them a consistent portrayal of your business across all of your platforms.
The ideal digital marketing strategy moves customers forward in the buyer journey. It offers the option of smooth transitions and consistent conversations across channels, making customers’ buying decisions easier and feel better. There is a need for businesses to make certain that their marketing strategy is following a customer-centric approach where connections with customers are focused on them and their individual needs.
The ease and convenience of omnichannel marketing is a surefire way to improve the customers’ experience as well as your brand reputation.
Once you’ve completed all of the above steps, you will have figured out all of the important details to include in your strategy as well as the goals needed to achieve in your ideal marketing performance. So, now is the time to start implementing that strategy you’ve planned by creating content and getting it in front of your customers. Being visible to your clients is key, and we help build content for businesses in manufacturing and SaaS. Regarless of the niche you're in, a B2B marketing strategy is never complete without the content pillar.
When you start publishing content, it is important to remember that your content will be different from other businesses' content. This is because you are implementing B2B marketing rather than B2C. Your content must be more specialized and appeal to specific businesses rather than consumers in the general public.
Don’t freight though, because this is an opportunity to stand out. Make sure to focus on your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, and let Google’s algorithm pick up on how your unique content is superior to existing material on the SERP. With all of your content, make sure your goal is to provide the ultimate resource and solution to customers’ queries.
When implementing your marketing strategy, it is important that you don’t lose focus on the buyer persona that you created in Step 2. Ensure that you are reviewing the analytics and statistics of your content mentioned in Step 5 to evaluate whether you are effectively reaching your ideal customer and engaging them with your content.
If you find that you aren’t meeting your goals and targets, maintaining focus on your target audience will allow you to shift your strategies and consequently improve leads and sales.
As B2B buyers often search for consistent suppliers to create a business relationship with, the buyers have a high demand for personal connections. Make sure your content makes audience members feel that you speak to them directly, and they will listen.
All of the traffic from your marketing campaigns is being directed to your website, so it is important to keep your site up-to-date. In addition to consistently creating content and keeping the information about your business accurate, your web design should also keep up with design trends.
Here are some signs that your website might need an update:
Here are some ways to update and improve your website’s design:
As mentioned earlier, tracking your analytics is a crucial part of effective marketing. Once you lose sight of your analytics, you will no longer measure the goals set in Step 3, meaning you will aimlessly produce and send out content with no sight of your ideal customers or measurable goals.
Marketing is not just a box that your business needs to check, but it is essential to your success and growth as a company. You must continue to evaluate, adapt, and update your online presence according to analytics to stay relevant and connect with buyers.
IN a general sense, digital marketing is important to all industries and markets. The world is transitioning more and more into a digital context, and online channels are inevitably part of purchasing decisions. Supplier websites, search engine searches and emails are now primary data sources for business buyers. Without a digital presence, even B2Bs and manufacturers will be affected and lose out on a lot of valuable business opportunities.
Social media is as important as any other digital marketing tactic. Customers in both B2C and B2B markets are on social media platforms, so without it, companies will miss out on several opportunities and business wins. 75% of B2B buyers apply social media in their purchasing decisions today. So if you haven't join the trend of B2B social media marketing yet, make that change today. Even more, according to LinkedIn, deals affected by marketing on LinkedIn are up to 161% larger than those established offline; in the boardroom, at the business lunch or at conferences.
Then again, we understand that everyone needs to put their time and effort into the tasks where they flourish most. For you, it's producing high-quality products or services for other businesses and marketing them in your sfere, for marketing firms for manufacturers, it's creating high-performing digital campaigns to get your products in the right hands.
With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, Manufacturing Automation and Healthtech. Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.
Our team loves new challenges and creating impactful marketing campaigns. If that is what you are looking for, don’t hesitate to make an appointment today.
