Digital marketing strategies are critical to manufacturers who want to reach today’s B2B buyer. Your buyers are smarter, more informed, and more impatient than ever. A good digital marketing strategy can deliver your message to the right people, at the right time, on the right platform.
Here are 4 reasons a digital marketing strategy is crucial for manufactures.
1.Manufacturing Buyers Are Digitally Savvy
Reports show that 94% of customers in the B2B market research online before they ever buy a product. If your customers can’t find you quick in a Google search, you’re missing out on potential business.
Accordingly, 82% of manufacturing companies who invested in digital marketing have reported increased success within the last year. Start understanding your buyers and the digital content they need by developing buyer personas and buyer’s journeys.
By defining buyer personas and their journey to becoming your customer, you can build a strategy that uses digital marketing tactics that your ideal buyers will see and engage with.
2. You Need Sales And Marketing Alignment
Without a strategy, you won’t have marketing and sales alignment. Without marketing and sales alignment, you’ll have a lot of finger pointing:
Sales: Where are our marketing qualified leads!?”
Marketing: We sent you hundreds of leads last month!”
Sales: “Those leads were all crap.”
Marketing: “You never follow up on what we give you, so why should we bother?”
Damn.
A clear marketing strategy can help support both teams get them aligned around shared goals. Start by creating a service level agreement to build clarity around those goals, then you can get everyone invested to support your marketing efforts.
Pro tip: Make sure you have the right people on your marketing team to carry out your strategy – use our checklist to help.
3. To Reach Specific Business Goals
Some manufacturers we know got started with marketing by dabbling in a few isolated tactics. They tried doing a podcast. Then they tried some Pay-Per-Click Campaigns. Then they wondered if any of it worked, or if it helped them reach their business goals.
Business owners who take a “tactics-first” approach end up with scattershot marketing that wastes time and money.
Take a strategy-first approach instead. Consider your goals, and build a plan around reaching them. Do the foundational work mentioned above (buyer personas, buyer’s journeys) and then decide on the best way to reach your customers. The tactics, or the ‘way you’ll get there’…will come last.
Pro Tip: Marketing teams can sometimes be bullied by leadership (or even sales) into using tactics they don’t believe in, but if they have a strategy they can easily justify why certain tactics shouldn’t be the priority.
4. Ensuring ROI From Your Marketing Program
This one is pretty simple: If you have a strategy, you’ll have goals, and if you measure against your goals…boom you can show results.
Starting with a strategy means focusing on a specific goal and planning to regularly track your progress. Use a CRM or marketing automation software to track leads brought in by your marketing tactics. If you’re using HubSpot you can even track influenced revenue from your marketing efforts.
It’s Time to Embrace Digital Marketing
Manufacturers who are ready to get serious about inbound marketing are often overwhelmed by all the ‘to-dos’ that go along with it. Like anything else, you’ll have to take a ‘one at a time’ approach.
Name your biggest business challenge that marketing can solve, and start there. For instance, if it’s leads your looking for…
…you should start by creating a few lead magnets, based on your personas, that address a specific problem that your business solves.
If you’re still not sure how to begin your marketing strategy, give us a call. We can do a quick marketing SWOT analysis of your current program and give you clear next steps to follow.
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