Struggling With Manufacturing Marketing? Use These 9 Strategies

Marketing can be a fun-filled career for many. That is until you are in a niche where landing new leads is a boring, snail-paced game. Something just has to give, so you try to find ways to inject life into your workflow again. Anything to improve business and cash inflow.

You know what they say — understand the customer so well that the product fits them and sells itself. Clearly, the secret sauce is not about screaming your brand name on every corner but about building a lasting relationship. This is the key to building a sustainable marketing strategy.

But how does this apply when you are marketing for manufacturers? That’s exactly what we are going to explore in this post.

Contents

• How do you make your manufacturing marketing strategy work?
• 9 best marketing strategies for manufacturing companies
• 1. Know what you want to achieve right off the bat
• 2. Learn about your target audience and build a relationship with them
• 3. Network at events and trade shows
• 4. Publish content that your audience appreciates
• 5. Make social media your friend (leverage it)
• 6. Invest in SEO
• 7. Take email marketing seriously
• 8. Consider using Google Ads
• 9. Give the podcast game a try
• Conclusion

How do you make your manufacturing marketing strategy work?

Let’s be honest for a moment. Many manufacturing businesses don’t prioritize marketing. Some don’t even have a digital marketing strategy for the manufacturing industry. And the ones that do often realize that their strategy doesn’t work as intended.

In fact, only 25% of manufacturers report that their company is highly successful with content marketing.

It means that three-quarters of manufacturing companies miss out on tons of potential leads and sales. So, the real question is — why don't most manufacturers succeed?

There can be several reasons for this. Usually, most problems come down to unorganized marketing campaigns, not enough funding, and, of course, no strategy.

For example, say you try to push your content marketing. It would be a smart move since most clients will read three to five pieces of content before they even engage with a business.

Yet, if your content doesn’t align with the specific needs of your target market, you won’t get any great results. Why? Because you aren’t reaching the right audience. That’s why your blog and other content must have a clear purpose.

Source: Procter & Gamble

We hear you asking — how do you make sure that your strategy actually works?

• You must first know your audience and what they want. This makes it easier to come up with marketing ideas for manufacturing companies that fit the market. Surveys, competitor analysis, and online forums are some methods to learn about your audience.
• Understand how to create compelling content. The type that your target audience will be able to engage and connect with. Besides, make sure you have a style guide and add a bit of personality, even if your business is extremely ‘serious.’
• Know how to convert the leads that you get into paying customers. For this, you need to provide high-value, quality service in the first place. Only after can you add marketing conversion instruments.

9 best marketing strategies for manufacturing companies

There is so much advice on how to do marketing in the manufacturing industry that it can get confusing to know where to start. That’s why we’ve selected the most effective strategies for you.

1. Know what you want to achieve right off the bat

Every marketing plan for any manufacturing company must have a goal in mind. It’s like anything else in business — you need a mission and, of course, a strategy to get there. So, what does such a goal might look like?

• Maybe it’s to create more awareness of your brand.
• Maybe there’s a specific offer you want to promote for the season.
• It could be that you want to encourage more of your existing customers to keep patronizing you.

Source: Catalyst

Having clear objectives helps crystalize which tasks should be a high priority and which ones can wait.

Besides, it’s a good way to figure out where your resources should be going. Once you know where you are headed, you can then decide which routes are the best to get there. You can then invest accordingly.

For example, if you want brand awareness and industry leadership, then investing in SMM and live events is a good idea. Yet, if you want quick growth in sales, PPC is a much better bet.

Naturally, you will need to know how to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. So, make sure you also define the metrics you’ll track in your strategy.

2. Learn about your target audience and build a relationship with them

Now that you know your goals, the next stage is to figure out who your ideal customers are.

And it isn’t just about B2B and B2C or their geography.

Many suggest focusing on demographics. Sure, building a customer profile like the one below isn’t bad and can be quite useful.

Source: Zendesk

Still, focusing on age, interests, goals, behaviors, and locations alone isn’t enough. What you want to concentrate on when defining your target audience is 2 things:

• True pain points: What are their biggest challenges?
• Desired outcomes: What results do they want instead?

When you know these, you can understand how you actually help. Yet, when you analyze this in detail and try to go deeper than simply, “they want more clients.”

At any rate, the more you understand the person/business you intend to market to, the easier your work becomes. Basically, it is the only way to create the right content and ads that hit the spot.

3. Network at events and trade shows

Digital marketing manufacturers who are successful are also those who are good at networking. Attending events and trade shows is a good way to meet other professionals from several relevant niches.

Source: X

These are people who are likely to be interested and who can connect you to even more interested parties. If possible, attend as a speaker. The reason for this is simple — the more you are out there, the more brand visibility you gain.

Plus, you get to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and stay updated on the latest trends and strategies. You don’t necessarily have to only participate in your industry events. You can also go for some connected niches to discover new opportunities.

You can get a booth at some tradeshows or conferences to turn the event into a manufacturing advertising campaign. Yet, you can simply connect with other professionals, learn from them, and broaden your network.

Best part? Attending most of the events is quite affordable, especially considering that so many potential clients can be in the same place.

4. Publish content that your audience appreciates

Source: WebFX

Remember when we said that many buyers would check at least three to five content pieces before engaging with a company? Yes, content is a really big thing. While many manufacturing marketers understand this, some don’t know where to start.

So, how do you create an effective content marketing strategy for manufacturing niches? Well, the same way you do it for most industries. You need different pieces that align with different stages of the sales funnel.

Building a sales funnel is a whole different topic in itself. So, we won’t go into all the intricacies. Just keep in mind that one of the important things to do is proper keyword research.

It will help you understand the search intent and other vital information you need to align your content to the right stage of the funnel. From there, the only thing you need is to improve your copywriting skills and start crafting pieces that actually have great value for your readers.

Now, what content do you typically use at each stage?

• Top of the funnel (ToFu). The top-of-the-funnel content is mostly informational, so it can include a long-form article that looks at industry trends or a how-to blog on challenges in the manufacturing industry.

You can also create short videos, infographics, and SM posts that inform and get people interested. All these pieces can lead to a download or a signup.

For example, the NAM links to its report in one of its blogs. This way, they get contacts and build their mailing list.

Source: NAM

• Middle of the funnel (MoFu). Now that you have won people’s interest, how do you fan it and nurture it to build better trust and relationships?

That’s where case studies, white papers, newsletters, and webinars come in. They show your expertise in real-world scenarios.

Source: The Manufacturer

• Bottom of the funnel (BoFu). When there’s trust, you need content that clicks the deal and gets leads to become paying customers. This is where product demos, testimonials, and personalized consultations are perfect.

Source: OEMCosmetics

5. Make social media your friend (leverage it)

Social media is perfect for brand awareness and improving customer-brand communication and relationships. While it might not bring you the most leads, SM can still be a powerful tool in your digital marketing strategy for a manufacturing company.

It can connect you with more potential clients and make it easier to find you. Just ensure you work on your business pages to make it work:

• Optimize your social media handle, profile, and bio keywords.
• Post quality images, product showcase videos, testimonials, and other teasers. The idea is to show what you are doing and the impact of your product/service.
• Did you do a collaboration recently with a related brand? Post that on your social media. It works as your social proof.
• Did you speak at a trade show or even just attended one? Post pictures and highlights of the events. The same works for any mention or publication — add that credibility.
• Won any award? Blow that horn and let the good people know!

Source: X

One more thing: some manufacturing marketing experts make the mistake of seeing LinkedIn as the only SM platform. From the examples above, you can see that even X (formerly Twitter) can be a great tool to build awareness. Don’t forget Facebook, TikTok, etc.

6. Invest in SEO

Why do we have another heading for SEO when we already mentioned content? Easy, there is more to SEO than just content, even though content is a big part of it.

Search engine optimization is mostly a technical process. You need to take care of everything from mobile optimization and speed to alt texts and slugs. This will make your website attractive to search engines so it shows up higher in search results.

Now, how does it work for marketing in manufacturing companies? There are several things you can do to improve your search engine rankings, such as:

• Work on your website speed. 83% of people expect websites to load in less than three seconds. Coincidentally, websites that get ranked on the top of Google search results pages are also pages that load pretty fast.

The longer it takes your site to load, the higher the bounce rate, which seriously lowers search rankings.

• Make your website mobile-friendly. These days, more and more people start their online journey on their mobile devices. This applies to your prospective clients as well — you don’t want to lose them.

Plus, Google gives priority to mobile-friendly sites when ranking them, so this helps your SERP positions.

• Get high-quality backlinks. A quality website linking to you is basically endorsing your site. That’s why backlinks help to signal to search engines that your site is trustworthy.

The more other sites link to you, the more referral traffic they send your way. This makes you credible in the eyes of both prospective clients and search engines. You can use a guest posting service to handle this task if you don’t have much experience in this area.

7. Take email marketing seriously

73% of experts swear by the effectiveness of email marketing as their manufacturing marketing strategy. The only issue is that it isn’t one of those fast-paced approaches. This means you need to work on building relationships over a long period of time.

Email marketing can help you capture the interest of your leads, nurture them, and gently nudge them in the right direction. So, find creative ways to add buttons to your site that get people on your email list.

Maybe that free report we mentioned earlier can be behind a CTA that motivates your readers to sign up for your newsletter. So, each time people download your report or infographics, they enter their email.

In return, you can send personalized emails based on the actions they take on your site. These emails can be a way to keep them informed about special brand events, company news, special promotions, etc.

Source: Murata

A word of caution, though: don’t spam your subscribers. If the emails are too frequent, they will simply unsubscribe or even send you to the spam folder. The point isn’t to be salesy. Instead, be helpful and use attraction marketing. You can learn more about it here.

8. Consider using Google Ads

Here’s the truth. Some niches are easier to rank for than others using search engine optimization. Besides, SEO takes a while to bring the desired results, so sometimes, it’s easier to go with ads.

Your marketing for manufacturing companies can easily combine both SEO and PPC. At the end of the day, promotional marketing is extremely effective in combination with more organic strategies.

Source: Google

The best part is that paid ads can get you in front of many eyes in a matter of minutes, hours, and days. Yet, make no mistake. SEO is cheaper, and PPC can be costly to maintain in the long term. Still, when done effectively, you can get good ROI.

So, how do you ensure this is the case?

• Use the right keywords (again, all the popular keyword-research software or Google-native tools are handy for these).
• Decide if you want the ads to run in a few targeted locations or not. You are likely to get better results when you focus on areas where your customers are primarily located.
• Make sure the landing page for the ads is also aligned and optimized to turn visitors into leads. Testimonials, demos, well-crafted content, and CTAs are non-negotiable.
• Ensure you keep tracking your ad metrics to spot when something is no longer working well. This way, you can switch tactics quickly.

9. Give the podcast game a try

You’re probably wondering who wants to hear someone talk about manufacturing. The answer might be quite surprising. Over 504 million people listen to podcasts. Besides, since it is long-form content, people connect better and, as a result, convert better as well.

Of course, not all of those people will be interested in manufacturing. But there is a market share for every niche.

Source: Google

An average podcast listener spends seven hours each week just listening to different shows. You could be one of them.

Imagine if you could find a way to explore your manufacturing solutions in an engaging manner. By talking about your experiences, you can make your brand more relatable. People would love to tune in to learn how the everyday things they use and even obscure items are made.

Don’t worry, you will be in good company. Think of other shows like the Manufacturing Happy Hour, Making Chips, the Prepared, and more.

Source: Apple Podcasts

Looking for ideas on how to start? How about interviews with industry experts or even news updates about the industry?

Another great idea is repurposing your already existing blog posts for your podcasts. Yep. There’s really more than one option. You can also ask your audience for suggestions.

Conclusion

Hey, you made it to the end; you deserve a treat! If you’re buzzing with so many ideas at this stage that you don’t even know where or how to begin, hang in there. You’ve got this.

The first part is the knowing, and the next part is the doing. And this doesn’t have to look the same for everyone. There are many ways to come up with a great marketing strategy for every manufacturing company.

Simply start with what feels right for your own unique situation. You can pick a strategy and dip your toe into it for a few months to see how things go and then try something else. You can always try as many or as few of these strategies as you like.

Be sure to track each one. This is the best way to know what’s working and what’s not. As long as your strategy is built on providing the best value to your audience, you’ll get them coming back to you again and again.