Manufacturing Marketing, Are you Relevant?

Making marketing relevant in a manufacturing company is not always an easy thing to do. Marketing is often the backwater, underfunded, poorly staffed department that just makes sure the brochures are printed and the trade show booth is set up. For marketing to be relevant it needs to be an active part of the company.

industrial-marketing-1 Manufacturing companies come to me every week and ask questions like "how do we grow our business in this environment?" or "we do great when we get in front of a qualified contact, so how can we generate more qualified leads?"

My answer revolves around the stats and steps we have been talking about as the keys to growing your revenue and they to a great extent revolve around making a manufacturing company's marketing relevant.

Stat 3: 70% finished - B2B buyers are up to 70% of the way to their purchase before they speak to a sales rep¹

Step 3: Change your focus from selling more to marketing more. Attract more people that need your help and once you have helped them then you earn the right to sell. Balance your staffing and spending on sales vs. marketing. Marketing is carrying more of the load now so marketing and sales need to be in alignment.

This means that success in growing your sales rests on adapting your marketing and sales strategies and tactics to the realities of the marketplace. Your marketing and sales need to be aligned to deal with how B2B marketing now engages buyers.

Most manufacturing companies still think of marketing as a cost and embed it under the title of someone that focuses mainly on sales. I am a reformed VP of Sales & Marketing, so I know what this looks like. I always wondered why marketing was listed after sales since marketing comes first in the customer value process and is a larger context and playing field than sales. I have yet to see a VP of Marketing & Sales.

Ask yourself these two questions in order to make your marketing relevant:

1. Can we connect our marketing department's goals and objectives to the revenue goals of the company?

If your marketing department is not a part of the revenue generation and goal-setting conversations, then they are not relevant. They are a cost.

The corollary to this question is what is the ROI of your manufacturing marketing? If you can tie your marketing investments to the revenue generation process by measuring leads generated, leads moving to a qualified state, RFQs generated, engagement metrics for closed customers, cost of customer acquisition, and other revenue-related measures then you can determine the ROI of marketing and show that your marketing does or does not contribute to revenue goals being met or missed.

Much of this data exists for B2B companies but they fail to gather it and organize the data in any relevant way. I am constantly surprised when successful companies cannot answer questions like, how many leads a month does your site generate, how many qualified leads do you need to convert one to a sale on average, and what are your best lead generation activities based on sales made?

Marketing that has an ROI is relevant to any President, owner, or board of directors.

2. Do we have the talent, experience, and expertise to match the changes buying behavior is driving within marketing departments?

Be honest when you evaluate your resources:

Does anyone know how your target clients use the Internet to find your solutions?
Is there any understanding of website structure, navigation, messaging, content building?
Do they know editors of target publications and have they ever written a feature article?
Do they know how to write and marketing case studies?
Do your people understand content marketing?
Can anyone write an e-book?
How to build email campaigns?
How to build buyer's journeys and matching lead nurturing workflows?
Are they blogging and posting social media messages?
Have they run paid ad campaigns on Google or LinkedIn?

This is not an exhaustive list for sure but you understand where I am going. This is not the same marketing that was done 20 years ago, many of the core principles are the same, but the techniques, technologies, and tactics are much different.

An Inbound Marketing Strategy Requires the Right Resources is a recent post that outlines the choices manufacturing and industrial companies have in terms of deciding how to staff and resource an inbound manufacturing marketing strategy.