The recently released second edition of The Marketing In Manufacturing Report revealed a number of challenges for the manufacturing sector. Creating enough high-quality content, measuring success and a lack of strategy have all reappeared as major challenges for industrial marketers. In this article we’ll talk more about those challenges – and provide some free marketing resources to help you overcome these pain points.
Some 49% of manufacturing businesses cite ‘creating enough high-quality content’ as one of their most significant marketing challenges. This is all too common as marketing teams struggle to remain competitive in the search engines while answering common questions from prospects. This is particularly true for those manufacturing businesses with small or one-person marketing teams servicing an entire organisation; 60% of manufacturers are in this group.
The truth is, content is still king, and if manufacturers want to compete and dominate in the search engines, they need to find a way of creating engaging, high-quality content for their prospects and customers. Without doing so, manufacturers will face the harsh reality of being invisible to potential prospects.
The stats really do speak for themselves. According to Ignite Visibility, those with first positions in search engines enjoy an average clickthrough rate of 43% compared with just 3% for those in position 10!
We’ve worked with manufacturing businesses for more than 20 years and more often than not, we discover that their lack of strategy is the source of many of their marketing challenges. It causes:
Without a solid business and marketing strategy, manufacturers do not focus on who they’re targeting, what their challenges are, how to measure success or even which content to create.
This previous blog post provides a guide to creating a marketing strategy for manufacturing businesses. In terms of structure, we recommend the following for any manufacturing marketing strategy:
Some 41% of manufacturing businesses voted measuring success and return on investment as a primary marketing challenge. This isn’t surprising as manufacturing businesses face long sales cycles, complex buying teams and multiple touchpoints throughout the buying journey. This often makes it very difficult to know which parts of marketing are influencing prospects the most.
That said, the bottom line is clearly in the minds of UK manufacturers when it comes to measuring success. Over half of manufacturing businesses say ‘generating new business leads’ is their primary goal for marketing. On top of this, 73% use the number of new business leads generated as a marketing KPI.
Upgrading your marketing tech stack is crucial here. All too often, manufacturers are using sales and marketing technology that’s been in place for 10-20 years. Often, this technology isn’t integrated, breaks up the user journey and means that marketers can’t get a holistic view of how marketing is driving results. Software such as HubSpot brings all of your marketing data into one place. It can integrate your website, CRM, email marketing and sales management platforms so you can understand exactly which parts of your marketing are driving sales. You’ll spend less time moving data between systems and more time measuring the things that really matter – such as leads and conversion rates.
Want to know more about what HubSpot can do? Attend this free HubSpot tool kit workshop!
Unfortunately, all of these challenges result in manufacturers not being able to generate leads quickly enough. This is detrimental to those manufacturing businesses which place such high value on generating leads through marketing.
Industrial marketers are often faced with a 6-12 month lag between setting campaigns live and driving results. This causes mounting pressure from sales teams that are hungry for fresh leads – driving a wedge between sales and marketing. Large upfront costs also put risk-averse marketers off certain marketing campaigns for fear of not generating results.
This is exactly what Intergage’s Rapid Lead Generation service tackles. Using a tried and tested marketing framework – along with new and existing customer data and powerful marketing technology – we guarantee to get your marketing campaign up and running within 15 days, with the aim of generating leads within 90 days.
These Rapid Lead Generation campaigns focus on achieving short-term objectives while setting the foundations for long-term growth. You can find out more about the service here.
While the outlook for industrial marketing is positive, manufacturers still face a number of challenges. The free resources listed in this article have been designed to help those who need to kick-start their marketing and generate results fast.
Want to read the full report? Download your copy here.