Demystifying Marketing for Manufacturers

By Jessica McCune on July 18, 2017 | Topics > Growth

Marketing can seem like an overwhelming task, with so many components to undertake and keep track of. Many companies aren’t sure of even where to start.

The first step is to understand who you are going to market to: you need to identify your ideal target audience. Ask yourself these questions to help narrow it down:

  • Who are the types of individuals your business development team consistently pursues?
  • Who are the individuals within companies that are tasked with choosing vendors?
  • What job title(s) are most likely to be advocates for hiring a company like yours?

Once you’ve narrowed down your list for an ideal target audience, it can be helpful to make a list of who makes up that list. It might look something like this:

The next step is to identify how your target audience gathers information during their decision-making or research processes. People tend to gather information on their own these days, and they mostly ignore interruptive advertising messages while doing so. 80% of business decision makers prefer to acquire information about companies they are researching through a series of articles, rather than through an advertisement. Business blogging can establish your company as a valuable resource to your potential customers. It also helps to show that your company has expertise in a specific area. Focus on answering the common questions your salespeople get asked and it will create an engaged audience which will help promote more sales conversations. Creating content that is not only engaging, but also takes search engine optimization into account, will help drive leads and sales.

Search engine optimization can be a convoluted concept for a lot of people. In a nut shell, SEO means optimizing your website so Google and other search engines list your website in their results pages when someone is searching for keywords related to your business. If you fill your website with descriptive web pages that are keyword-focused, whether it is blog posts, products and services pages, or case studies, search engines will reward you by offering your website at the top of the searcher’s results page.

Social media is a great way to connect with your target audience and serve up great content. Whether it’s original content you’ve created, or curated content that you think is relevant and provides value to your target audience, sharing the best content you can will engage your audience and show that you are on top of key issues and topics that matter to them. The most important first step when conducting social media marketing is identifying where your audience is participating. This will differ depending on your target audience and industry. Using LinkedIn for B2B helps build a community of relevant connections. You can then use these connections to find great content to share with your audience, as well as to share your own original content.

E-mail marketing is another tactic that many companies find useful at engaging with their audiences. You can highlight exciting things happening at your company or in your industry. You can provide relevant updates regarding relevant regulations for your industry. You can also feature content you have produced like blogs, whitepapers, videos, case studies, etc. There are many easy-to-use e-mail marketing platforms like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor that you can utilize to send out your e-mail marketing campaigns. These platforms make it very simple to create lists, segments, campaign templates, and also view reports for each campaign. Within the reports for campaigns, you can view many different kinds of data like who opened your e-mail, who unsubscribed, who clicked on specific links, and many other things that can provide invaluable insight about your customers and potential customers.

There are many tactics and strategies that can be utilized to help your company market itself. It’s important to establish your overall goals before undertaking expensive, and perhaps ineffective, tactics or strategies. You have to identify what you want to accomplish before you have establish how you are going to go about accomplishing it!

If you are need help getting started with your marketing plan, we can help! Call us at 913.649.4333 or send us an e-mail!

Here's quick video featuring these tips and more!