Plan your manufacturing marketing now for future company growth

Do you really know where your customers search for products like yours? Or how effective your marketing is? 

Digital marketing opportunities offer a wealth of opportunities. But they are not universally used or effective. While many manufacturers and other business-to-business (B2B) companies use LinkedIn and advertising in trade publications, they may also use a combination of emails, SEO, content marketing, YouTube or other social media channels.  The key is figuring out which one will work best for your business. 

It's no longer enough to use the same tactics and the same messages on the same platforms. Current and potential customers expect more.

To be successful and grow your business you need to experiment and track your successes to get the perfect mix of tactics to reach your prospective buyers. 

Where to start? 

Our client, a Fortune 500 global manufacturer, knew they wanted to evolve their marketing, but didn’t know how or where to start. They came to us because they needed to transform their manufacturing marketing - fast. And, they knew, that marketing is far more complex than it used to be. 

This manufacturing company is well known, but their marketing wasn’t reflecting their expertise or their progressive products to their full potential. They needed to try new things to capture the attention of new and existing customers. Over the course of a year, they increased leads tenfold and filled their sales pipeline with $400 million worth of potential deals by learning from our team. 

This is the sixth lesson our client learned on their way to transforming their dated marketing efforts to become a world-class marketing machine. This lesson is about planning ahead and tracking progress. Planning ahead will give you a clear path to follow and tracking let’s you know how you’re doing against your goals. 

The lessons in our whitepaper can be adapted by any B2B or manufacturing business to accelerate growth and realize tangible results. More lessons are included at the end of this post. 

Engineers constantly reinvent things to go faster, further and run more efficiently. Your marketing can do the same. With a clear plan and strategy, along with the right tools and processes, you too can reach more prospects, more efficiently and further afield.

Read: 6 Ways Strategic Marketing Impacts the Growth of B2B and Manufacturing Companies 

What did they do? 

This manufacturer knew they wanted to build a marketing machine (or engine) - much like the equipment they are known for producing. They needed to create a reliable solution to set their marketing efforts up for long-term success. 

By thinking like engineers, they built the structures and processes they need to effectively track all their marketing activities, in one place. The right procedures also enable them to replicate and scale their successes or know when to discontinue activities that aren’t working for them. 

They understand what their current and potential customers value and where these customers want to see their information. From international campaigns to more regional messaging, they are able to see what activities work best to gain the attention of prospective buyers in different locations and can repeat or change course as needed. 

Previously they relied on trade shows, a simple website and other traditional marketing materials. Today, they market in different places and in more ways than ever before. 

It’s a heady combination of things to learn and keep track of, but having the right mix of opportunities and effective tracking processes supports them in reaching far more customers than their earlier marketing achieved.

How did they do it? 

Andrew Green, Mezzanine’s Vice President of Client Strategy, explains that when companies “treat their entire marketing operation like a factory and get people thinking like engineers: they can find efficiencies, use the right tools, and keep tuning and tweaking to get the best performance.”

Know what your company needs and wants from your marketing efforts before you get started. This includes making sure all your parameters and expectations are clear. 

Next, plan to be extremely organized and monitor everything. This comes with a clear and robust tracking system to capture all of your marketing activities. You’ll need to know who needs to do what, and when, as well as the results.

When you are ready to proceed, go slowly. It’s easy to get caught up doing ‘all the things’ and then going in too many directions at once. Stay focused. Figure out what works for you and what doesn’t.  Doing too many things too quickly leads to disorganization and chaos.  

At first, you might run a few campaigns a month, as our client did. With experience, you will be able to ramp up. Given enough time, these robust databases become a rich source of insights and a road map for future initiatives. 

“Our system tracks hundreds of activities, all happening at the same time,” Andrew adds. “Media buys. Webinars. Email blasts. Videos. Social posts. All targeted to different regions, focused on different products, and sent out in different languages. This way nothing falls through the cracks.”

This client’s database tracks hundreds of campaigns, happening simultaneously, in multiple languages, around the globe. It captures everything from global media buys to individual emails, which are sorted and available at a glance. It’s a lot of information which would be impossible to keep organized without a solid system. 

Learn more: 4 Steps to Making Your B2B Marketing More Measurable

That engineering-inspired marketing structure keeps things running smoothly, but it also has another valuable benefit: it makes tracking ROI easier. 

For this client, each activity is connected to a specific business goal and has a specific budget attached as a unit of investment. The math is clear. When you factor in how many leads a particular activity has achieved you can figure out how much each lead costs and which tactics worked best, in which locations. 

They use dashboards and other analytics tools that were built into their database from the outset. And recently they added a customized app to further optimize tracking to help them better manage campaigns and reporting.

Reuse and Recycle

The team has also learned to produce and distribute content in new ways. They save valuable time by not reinventing the wheel for every piece of marketing collateral needed to launch a project, product or initiative. They reuse, repurpose and recycle quality content wherever they can. 

Examples include:

• Using the same article in multiple publications, 
• Republishing content to reach new audiences, 
• Turning webinars into blogs, social posts, videos and more.

Effective marketing comes from knowing what your audiences appreciate hearing about, which tactics to use and when to use them. Think like an engineer and track what works well and what doesn’t, to find your perfect mix of marketing activities to reach your different audiences. 

Do you want to be able to scale your manufacturing marketing? If so, when? In six months? Next year? Never? If growth is part of your business plan, make sure to put all the systems in place early to smoothly transition from doing a few activities to doing more when you are ready. 

Another Success Story: Marketing Was the Catalyst to This Manufacturer’s Astronomical Growth

Are You Ready to Grow? 

If you’re ready to take your manufacturing marketing to the next level or have questions about getting started, give us a call. We’re happy to go over your marketing needs and how we might be able to help you reach more customers, in more ways and locations than ever before. 

More Lessons our Client Learned:

Lesson One: Explains why having a clear and actionable business case is important. 

Lesson Two: Shares how getting focused helps narrow lead generation opportunities. 

Lesson Three: Covers why it’s important for companies to establish definitions before starting a large or new-to-the-team project. 

Lesson Four: Explains how a strategic external partner, like Mezzanine Growth, can help businesses get ahead.

Lesson Five: Talks about the importance of making lead generation a mindset. 

Want to learn more about our client's experience? Watch this recording with our client and hear how they now produce 500+ leads a month using an efficient and effective process. 

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