10 Things to Include in Your Marketing Strategy for Manufacturers

How Manufacturers Can Improve Their Marketing Strategy

Learn How Manufacturer Can Improve Their Marketing Strategy

Generating a comprehensive marketing strategy that stands above the noise in an over-populated manufacturing industry can be difficult. Think about what marketing strategy or strategies have worked in the past.

Time is scarce, so focusing on your project efforts is necessary. But how can you measure the return on investment of your marketing programs? With today’s competitive setting the bar higher than ever, your manufacturing marketing strategy needs to be exhaustive.

Don’t worry, though. Matrix Marketing Group has compiled what your marketing strategy needs to succeed. So take a quick step back, and dive into this challenge head-on.

Snapshot for Manufacturers

It doesn’t matter if you are a start-up entrepreneur with a few cents in your budget or the head of a large enterprise organization with millions of dollars at your disposal.

The blueprint of your company’s marketing strategy should consist of these 10 activities:

1. Situational Review
2. Current Marketing Report
3. S.M.A.R.T Goals
4. Buyer Personas & Target Audience
5. Software Stack Selection
6. Inbound Marketing Activities
7. Outbound Marketing Activities
8. Sales & Marketing Process Identification
9. Marketing Budget
10. Measure Return on Investment

1. Situational Review (Analysis)

Anyone who has taken business 101 has probably heard of a S.W.O.T analysis or situational analysis. Its sole purpose is to connect strategy and objectives by establishing where a company stands in four key areas. This overview consists of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Strengths and weaknesses are internal to your business, while opportunities and threats are external.

It is important to prepare a thorough review as it will be the underlying message for all your marketing efforts in the future.
Your company’s strengths should revolve around the superiority of your products over close competitors. Either that or define how the services offered alongside the products are more inclusive.

Whichever you choose, these should be compelling to your niche audience, as strengths are undoubtedly the focal subject of future communications. Conversely, address possible weaknesses and get to know how to present the relevant solutions. 

Understand that your target market and market research might be slightly outdated, and be ready to address concerns based on it.

External opportunities present themselves in many ways, high product demand, loyal customers, and changing the target landscape. Plan extensively for openings, but to successfully position your product in the market, you must also mitigate external threats.

Don’t be caught off-guard. Analyze your commodity and predict the outcome of your marketing efforts as efficiently as possible. Know what your customers want and execute your full situational analysis.

2. Current Marketing Report

A current marketing report looks at your marketing team’s approach to gaining new leads and customers.

What has been your general marketing procedure? An issue we often encounter at Matrix Marketing Group is small teams typically have one or two specialists with extensive knowledge in one or two sub-categories but cannot craft a full marketing strategy.

Additionally, over 50% of marketers don’t feel prepared to provide their executive team with hard metrics. So let’s make our company stand out and take care of business.

Reach:

This is a solid indicator if your content has been loved by your viewers and consumed or has been a dud. Where are these observers coming from, email, PPC, or social? If your reach hasn’t been growing at a healthy rate, you might be missing out on new marketing leads. When you miss out on leads, you miss revenue, and no executive will be happy.

Website Visitors:

The number of visitors to your site details how many people came to your site during a given period. More importantly, though, is where these visitors originated.

As you enter the nitty-gritty of the marketing strategy, you’ll naturally want to treat referral traffic differently than organic and social traffic. If efforts aren’t paying off on social media, it’s nice to know so that you can refocus and adapt.

Am I driving new website traffic? Is it high-quality and targeted traffic? Is the traffic converting into sales? And if not, how can I improve to maximize my efforts? That point should be brought up early on and repeated often.

Leads:

These are your bread and butter, your meat and potatoes; they make the marketing world go round. Leads will show your efforts’ direct return on investment and how beneficial the marketing department has been for the sales team.

Ideally, divide your leads generated by the source to identify the most efficient producing channels.

Customers:

What’s on everyone’s mind is the total amount of clients gained from marketing campaigns. New business drives your budget and gets straight to the executive’s heart.

Couple this section with conversion rates on businesses closed by the sales team to understand the quality of leads flowing through the sales funnel. Are you experiencing a low closing rate? Changing how you hand off leads to the sales team might be time.

3. S.M.A.R.T Goals

S.M.A.R.T Goals is another one of those acronyms most of us know by heart: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Nonetheless, structuring plans around these parameters increase the likelihood of success. So let’s structure a sample goal.

Being specific on what your team intends to accomplish drives them forward. Who is involved, what are they trying to achieve, where will this be executed, when will they finish, which requirements or constraints are in place, and why are these individuals included? These points all relate to transparency and aim to ensure everyone is up-to-date regarding fulfilling their goals.

Goals need to be measurable to establish criteria for progression. Like reporting marketing metrics, you want reliable standards that relay where the goals stand regarding completion. Understand questions along the lines of when ” X ” will be finished and how much of “Y” I need to achieve that.

Begin determining what developments are most important to you and figure out how to make these things a reality. What skills and abilities must be improved to make this goal attainable? Remember, almost anything can be attainable if you develop your goals wisely and with uninhibited motivation.

That being said, if you were never realistic in the first place, you are just wasting everyone’s time.

An ERP company probably won’t make a seamless switch to selling gym socks, but you never know. Balance your goals with realism and drive substantial progress. Just because you might have to reach doesn’t mean it’s unrealistic; motivate the team to perform their best.

Draw a line in the sand.

Create a sense of urgency and follow a time frame immediately. Don’t let procrastination take over. Set intermittent due dates to drive productivity. So let’s wrap all of this together with the example promised earlier:
“Our marketing team would like to increase inbound lead flow by 25% through content marketing strategy.

Within two weeks, we would like to develop and approve a three-month-long content marketing plan describing how to attract, convert, close, and delight future inbound leads.

One marketing team member will be responsible for SEO, two will be responsible for blogging, one will be responsible for premium content (white papers, ebooks, videos, etc.), and one will be in charge of design.
Every two weeks during our three-month plan, we will generate six blogs and three premium pieces of content.

At six weeks, we will review metrics and determine if our long-tail keyword strategy needs an adjustment based on recent lead generation rates.”

4. Buyer Personas & Target Audience

An ideal customer profile (ICP) can either bring total success or total failure and therefore is a crucial make-or-break decision for marketing managers. Try to envision who your business’s buyers are and how much information is known about them.

In thinking about consumers, you begin the process of developing buyer personas. Matrix Marketing Group offers an excellent free buyer persona template to help organize your thoughts and walk through the creation process.

Buyer personas are fictional generalizations of users who fit into an ICP. These personas are beneficial not only to marketers but also to sales, product development, and customer services. Future marketing content generation will depend on who these dynamic fictional characters represent. The good news is buyer personas aren’t challenging to form under the right circumstances.

To start the process, you can use market research reports, customer surveys, interviews, and focus groups of anyone in your target audience. These don’t have to be customers only; they can consist of sales prospects, referrals, and database contacts. The better understood a profile is, the more valuable it becomes. Begin asking questions along these lines:

• What is their job title, role, and experience?
• What does an average workday look like?
• Do they possess a specialized skill set?
• Which industry are they involved in?
• How big is their company?
• What are their responsibilities?
• What does their personal life look like?
• Do they have shopping preferences?
• Educational background?

Take this raw data and compile it into the top reoccurring trends. Organize and fill in the essential background, demographic, and identifying information. I suggest downloading our free buyer persona template for a more in-depth, step-by-step guide to creating your company’s buyer personas.

5. Software Stack Selection

The sales and marketing technology industry has become exponentially overcrowded in the past few years. In 2022, the industry offered over 4,000 different solutions. In 2023, there will be over 12,000 sales and marketing apps and tools.

The good news is that this allows marketing teams to create a software stack that fits their needs.

The bad news is finding the software to match your requirements has become a daunting task in the face of 4,000 options. Every manufacturing marketing strategy will require a personalized software stack for efficiency, but we have some favorite combinations we’ve encountered with multiple clients at Matrix.

Our Setup

Outreach: We use Outreach to structure our outbound email campaigns. It allows for personalized correspondence with prospects and statistical analysis to determine which emails are working and which ones need tweaking for better results.

A majority of the activity generated is directed toward our website. The outbound activity here is typically cold-emailing or old leads needing reinvigorating. Outreach is where new data starts in our full-cycle sales and marketing system; it is the beginning of our cycle.
Our favorite Outreach alternatives:

• Campaigner
• MailChimp
• AWeber

Hubspot: This is our marketing stack middleman. Hubspot manages our web presence and everything related to our inbound marketing strategy. They have a broad range of services, from web content management, inbound email marketing, marketing automation, and digital analytics.

Their core is inbound marketing, but their team endlessly pumps out innovations like PPC management, an advanced reporting add-on, and their sales sidekick.

Our favorite Hubspot alternatives:

• Pardot
• Marketo
• Act-On

Salesforce: To end our full circle software stack, we implement Salesforce CRM and integrate its functionality with Hubspot and Outreach.

After leads have taken enough predetermined action on the website, they are passed along to the sales team to be qualified or sent back to Outreach for further lead nurturing. Salesforce provides limitless features and upgrades to keep the sales process on track.

Our favorite Salesforce alternatives:

• Pipedrive
• Insightly
• Zoho

It’s easy to get lost in all these software options, and we didn’t even get into niche solutions for content creation, collaboration, social, paid media, project management, and contact discovery.

Take the time to devise a strategic framework that works with your team. Most of the software listed offers free trials, so you can play with organization structure and operate different options in unison.
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