Launching a successful industrial marketing strategy presents some challenges that are not present in other industries.
In industrial markets, sales cycles can be very long, high-ticket processes. A lot rides on your relationships with your prospective accounts and customers. This is very much still an industry where a lot of business is done during golf outings, lunches, and with handshakes.
But if you haven’t embraced digital industrial marketing strategies, you have probably noticed some of your competition pulling away from the pack.
See — smart, forward-thinking industrial marketers know that you can’t change the way that business has been done in these industries overnight.
Instead, they look for the best possible ways to blend traditional industrial marketing strategies with new-age digital ones, to improve your efficiency while providing better, more modern experiences to your customers.
In this article, we’ll cover my top tips for launching a successful industrial marketing strategy from the digital side, and touch on how these digital strategies can complement more traditional marketing techniques.
Source: Hook
Digital marketing and all of the channels and platforms that it encompasses is no longer something that you can dabble in.
“Testing out digital” is a thing of the past. You either embrace digital marketing and all of the nuances that come with it, or you decide to stay on the outside looking in.
Part of embracing a digital approach is embracing a multi-channel marketing approach. Essentially, this means that you look to connect with your prospects through multiple different paths.
These might include channels like phone, email, social media, search ads, etc. It all comes together to create a multi-channel ecosystem that drives growth.
This expansion can seem daunting for companies that are still doing a majority of their business on the phone and through hand-written emails. Suddenly you are speaking to customers in ten different ways when you are used to only speaking to them in two.
The truth is that kind of rapid expansion would be impossible without industrial marketing automation.
Automation is what allows us to ensure that all of the diverse channels are connected and provide a consistent experience to customers, delivering the information they want to see when they want to see it.
Here’s the thing about industrial marketing — your marketing automation is only going to be as good as your data.
Your ability to speak directly to customers relies on how well you know them in the digital sense. You may know your customers inside and out, but if that doesn’t translate to accurate, usable data, then you are always going to have a hard time meaningfully growing your digital marketing operations.
Customer and prospect data cleanup is an important part of the puzzle. Making sure that all of your names have proper capitalization, that emails are valid, and that phone numbers are formatted correctly are all important data standardization tasks that ready that data to be used in your marketing campaigns.
The great thing about digital marketing is that it moves at lightspeed. If you have the budget to pay for traffic, you can quickly test ad copy, landing pages, email sequences, and messaging on the fly.
With each new data point, you grow that much closer to learning more about your audience and improving your return on marketing spend.
Continual testing and optimization are a big part of what we do here at RiseFuel.
We never assume that the original strategy we launch will be successful. Instead, we opt to learn from our efforts and use each campaign as a guide for the future of your industrial marketing strategy.
We are big believers in the inbound marketing methodology. Inbound marketing focuses on attracting potential customers by creating and publishing resources that they will find valuable.
Those could come in the form of industry insights, buyer’s guides, or content that answers their most burning desires and questions.
When working with those in the industrial sector, we always focus on creating valuable resources that will attract website visitors and generate leads.
We blend this focus on content marketing with rock-solid SEO, paid advertising, and sales enablement practices to ensure that our clients have a well-rounded approach that focuses on being a value-add to the lives of their customers.
Source: Ironpaper
Part of the sales enablement process is ensuring that your marketing and sales approaches are aligned and working together toward common goals. To do that, you’ll need to align those two teams and your traditional and digital marketing efforts.
For instance, if trade shows play a key role in your marketing strategies, you might call prospects that you met at trade shows a few days after the show ends.
But you could be enrolling those leads into an automated email sequence that drips new information to them over the course of weeks. By the time your sales team picks up the phone, they are already ready to buy.
The value of this pairing really can’t be understated. You still have the personal meet and greet that drives home the real-world connection.
But then you add a new step that helps to educate your prospects about your company, industry, and product before you ever hop on the phone with them.
Then, your sales team can be armed with their own content to help facilitate the sale.
You don't want just anyone when you partner with a marketing agency. You want an agency that has a verifiable track record in your industry.
They should be able to show you that they have worked with similar companies to deliver stellar results.
You can learn more about how we have been able to help companies by taking a look at our marketing case studies.
Want to learn more about how we can help manufacturing and industrial companies to make the leap into digital marketing?
Click here to schedule your risk-free consultation with Tony today.