94% of B2B buyers, according to studies, conduct a lot of internet research before making a purchase. This suggests a fundamental shift in consumer purchasing patterns, the sales funnel, and business operations. Particularly manufacturing organizations have more complex issues because they frequently sell to multiple target markets.
This comprises original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with a diverse range of stakeholders, including scientists, engineers, buying agents, and plant managers, who seek sophisticated and frequently costly goods and services to fulfill their requirements. The goal is simple: you won't close the deal if you don't give these decision-makers enough insightful information.
Over the past few years, marketing for manufacturing organizations has gotten increasingly competitive and complex in order to please information-seeking prospects. It's no longer effective to cold call without a planned marketing strategy; your competitors have moved on, and so should you.
The way that consumers and businesses communicate has also evolved. They no longer anticipate having their lives interrupted by intrusive emails or phone calls. When customers are ready to buy or require more information about a product or service, they will get in touch with the company after conducting their own research on it. Although change can be unsettling, there is an easy fix: implement an inbound marketing for manufacturers plan for your industrial manufacturing business .
What Is Inbound Marketing?
The goal of inbound marketing methodology is to draw website visitors and potential customers by providing them with the information and interactions they are looking for, enabling them to identify themselves with your goods and services. It takes the place of the outdated "spray and pray" strategies that inundate people with irrelevant, obtrusive, and ill-timed touchpoints, pushing a service, product, or brand on potential clients in the hopes that they would eventually become paying customers.
Using inbound technique, clients are drawn in, kept interested, and delighted online. Manufacturers must continuously add value to their prospects and cultivate a relationship based on trust if they hope to reach the last step of the inbound process, pleasure.
Using a variety of digital channels—most frequently content production, SEO, social media, and email marketing—to grab attention is part of putting an inbound marketing approach into action. "By publishing the right content in the right place at the right time, your marketing becomes relevant and helpful to your customers, not interruptive," states HubSpot, a leader in inbound marketing industrial strategies and marketing tools. Producing content with your clients' requirements in mind will draw qualified prospects to your organization and keep them coming back for more.
This is a marketing experience that consumers will find engaging and effective. Regarding marketing approaches, inbound is the most effective and qualitative (yes, ROI can be tracked using real-time and year-over-year analytics) approach available today. View the CTA for the Marketing Assessment on the right .
The Inbound Marketing Methodology
It's critical to keep in mind that, although operating in a B2B setting, your industrial company still markets and sells to consumers. Your objective when using an inbound strategy is to draw potential customers to your business, engage them with pertinent material on a large scale, and then personally satisfy each one of them. Remember that the buyer's path is no longer a straight line. Every stage of the process can support each buyer's momentum and progress, as well as that of other prospects and customers within those stages.
Attract
Although you want visitors to your website to engage with it, these visits will only be valuable if they become leads (and hopefully buyers). In order to draw in quality inbound leads, you must publish timely, relevant content that is beneficial. The ideal time is always—morning, noon, or night—so that guests can access it whenever it's most convenient for them. You will have a far higher chance of satisfying the demands of members of your target market while they are actively searching for what you have to offer if you regularly update and publish content on the internet.
During the attract stage, the most popular content tools include social media, blogs, videos, advertisements, and a strong content strategy built around pillar pages. Similar to the one you are reading right now, a pillar page serves as a comprehensive resource for visitors seeking authoritative information on a certain subject. Search engine optimization (SEO) strength is added to pillar pages through an under-the-radar approach that makes it easier for users to access the content while conducting online searches.
Closing Industrial Sales—Better and Faster through Inbound Marketing
We can now close the loop between marketing and sales and have the metrics to support it thanks to the technology found in today's B2B marketing and sales platforms. Working in silos in marketing and sales is unacceptable. Consider marketing to be an aid to sales. Management wants to know the return on investment (ROI) from marketing initiatives and complete deals more effectively and quickly.
For manufacturing and industrial businesses, increasing sales is the ultimate goal of corporate growth. Although there isn't a single answer, there are plenty of options open to you for effectively marketing your industrial business. See our article, What Industrial Companies Don't Get About B2B Marketing, for additional information on the realities and fallacies around marketing for industrial manufacturers.