Why Inbound Works for Manufacturing Marketing & ROI

Posted On: September 01, 2019 by

With many industries experiencing unsteady growth these days, marketing budgets are beginning to rise. This increase in budgets means more opportunities for expanding your customer base and sharing the vision of your brand. However, it’s still important that manufacturing companies get the most out of their existing marketing budgets, which is why many opt for hiring a marketing agency for the manufacturing industry.

At Marketing Metrics Corp., we specialize in manufacturing marketing and industrial marketing solutions. Below, we’ve shared some insight into why our inbound marketing services work, as well as how they can generate the biggest possible return on investment (ROI).

What Exactly is Inbound Marketing?

Unless you’re a marketing professional yourself, you might not be aware of how inbound marketing works and how it differs from traditional advertising. In the simplest terms, inbound marketing is when you target specific customer personas and try to bring them to you, rather than going after them using traditional advertising or direct sales methods.

Manufacturing marketing professionals help companies do this by creating content and webpages that attract customers. Such content will often be optimized for your particular industry and include keywords that target your ideal customer persona. Additionally, a reliable manufacturing marketing agency will ensure you also have an easy-to-navigate website that performs at top speeds.

What type of content can an inbound agency help you create? Well, when it comes to content creation, the sky is the limit. A good manufacturing marketing agency can help you create interesting items like blogs, videos, email campaigns, eBooks, webinars, infographics…the list goes on.

Inbound Gives Your Manufacturing Company a Global Reach

When it comes to the manufacturing industry, many companies aim to have a reach that’s worldwide, which is why inbound marketing services fit nicely into the picture. There’s a common misconception that expanding globally as a manufacturing company can be negative, especially in countries that boast cheaper labor and material costs. However, inbound can actually give you the tools needed to compete on a global scale.

When working with a trusted inbound marketing firm, you can attract new prospects and build solid relationships online. Nowadays, there’s less of a need for maintaining a premise sales team and scheduling face-to-face meetings with clients abroad. As long as manufacturing firms are able to provide clients with easy access and insight into their business processes, they can compete globally without a problem.

Inbound marketing services for manufacturing firms enable you to directly connect with clients and answer their questions, provide solutions to problems, and give them all the information they need to purchase your product or service.

Embrace Longer Sales Cycles

One of the issues that manufacturing firms constantly deal with is longer sales cycles, which can make it more difficult to keep sales prospects engaged over time. However, a marketing agency for the manufacturing industry will be able to provide a host of solutions. There are a variety of marketing automated platforms that you can implement, such as HubSpot, that will ensure you never lose another lead again.

Such customer-relationship-management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms allow companies to create a personalized user experience, tracking new leads and delivering automatic emails to ensure they don’t go unnoticed. Software like HubSpot also enables companies to monitor potential clients at every step of the sales process by tracking calls, emails, and social media and website activity. This enables your sales team to directly pinpoint where potential clients are in the sales funnel and react in real-time.

Invaluable Industry Insight

Likely one of the foremost advantages of working with an inbound manufacturing marketing agency is that you’ll have a team of experts at your beck and call. A reliable agency will be able to highlight your firm’s best assets and get them in front of the ideal person or company. One of the top goals is to make it easy on your potential clients to find solutions to their challenges and express why your goods and services will do so. An inbound marketing firm will give them access to your company’s product engineers, salespeople, and research and development team to solve pain points.

The primary goal of a manufacturing marketing agency is to demonstrate why customers should choose your company over the competition. This is accomplished by creating one-of-a-kind content that’s at the top of the rankings when potential customers search for it; content that’s informative, easily digestible, and builds trust.

After accomplishing this, your marketing team can then take the next step and help your company drive “sales ready” prospects to your sales team.

Lower Cost Per Acquisition

Another reason why many in the manufacturing industry choose to outsource their inbound marketing services is due to the lowered costs associated with doing so. The first reason why inbound offers such a high ROI is that you’ll avoid the need to hire, train, and maintain a large marketing team in-house. Traditional marketing campaigns, such as printing flyers and advertising at trade shows, can also be a drain on resources, so many hire an inbound firm to reduce the need for these tactics by bringing the customer directly to them.

Studies show that inbound marketing leads can cost upwards of 60% less than outbound marketing leads, leaving you more money to focus on customer service and production.

How Do Inbound Manufacturing Marketing Firms Create a Plan for Success?

At this stage, you may be wondering what goes into creating a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy for your manufacturing firm. There are several things agencies address to develop a solid marketing strategy for your brand.

Let’s go into more detail on some of the points mentioned above, like:

  • Identifying Your Target Audience: The first thing a marketing agency will do is help you clearly identify the type of customers you’re trying to attract. Determining your ideal buyer, also known as persona targeting, is how agencies ensure that all your resources are going to the right places. Moreover, having a solid understanding of the personas is of paramount importance to developing and executing a strong digital marketing strategy and plan. In addition to providing what conditions tripper this persona’s decision to look for companies like yours, a good buyer persona will include information down to the last detail, like job function, industry, age, challenges, perceived barriers, decision criteria and more.
  • Appealing to Your Target Audience’s Problems: After developing a clear idea of who you’re trying to reach, the next step is determining how your products or services can help them. This is done by doing a little bit of reverse engineering and researching issues your target audience has expressed directly or online, such as in Q&As, search terms or social media posts, then adapting your brand and message accordingly.
  • Creating Unique Marketing Content: This is where your company needs to offer potential customers something they can’t find anywhere else, whether it be blog content or interactive seminars. Videos and other visually compelling content are a great way to make your brand stand out and offer customers unique information; if it’s done right, they’ll also want to share it with peers, which attracts additional clientele.
  • Nurturing Leads Through Your Sales Funnel: There are four steps to inbound marketing. First, your goal is to attract them, then convert them, then close the deal, and keep them coming back. At this stage, marketing teams will help you foster a relationship with your clients that will help you retain them and encourage them to spread the word about why they chose your products or services over competitors.

Other important components of developing a solid digital marketing blueprint include establishing a baseline audit with achievable goals and a working timeline, conducting extensive competitor research, and optimizing your website performance.

Working with a reliable manufacturing marketing agency is one of the best ways to ensure all the items mentioned above are implemented into your marketing strategy. If it seems a little overwhelming, don’t worry, a team of experts will guide you every step of the way to make certain your company is at the forefront of your industry.

Let our team help you gain an edge in the manufacturing industry!

With more than 55 years of combined industrial and manufacturing marketing experience, the team from Marketing Metrics Corp. has all the insight necessary give you an edge. Our Wisconsin-based team is equipped to implement a successful marketing strategy that will generate ROI for years to come. We give companies a lasting presence online by offering personalized website design, search engine marketing services, pay-per-click advertising solutions, and more.

To learn more about the innovative services offered by Marketing Metrics Corp. call us now at (262) 691-9229 or fill out our online contact form!