Marketing for Manufacturing Companies: Does Inbound Work?

Marketing for manufacturing companies traditionally relies on hands-on marketing approaches such as trade shows, printed materials, and phone calls. While these have all proven successful in the past, Inbound is your ticket to the future.

Did you know that 94 percent of business-to-business buyers research online before making purchase decisions? More than 75 percent of those buyers start with a Google search. That’s just about everybody! If you’re not ready to answer the questions of those online researchers–especially the Google –they will have to settle for your competition.

Inbound Marketing for Manufacturing Companies

In manufacturing and engineering, the primary hurdle for customers is often confidence in your ability to deliver. Your customers need to rely on your expertise, but how can you demonstrate your knowledge and begin to establish trust without reaching out to potential customers by phone or in person?

With inbound, of course!

Inbound will allow you to connect with those buyers who are researching on the web, and set them down the path to understanding the solutions you provide and building the trust essential to the buying process.

Marketing for Manufacturing: How Inbound Closes the Deal

Step One: Attract Traffic

The first step to achieving success with Inbound is to make sure you get found. That means creating content that answers the questions that your customers are typing into a search engine. This is typically done with a website and blog that are frequently updated with helpful, informational content that establishes you as the leader in your industry.

Step Two: Convert Visitors Into Leads

As you start getting more traffic to your website from search engines, you want to point those visitors in the right direction so you can collect their contact information and move on to the next step. Getting visitors to make the leap is often done with special offers like free consultations or premium content such as how-tos and white papers.

You’ll already have an idea of which visitors are interested in which products or services based on the pages they’ve previously visited. An effective inbound lead-generation strategy will make it super easy for visitors to connect the dots and sign up.

Step Three: Lead Nurturing

You’ve already begun to establish trust with a prospect at this point, so this stage is where you really dig in and demonstrate your ability to crush the competition. You might think this is the right place for your sales team to take over, but a bit more hands-off nurturing will let that lead ripen without the pressure of a sale looming over their head.

By sending out well-timed and highly informative emails that are based on the visitor’s needs, you’ll be providing the lead with the information they need and the time necessary to digest the information and keep moving. Then, when the prospect is ready for the pitch, your sales team can jump in.

Manufacturing and Engineering: An Inbound Strategy

If you think that the process seems too simple, that’s because it is! Of course, success only comes when you’ve built a solid strategy based on the pain points of your customers.

You’ll need to begin with a deep understanding of who your customers are so you can clearly define their problems and align your solutions. You need to speak the language of your customers and demonstrate your solutions in ways that make sense to them without the pressure of a hard sales pitch.

When you build an inbound strategy that’s centered around answering questions, solving problems, and demonstrating your expertise, you’ll have a lead-generating machine that will rival even the best trade show results. New Perspective has experience in building marketing strategies based on research and implementing them to bring in business. We know the building materials manufacturing space, and we’re ready to help you bring in leads.