Industrial marketing and sales should work hand in hand—but too often, they operate in silos.
This disconnect is a common challenge for small to mid-sized manufacturers. Even companies that consistently publish blog posts, invest in SEO, run digital ads, and build their marketing tech stack find that results fall short of expectations.
You generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Website traffic is steady. KPIs trend upward. Yet, your sales team keeps asking: “Where are the real opportunities?”
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Let’s be honest—industrial sales is complex and rarely linear, especially if you are selling custom-engineered solutions.
Your buyers are:
Engineers with long evaluation cycles
Procurement teams that are comparing vendors
Decision-makers from across departments
Risk-averse professionals who want proof before engaging
Bridging the gap between industrial marketing and sales is not about working harder. It’s about working smarter—with the right strategy to connect activities with outcomes.
Hard Truths: What the Numbers Reveal About Industrial Marketing and Sales
According to Forrester, less than 1% of B2B marketing inquiries actually convert into closed deals—a sobering reminder of how difficult it is to drive measurable revenue from marketing alone. (Source: Forrester)
Even when you generate solid MQLs, only 10–20% ever become Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), according to industry benchmarks. (Source: GrowthDriverShow)
That means the vast majority of your leads won’t move forward unless there’s a clearly defined process for collaboration between industrial marketing and sales.
Understanding MQLs vs SQLs in Industrial Sales
What exactly is a qualified lead?
Marketing teams often celebrate MQLs—visitors who download a white paper, fill out a contact form, or subscribe to your newsletter. These actions signal interest, but they don’t necessarily mean the prospect is ready for a sales conversation.
Sales, on the other hand, is looking for SQLs—leads that meet specific criteria like budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT). Without this alignment, it’s no surprise that sales often ignores leads passed from marketing.
Here’s why this matters:
When the criteria for MQLs and SQLs aren’t agreed upon in advance, both teams lose faith in the process.
Sales thinks the leads are junk
Marketing thinks sales isn’t following up
Valuable prospects fall through the cracks
This disconnect slows down your pipeline, frustrates your team, and weakens your ROI.
We’ll revisit this in the section on strategy. For now, just know this: Industrial marketing and sales alignment starts with a shared definition of what a lead actually means.
Why Marketing Attribution is So Difficult in Industrial Sales
In theory, marketing attribution should be simple. A visitor clicks an ad, downloads a brochure, receives nurturing emails, and then makes a purchase.
But industrial sales don’t follow a neat, linear path.
You’re selling complex solutions with long buying cycles and multiple stakeholders. That makes it incredibly hard to connect the dots between a marketing action and a signed contract.
Here’s why attribution breaks down in manufacturing:
Sales cycles often span 6–18 months, especially for high-value capital equipment or engineered systems
Multiple influencers—engineers, maintenance managers, procurement, and executive leadership—all weigh in at different times
Prospects may engage anonymously long before reaching out to sales
Decisions are rarely made in a straight line—they loop back, stall, and restart
What Can You Do?
To improve attribution in industrial marketing and sales:
Agree on attribution models (first-touch, last-touch, multi-touch) that reflect the reality of your sales process
Use marketing automation tools to track behavior across touchpoints
Encourage sales to provide feedback on lead quality and source
Document all interactions that contribute to pipeline movement—even those that don’t get immediate credit
Attribution in industrial marketing isn’t perfect. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. Even directional insight is better than flying blind.
Start With a Manufacturing Marketing Strategy—Not Just Tactics
If your marketing and sales teams are out of sync, the root problem may not be execution—it’s likely the lack of a documented, shared strategy.
I’ve seen it too often: A manufacturer hires a freelancer to write blog posts, launches a new PPC campaign, or updates their website. Each of these is a good step—but without a larger strategy, they operate in isolation.
Tactics without strategy often lead to frustration for marketing and sales, resulting in wasted efforts and money.
You can’t align marketing and sales if you haven’t aligned the why, who, and how behind your efforts.
A strategy-first approach also helps you adapt to changes in the digital landscape—including the next big challenge: AI-driven search.
Navigating the New Digital Landscape: AI and Declining Organic Traffic
Even when your industrial marketing and sales teams are aligned, there’s a new challenge you can’t ignore—AI is disrupting search behavior in a big way.
Google’s AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience or SGE) and platforms like ChatGPT are changing how buyers find and consume information. Instead of clicking through to your website, users now get summarized answers right in the search results.
According to a recent study, AI Overviews now appear in 47% of Search Results. (Source)
AI isn’t killing SEO—but it’s raising the bar. That’s why quick fixes and disconnected tactics won’t cut it anymore.
You need a system that continually adapts to both your buyers and the changing digital landscape.
It Takes More Than One-Off Campaigns to Generate High-Quality Industrial Leads
Industrial sales don’t happen in a single click—or even a single conversation.
If you’re relying on a one-time campaign to fill your pipeline, you’ll likely be disappointed. Generating high-quality industrial leads requires consistency, iteration, refinements and long-term commitment.
Quick wins are rare. Sustainable results come from strategic planning, strong execution, and ongoing refinement.
That’s why more manufacturers are turning to outsourced expertise—especially when in-house resources are limited or stretched thin.
Why a Fractional CMO Makes Sense
As a Fractional CMO for manufacturers, I bring strategy, execution oversight, and continuous optimization—without the full-time cost.
Whether you have a small in-house team or no marketing staff at all, a Fractional CMO can help you stay focused on what matters: Driving sales—not just clicks and impressions.
Why Traditional Industrial Marketing Tactics Alone No Longer Work
Print ads, cold calls and other conventional marketing methods—these tactics still exist in manufacturing marketing. But they’re no longer the primary way buyers engage.
Today’s industrial buyers don’t want to be sold to. They want to research on their own, at their own pace—often long before they talk to a salesperson.
That’s why traditional industrial marketing alone isn’t enough. It needs to be integrated with digital strategies that reflect how your buyers behave in the real world.
When you align traditional efforts with digital strategies, you meet buyers where they are—not where they used to be.
Let’s Bridge the Gap Between Industrial Marketing and Sales—Together
If your sales team is frustrated by lead quality… If your marketing feels like it’s working in a vacuum… And if you’re tired of disconnected tactics that don’t deliver…
Then it’s time to connect the dots.
I’ve worked exclusively with manufacturers and industrial companies for more than 35 years. I don’t learn industrial marketing at your expense.
Whether you need a documented strategy, ongoing oversight, or execution support—I can help you close the gap between marketing efforts and results.
When it comes to industrial lead generation, I often hear, “We just need more prospects to talk to our sales team,” when speaking with marketing managers, business development professionals, and company leaders at manufacturing and industrial companies.
The intent is clear—get in front of more qualified prospects. However, the frustration is just as real: reaching the right people is more challenging than ever.
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Today’s B2B buyers don’t follow the old playbook. According to research from Demand Gen Report,buyers are nearly 70% through their purchasing journey before they ever speak with a salesperson, and 80% of the time, they are the ones initiating contact, not the other way around.
In other words, by the time your sales team gets “face time,” the buyer has already formed strong preferences based on what they found online.
If your marketing strategy is still playing a supporting role—just making brochures, managing trade shows, and updating the website—it’s time to rethink that model. Modern manufacturing marketing must lead the charge in industrial lead generation. It sets the stage for sales conversations by attracting and nurturing the right people long before they reach out.
The Reality of Today’s Industrial Lead Generation Process
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: most of your buyers are invisible. They browse your site and read case studies if you have them on your website. But they rarely fill out your contact form. And they certainly don’t call your sales team—at least not until they’re ready to talk to them.
A 2024 benchmark report from 6sense found that average form-fill rates across B2B websites hover around just 3.7%, which means the overwhelming majority of buyers are researching anonymously. They’re engaging with your brand, but not in a way your sales team can see or act on directly.
This silent behavior makes it incredibly difficult for traditional outbound sales tactics to be effective. Cold calls, unsolicited emails, and generic sales outreach often fall flat because the buyer doesn’t need or want them. They’re already five steps into their journey before your rep even knows they exist.
That’s why your industrial lead generation efforts must shift focus to meet buyers where they are—early in the research phase. This requires a marketing strategy that emphasizes discoverability, education, and trust-building over time.
Why Industrial Lead Generation Starts With a Strong Online Presence
A strong online presence isn’t just about credibility anymore, but survival. In today’s anonymous buying environment, your website and digital content are often the first (and sometimes only) interaction prospects have with your company. If those assets don’t engage and educate, you’re losing potential leads even before you know they exist.
Yet many manufacturers still treat their websites like static brochures—filled with product-centric content, company history, and a contact page buried at the bottom. That approach doesn’t match how technical buyers research. They expect more.
Your website must now function as a sales enabler—a digital gateway that helps visitors quickly understand your capabilities, see your differentiation, and envision how you can solve their problems.
Key elements of a high-performing site that supports industrial lead generation include:
Clear messaging that speaks to engineers, operations, and procurement professionals—not marketing fluff
Logical site structure and navigation that guides visitors to relevant solutions or product categories with minimal clicks
Helpful, application-focused content like CAD files, selection guides, case studies, and spec sheets
Fast-loading, mobile-friendly pages to support researchers across devices and geographies
Calls to action tailored to different stages of the buying journey—not just “Contact Us” forms
Your buyers are evaluating vendors long before they talk to sales. If your website isn’t positioning you as a knowledgeable, trustworthy solution provider, your competitors will.
In fact, LinkedIn’s B2B Institute reports that 95% of potential buyers aren’t in the market to buy today, which makes it even more critical to stay visible and relevant during the long consideration phase.
Don’t let your digital presence be an afterthought. A strategically planned and well-executed industrial website design is foundational to building awareness and trust.
Stop Thinking of Manufacturing Marketing as Just Sales Support
It’s time to retire the outdated idea that marketing’s role is to “support” sales by making brochures, managing trade shows, and updating the website.
Marketing preps the market for industrial lead generation in the current digital-first buying environment. It’s responsible for attracting the right people, educating them, and nurturing their interest until they’re ready for a productive conversation with Sales.
That shift requires a different mindset—one where Marketing is not a service department but a strategic growth driver.
Salespeople spend less time cold prospecting and more time closing
Leads are better informed and further along in their buying journey
Conversations are more focused and productive from the start
To make this shift, marketing efforts must be built on educational, customer-focused content, not just product specs and features (Of course, they are important, but not enough by themselves). Engineers and technical buyers want substance: white papers, how-to articles, comparison guides, and application-specific insights. They prefer to consume this information at their own pace.
That’s where industrial content marketing plays a pivotal role. It fuels your visibility, drives organic traffic, and creates engagement with prospects long before your sales team ever gets involved.
You Don’t Need More Marketing Tactics—You Need a Strategy
When sales are slow or leads dry up, the knee-jerk reaction is often to add more marketing tactics—launch a Google Ads campaign, redesign a brochure, or try a new email platform. But without a solid roadmap, these activities rarely deliver lasting results.
Tactics are tools, not solutions.
What most manufacturers really need is a well-thought-out manufacturing marketing strategy—one that connects your business goals, sales process, and customer journey into a cohesive plan.
Take a step back and ask yourself:
Who are we trying to reach? (Go deeper than industry, company size, etc.)
What problems are they trying to solve? (Customer-centric)
How do they research and evaluate solutions? (Google’s AI Overviews have turned this part on its head)
What kind of experience does our digital presence create? (Are you guiding visitors to the next logical step?)
The strategy brings alignment. It ensures that your marketing works in sync with your sales efforts, not just adding noise.
If you’re frustrated by poor lead quality, missed opportunities, or marketing efforts that feel disconnected, it may not be your tactics that are broken—it’s the absence of a good manufacturing marketing strategy.
Key Takeaways:
Buyers are in control—most complete 70% of the buying journey before talking to Sales
Your website is your frontline sales tool, not a digital brochure
Marketing must set the stage in industrial lead generation, not just support sales
Sales and Marketing alignment is essential for qualifying and nurturing leads effectively
Without a strategy, tactics fail—you need a plan tailored to your business, sales processes, and buyers
Let’s Turn Your Website and Manufacturing Marketing Into a Sales Conversation Starter
If you’re struggling to connect with the right people—and watching too many promising leads go silent—it may be time to rethink how your marketing is set up to support sales.
Let’s start with strategy.
We’ll help you create a manufacturing marketing strategy that aligns your brand, website, and content with how your buyers actually buy. That strategy becomes the blueprint for everything else—content, website design, sales enablement tools, and more.
Contact Tiecas to start a conversation about building a smarter lead-generation engine for your industrial business.
Lead quality versus quantity—you’ve probably heard this debate more times than you can count. The reality is that, as a manufacturer, you need a certain volume of leads to keep your sales pipeline flowing. But how do you strike the right balance? How do you make sure those leads aren’t just numbers but opportunities that actually convert?
“Gartner research shows businesses that source over 40% of their leads from marketing experience higher conversion rates than others.”
Shifting the focus from quantity to quality isn’t an easy sell, especially if you’re a manufacturing marketer trying to convince leadership. But here’s the thing: prioritizing lead quality can drive better results in the long run, and in this blog, I’ll show you why it matters, how to measure it, and—most importantly—how to prove ROI with data.
Let’s dive in.
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Defining Lead Quality for Manufacturers
When we talk about lead quality in the manufacturing industry, it goes beyond just collecting names and email addresses. Lead quality is about identifying prospects who are not only interested in your products or services but also have the potential to become paying customers. For manufacturers, high-quality leads often possess three key characteristics:
Relevance: The lead must align with your target market. This means they operate within industries that benefit from your offerings, and your solutions directly address their pain points. For example, a lead interested in butterfly valves for hydrocarbon processing is far more valuable than a general inquiry about industrial components.
Decision-Making Power: High-quality leads are individuals with the authority or significant influence over purchasing decisions. In manufacturing, this could be procurement managers, engineers, or senior executives. They have the potential to fast-track the buying process or ensure that your products are seriously considered by their organization.
Purchase Intent: Finally, high-quality leads exhibit clear buying intent. Whether they’ve filled out a detailed request for a quote (RFQ) or engaged deeply with your content, they’re showing signals that they are moving toward a purchasing decision. This separates them from low-quality leads who are merely exploring their options without a clear plan to act.
To achieve these results, manufacturers need to adopt a strategic approach to lead generation that focuses on quality from the start. A well-developed strategic roadmap can guide your marketing efforts, helping you identify where your high-quality leads are, how to attract them, and how to nurture them into paying customers. Developing this roadmap ensures that your marketing strategy isn’t left to chance.
Understanding these characteristics is key to ensuring your marketing efforts are directed at the right audience—those most likely to convert and contribute to the bottom line. But before diving into strategies for generating these leads, it’s important to distinguish quality from quantity, which we’ll explore in the next section.
Lead Generation for Manufacturers: Quantity vs. Quality
For many manufacturers, lead generation efforts have traditionally focused on volume. The goal was simple: generate as many leads as possible to fill the sales funnel. After all, more leads must mean more potential customers, right? However, this focus on sheer quantity often leads to a major disconnect between marketing and sales efforts—and, ultimately, missed opportunities.
The Pitfalls of Focusing on Lead Quantity
While it might seem logical to prioritize volume, the reality is that an influx of low-quality leads can do more harm than good. For one, a large pool of leads that aren’t properly qualified overwhelms your sales team, forcing them to spend valuable time sifting through unfit prospects. This not only wastes time but also diverts attention from leads with real potential.
Also, focusing on quantity puts additional pressure on marketing teams to maintain high numbers. This approach often results in campaigns that cast too wide a net, attracting leads who have little to no intention of making a purchase. The outcome? A higher cost per lead, lower conversion rates, and diminishing returns on your marketing investments.
Why Quality Leads Are the Key to Manufacturing Success
When it comes to manufacturing, where sales cycles are often long and complex, it’s critical to prioritize lead quality over quantity. High-quality leads are more likely to be decision-makers or influencers who understand their needs and actively seek solutions. This makes them more valuable from the start and more likely to convert into customers.
Moreover, nurturing these high-quality leads results in shorter sales cycles. With quality prospects, your sales team can engage in more meaningful conversations, leading to quicker decision-making processes and, ultimately, faster conversions. High-quality leads also tend to have higher lifetime value, as they are more likely to be loyal customers who trust your expertise and product offerings.
Solutions to Shift from Quantity to Quality
To improve lead quality, manufacturing content marketing is a proven strategy that can make a significant difference. By creating valuable and relevant content tailored to your audience, you’ll attract leads that are more aligned with your offerings. I’ve written extensively about this strategy—search this blog for related articles or learn more about our industrial content marketing services here.
For some manufacturers, especially those targeting high-value accounts, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) may be the more strategic approach. ABM allows you to focus your efforts on key accounts that matter most to your business, tailoring marketing initiatives to specific companies and decision-makers. For a deeper dive into ABM, refer to my earlier blog, ‘How Manufacturers Can Win Big with Account Based Marketing (ABM) and Industrial Content Marketing’.
A Paradigm Shift for Manufacturing Marketers
For many manufacturing marketers, this shift from lead quantity to lead quality is essential, but not always easy. It’s important to rethink your lead generation systems, focusing on targeting and nurturing leads that match your ideal customer profile.
This shift requires a more sophisticated approach to marketing—one that integrates data-driven insights, aligns marketing with sales, and uses targeted content to attract the right audience. It’s about creating a strategy that not only brings in leads but also qualifies and nurtures them effectively. Ultimately, quality will consistently outperform quantity in delivering measurable, long-term success.
Measuring Lead Quality: Key Metrics to Track
Shifting your focus to lead quality is only the first step. You need to track and measure lead quality using the right metrics to improve results. Here are some essential ones to consider:
Key Metrics for Measuring Lead Quality
Conversion Rates: A high conversion rate from lead to customer indicates quality. Tracking conversions at various stages of the buyer’s journey helps you understand which leads are most valuable.
Lead Scoring: Assign numerical values to leads based on factors like job title, engagement, and purchase intent. This helps prioritize high-quality leads. Marketing automation tools make lead scoring easier and more accurate.
Engagement Levels: Leads who consistently engage with your content—whether through downloads, emails, or demos—are likely more qualified. These engagement signals offer insights into their readiness to buy.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) vs. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Monitor how MQLs convert into SQLs to measure alignment between sales and marketing. A low conversion rate may indicate gaps in lead quality or communication. See Industrial Lead Generation – MQLs vs. SQLs.
Marketing Automation and Lead Tracking
Marketing automation tools improve lead tracking throughout their journey and ensure accurate attribution for Marketing’s contribution to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). This is especially challenging in long, complex sales cycles involving multiple stakeholders. By automating lead scoring and tracking engagement, these tools help maintain visibility into the lead’s journey and improve sales-marketing alignment.
How High-Quality Leads Drive Manufacturing Marketing Success
Focusing on high-quality leads enhances your marketing efficiency and business outcomes, especially in the manufacturing sector, where long sales cycles and multiple stakeholders are common.
Shorter Sales Cycles and Higher Conversions
High-quality leads are typically further along in their buyer’s journey. This allows your sales team to engage in more focused conversations, skipping early-stage education and moving straight to closing the deal. As a result, your sales cycle shortens, and conversion rates improve.
Better Resource Allocation and Lower Costs
By reducing the number of unqualified leads, your marketing and sales teams can dedicate more time to nurturing prospects that are likely to convert. This targeted approach cuts waste, lowers your cost per lead, and boosts your overall ROI.
Increased Customer Lifetime Value
Leads that are a strong fit for your offerings often become long-term customers. These high-quality leads aren’t just looking for a quick solution—they value reliability and tend to provide higher customer lifetime value (CLV) by returning for repeat business.
Example: How Lead Quality Improves Business Outcomes
Let’s take an example of a manufacturer specializing in centrifugal pumps. By focusing on lead quality, this manufacturer targets procurement managers and engineers in industries like oil and gas, where pumps are critical components. Instead of chasing broad leads, they focus their efforts on engaging these decision-makers with specialized content. The result? A shorter sales cycle, higher conversion rates, and more loyal customers who trust their expertise.
Strategies to Improve Lead Quality in Manufacturing Marketing
To attract and nurture high-quality leads, here are a few proven strategies that manufacturers can implement:
Targeted Content Creation: Use specialized content to engage your audience and address their unique pain points.
Align Sales and Marketing: Ensure both teams work together to refine lead qualification and improve conversion rates.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Focus your efforts on high-value accounts with personalized marketing strategies.
Marketing Automation: Leverage tools to automate lead scoring, segmentation, and content nurturing to improve lead quality.
Key Takeaways:
Focusing on lead quality over quantity leads to shorter sales cycles, higher conversion rates, and better ROI.
High-quality leads are more likely to be decision-makers and exhibit clear buying intent.
Effective lead quality measurement involves tracking conversion rates, engagement levels, and using lead scoring systems.
Manufacturing content marketing and Account-Based Marketing (ABM) are proven strategies for attracting high-quality leads.
Marketing automation tools enhance lead tracking, scoring, and nurturing, improving alignment between marketing and sales.
Ready to Improve Lead Quality? Let’s Start a Conversation. If you’re ready to elevate your lead generation strategy and focus on quality that drives real results, we’re here to help. Contact us today to explore how we can tailor our industrial marketing expertise to your specific needs. Together, we’ll build a roadmap that brings in leads that convert and contribute to your long-term success.
The Challenge of Generating High-Quality Industrial Leads
Industrial marketing strategies for lead generation are critical for manufacturers aiming to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Manufacturers I work with regularly struggle to generate high-quality industrial leads. With global competition intensifying and everyone fishing in the same limited pool of qualified prospects, standing out has become increasingly difficult. Potential customers often see very little differentiation because there’s parity in value propositions across the industry. For more insights, see my earlier post, “How to Use Manufacturing Branding & Industrial Lead Generation as a Power Couple.”
Many manufacturers resort to trying various marketing tactics without a strategic plan in place, which often leads to disappointing results. This is where industrial marketing strategies for lead generation come into play. The real challenge lies in targeting and attracting high-quality leads—prospects who genuinely need your products or services and are ready to engage with your sales team.
This chart from Forester’s Capture The True Value Of Marketing summarizes the problem with website form submissions. (Source).
A strategic approach to industrial marketing is the key to bridging this gap. By focusing on quality over quantity, you can streamline your marketing efforts, ensure that your sales team spends more time closing deals, and drive significant growth for your business. Of course, this is easier said than done because you still need a minimum quantity of inquiries to fill your sales pipelines.
In this blog, I will explore five proven industrial marketing strategies to help you generate high-quality leads that actually convert. These tactics have been crafted from years of experience and industry insight, offering a reliable roadmap for your marketing success.
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1. Crafting an Effective Industrial Marketing Strategy for High-Quality Industrial Lead Generation
The foundation of generating high-quality industrial leads lies in crafting a well-thought-out marketing strategy. Without a roadmap, it’s easy to lose direction and waste valuable resources on tactics that don’t deliver. An effective industrial marketing strategy focuses on understanding your target audience, defining clear objectives, and aligning your marketing efforts to meet those goals.
Understand Your Target Audience
The first step in developing a successful marketing strategy is to deeply understand your target audience. This includes identifying their pain points, challenges, and needs. Conduct market research, analyze customer data, and develop detailed buyer personas. Understanding your audience’s decision-making process will allow you to tailor your marketing messages to resonate with their specific needs.
Most small to mid-size manufacturers do not have the resources to conduct extensive market research, and often, data on niche markets is unavailable. One practical solution is to use customer surveys to gather first-hand intel, providing valuable insights directly from those you aim to serve.
Define Clear Objectives and KPIs
An effective strategy is goal-driven. Set clear, measurable objectives for your lead generation efforts. Whether it’s increasing website traffic, improving lead conversion rates, or enhancing brand awareness, having specific goals will help you stay focused. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your success and make data-driven decisions.
Align Your Marketing Tactics
Once you understand your audience and have set your goals, align your marketing tactics to support these objectives. Utilize a mix of inbound and outbound marketing tactics, such as SEO, content marketing, email campaigns, and targeted advertising. Each tactic should serve a purpose in your overall strategy, driving high-quality leads through the sales funnel.
Regularly Review and Optimize
An industrial marketing strategy is not a set-it-and-forget-it approach. Regularly review your marketing efforts to assess their effectiveness. Analyze performance data, gather feedback, and make necessary adjustments to optimize your strategy. Continuous improvement based on data ensures your marketing efforts remain relevant and effective in generating high-quality leads.
A comprehensive and effective industrial marketing strategy serves as your roadmap to success. By focusing on quality and aligning your marketing tactics with your business goals, you can attract high-quality leads that are more likely to convert into customers.
2. Using Industrial Content Marketing to Attract and Convert High-Quality Leads
Content marketing is more than just a buzzword; it’s a powerful strategy that can significantly impact your lead generation efforts. For manufacturers, especially those targeting niche industrial markets, content marketing can educate potential customers, build trust, and position your brand as a thought leader in the industry. The goal is to create content that attracts high-quality leads and nurtures them through the buying journey. To learn more, see my post, “Leveraging Industrial Content Marketing for Manufacturers—a Key Strategy for Lead Generation.”
Educate Your Audience with Valuable Content
In the industrial sector, purchasing decisions are often complex and involve multiple stakeholders. Decision-makers are looking for reliable information to help them make informed choices. By producing high-quality, informative content, you can address their pain points and offer solutions that align with their needs. This could be blog posts, white papers, case studies, how-to guides, or webinars.
The key is to focus on providing value rather than overtly promoting your products or services. Educational content builds credibility and trust, encouraging prospects to view your brand as a trusted advisor. When potential customers see your company as a reliable source of information, they are more likely to engage and consider your offerings.
Leverage Different Content Formats to Engage Leads
Diversifying the types of content you produce helps engage prospects at different stages of the sales funnel. For instance:
Top of the Funnel (TOFU): Use blogs, infographics, and videos to attract attention and raise awareness.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): Create case studies, webinars, and eBooks to provide deeper insights and establish expertise.
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): Develop product demos, comparison guides, and customer testimonials to help prospects make final purchasing decisions.
By tailoring content to each stage of the buyer’s journey, you can effectively guide leads from awareness to consideration and, ultimately, to decision-making. But, is there too much content available?
The short answer is “YES.” According to the CSO Update report published by Gartner, customers today have access to an overwhelming amount of high-quality information. This abundance often leaves them feeling less empowered and more confused. Successful sales reps focus not on adding more information but on helping customers understand what’s already out there. Acting as “information connectors,” they provide the frameworks and tools customers need to efficiently organize and align their thinking. Read more about Gartner’s insights here.
Optimize Content for Search Engines and Lead Generation
SEO plays a crucial role in ensuring your content is discoverable by the right audience. For instance, if you are a manufacturer of butterfly valves used in the Oil & Gas and Hydrocarbon processing industries, relevant keywords might include “high-performance butterfly valves,” “corrosion-resistant valves for hydrocarbon processing,” or “oil and gas flow control solutions.”
Traditional keyword research tools often fail to capture these long-tail niche keywords due to their low search volumes. However, leveraging Generative AI tools can help discover these niche keywords, opening new opportunities for attracting the right audience.
It’s important to note that effective organic SEO isn’t about stuffing as many keywords as possible into your content. Instead, it’s about understanding and aligning with search intent. Google’s evolving landscape, particularly with the introduction of its Search Generative Experience (SGE) and the soon-to-be-released SearchGPT, is reshaping how we approach SEO. See Could Generative AI Revolutionize Your Industrial SEO Strategy?
Stay tuned for these changes, as they will redefine how search engines interpret and rank content.
Measure Content Effectiveness and Refine Your Approach
To ensure your content marketing efforts are driving high-quality leads, regularly measure the performance of your content. Track metrics such as website traffic, time spent on pages, conversion rates, and engagement levels. Analyzing this data helps you understand what content resonates with your audience and where improvement opportunities exist.
Remember, content marketing is an ongoing process. Continuously refine your strategy based on feedback and performance data to keep your content relevant and effective in attracting high-quality leads.
By leveraging content marketing, you can establish your brand as a trusted authority, engage prospects meaningfully, and generate results-driven leads that convert into long-term customers.
3. How Data-Driven Insights Enhance Industrial Lead Quality
In modern industrial and manufacturing marketing, data is critical for understanding your audience and fine-tuning your marketing efforts. By tapping into the power of data, you can make informed decisions that lead to higher-quality leads and better conversion rates.
Understanding Lead Behavior and Preferences
Data provides valuable insights into how leads interact with your brand and content. You gain a clear picture of your leads’ behavior and preferences by analyzing data from various touchpoints—such as website visits, content downloads, email interactions, and social media engagement. This allows you to tailor your marketing messages and offers to align with what your audience truly wants and needs.
For example, suppose you notice that leads in the Oil & Gas sector consistently download a particular white paper or case study. In that case, this indicates a strong interest in that specific topic. You can use this insight to create more targeted content that addresses related issues, thus increasing your chances of converting these leads into customers.
Personalizing Marketing Campaigns
Personalization is a powerful tool in industrial content marketing. By using data to segment your audience based on demographics, industry, job role, and behavior (Buyer Personas), you can create highly personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with specific segments of your audience.
This tailored approach makes your messages more relevant and engaging, increasing the likelihood that leads will respond positively. For instance, a manufacturer targeting engineers and procurement managers in the automotive industry can use data insights to craft different messages for each group, addressing their unique concerns and requirements.
Optimizing Content and Channels for Maximum Impact
Data-driven insights help identify which content and channels attract and engage high-quality leads most effectively. By tracking metrics such as click-through rates, time spent on pages, and lead conversion rates, you can determine what’s working and what needs adjustment. This allows you to focus on the most effective content formats and marketing channels, maximizing your return on investment.
For example, if webinars generate more high-quality leads than blog posts, you can allocate more resources to developing and promoting webinars. Similarly, if LinkedIn proves to be a more effective channel for reaching decision-makers in your target industry, you can increase your presence and engagement on that platform.
Predicting Future Trends and Adjusting Strategies
Data analysis not only helps you understand current trends but also predicts future ones. By examining historical data and market trends, you can anticipate changes in customer behavior and industry dynamics. This foresight enables you to adjust your marketing strategies proactively, keeping you ahead of the competition.
Using advanced tools like predictive analytics, you can identify which products or services might gain popularity, which market segments are emerging, and how customer preferences may shift. With this knowledge, you can fine-tune your marketing campaigns to align with future demands.
Continuously Improving Through Feedback Loops
Data-driven marketing is an iterative process. Establishing feedback loops allows you to continuously collect data on your marketing performance and use it to make informed decisions. Regularly reviewing analytics reports, customer feedback, and lead conversion data helps identify areas for improvement and optimization.
Getting your sales team involved in these feedback loops is crucial. Their insights can provide a real-world perspective on lead quality and customer needs, helping to align sales and marketing efforts more closely.
4. Establishing Thought Leadership to Attract High-Quality Industrial Leads
Establishing thought leadership can set your brand apart and attract high-quality leads. It positions your company as a knowledgeable and trusted authority in your industry, building credibility and encouraging prospects to engage with your brand.
Leveraging the Right Platforms for Thought Leadership
Although engineers and technical professionals may not actively engage on social media as much as other demographics, they do pay attention to valuable content shared on platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube.
By focusing your thought leadership efforts on LinkedIn and YouTube, you can effectively reach your target audience where they are most likely to consume content. LinkedIn provides a professional environment where industry insights and innovations are appreciated, while YouTube offers a platform for video content that can demonstrate complex concepts and solutions in a more engaging and understandable format.
Utilizing Content Formats That Build Credibility
Creating thought leadership content goes beyond writing blog posts. It involves sharing expert opinions, providing industry insights, and offering unique perspectives that address the challenges and opportunities within your field. Here are some examples of compelling thought leadership content:
White Papers and Industry Reports: A manufacturer of precision components could publish a white paper on “The Future of Precision Manufacturing in Aerospace: Trends and Innovations.” This type of content would provide deep insights into emerging trends and showcase the company’s expertise in the field.
Webinars and Expert Panels: Host webinars or participate in industry panel discussions to share your knowledge and connect with potential leads. For instance, a valve manufacturer could conduct a webinar, “Advances in Corrosion-Resistant Materials for Oil & Gas Valves,” attracting engineers and procurement professionals interested in the latest developments.
Case Studies and Success Stories: Although customer testimonials are powerful tools for establishing credibility, obtaining them can be challenging due to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). In these cases, consider creating anonymized case studies that highlight the impact of your solutions without revealing sensitive information.
Building Trust Through Consistent Thought Leadership Efforts
Consistency is key to establishing and maintaining thought leadership. Regularly publishing insightful and valuable content helps keep your brand top-of-mind for potential leads. Whether it’s a monthly newsletter sharing industry news and trends or a series of blog posts exploring various aspects of your industry, maintaining a steady stream of thought leadership content is crucial.
Remember that thought leadership is not about self-promotion but providing value to your audience. Make it more about them and less about you. It’s about sharing your expertise, offering solutions to industry challenges, and fostering a dialogue that helps your audience make informed decisions.
This approach attracts high-quality leads and builds long-term relationships based on trust and respect.
Examples of Thought Leadership Content
To illustrate, let’s consider this example: Imagine a small manufacturer specializing in eco-friendly coatings for industrial machinery. To establish thought leadership, they could develop a comprehensive content series titled “Sustainable Solutions for Industrial Equipment: The Future of Eco-Friendly Coatings.” This series might include the following:
A white paper exploring the environmental impact of traditional coatings versus eco-friendly alternatives,
A webinar featuring industry experts discussing sustainability trends
A video demonstration showcasing the application and benefits of their eco-friendly coatings.
This multi-channel approach positions the company as a leader in sustainability, attracting high-quality leads interested in environmentally responsible solutions.
Establishing thought leadership in the industrial sector is a powerful strategy for attracting and engaging high-quality leads. By leveraging the right platforms, utilizing various content formats, and consistently providing valuable insights, you can position your brand as a trusted authority, fostering relationships that drive business growth.
5. Leveraging Marketing Automation for Comprehensive Lead Management
Marketing Automation (MA) has become an indispensable tool for industrial marketing, particularly when it comes to managing and nurturing high-quality leads. Tools like HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot enable manufacturers to streamline their marketing processes, ensuring that no potential lead slips through the cracks. Here’s how you can leverage marketing automation to boost your lead generation efforts and drive sustainable business growth:
Streamlining Lead Scoring and Qualification
One of the primary benefits of marketing automation is the ability to implement quantitative lead scoring. MA tools track a lead’s interaction with your content, website, emails, and other touchpoints, assigning scores based on predefined criteria. This scoring system helps you differentiate between cold, warm, and hot leads, ensuring that only the most qualified leads are passed on to your sales team. By focusing on high-quality leads, your sales team can prioritize their efforts, increasing the likelihood of closing deals and improving conversion rates.
Enhancing Content Personalization
Marketing automation goes beyond mere lead scoring. It allows for dynamic content personalization, delivering tailored messages to each lead based on their behavior, preferences, and stage in the buying journey. For instance, if a prospect has downloaded a white paper on corrosion-resistant materials, your MA tool can automatically send them follow-up content related to that topic, such as a case study or a webinar invite. This personalized approach keeps leads engaged, builds trust, and guides them seamlessly through the sales funnel.
Nurturing Leads Through Automated Email Campaigns
Email marketing remains a powerful tool in the industrial sector, but its effectiveness is magnified with automation. With MA, you can set up automated email campaigns that nurture leads over time, keeping your brand top-of-mind. These drip campaigns can be designed to deliver educational content, product updates, special offers, or invitations to industry events, all based on the lead’s previous interactions and interests. Maintaining regular, relevant communication builds stronger relationships with prospects, moving them closer to making a purchase decision.
Providing Real-Time Insights for Informed Decision-Making
Marketing automation tools offer real-time analytics and reporting, providing valuable insights into lead behavior and campaign performance. These insights enable you to make data-driven decisions about which tactics are working and which need adjustment. For example, if you notice a high click-through rate on emails but low conversion on landing pages, you can tweak your landing page design or content to better align with your audience’s expectations. This continuous optimization loop ensures that your marketing efforts remain effective and aligned with your business goals.
Improving Sales and Marketing Alignment
A significant advantage of marketing automation is its improvement in sales and marketing alignment. By sharing real-time data and insights, MA tools bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams, ensuring lead quality and engagement are on the same page. Sales teams can provide feedback on the leads they receive, which in turn allows the marketing team to refine their lead-scoring models and content strategies. This collaboration enhances the overall efficiency of your lead generation efforts and improves the chances of converting leads into customers.
Facilitating Multi-Channel Engagement
Today’s industrial buyers interact with brands across multiple channels, including social media, email, websites, and even offline events. Marketing automation enables you to manage and integrate multi-channel engagement, providing a seamless experience for your prospects. For instance, you can use MA tools to track social media interactions, retarget website visitors with personalized ads, and follow up with email campaigns based on a lead’s activity across these channels. This integrated approach broadens your reach and ensures consistent messaging, reinforcing your brand’s value proposition.
Supporting Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Efforts
For manufacturers targeting specific high-value accounts, marketing automation is a key enabler of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies. MA tools allow you to create highly personalized and targeted campaigns for each account, focusing on their unique needs and challenges. By combining lead data with company-specific insights, you can craft bespoke content and messaging that resonate with key decision-makers within those accounts, increasing your chances of success.
Enhancing ROI and Scalability
Finally, marketing automation significantly enhances your marketing efforts’ return on investment (ROI). By automating repetitive tasks like sending follow-up emails and tracking lead interactions, MA tools free up your marketing team to focus on strategic initiatives. Additionally, the ability to scale your campaigns effortlessly means you can grow your lead generation efforts in line with your business growth without a proportional increase in resources.
By leveraging marketing automation effectively, you can transform your lead generation process into a well-oiled machine. Automating repetitive tasks, scoring leads, personalizing content, and nurturing relationships ensure that your marketing efforts are efficient, targeted, and highly effective. When integrated with data-driven insights, marketing automation becomes a powerful tool for enhancing lead quality, improving conversion rates, and driving long-term growth.
Partner with Tiecas for Your Industrial Marketing Needs
Generating high-quality leads that convert is not just about implementing a few tactics—it’s about having a well-thought-out strategy and the right expertise to back it up. With over 35 years of experience specializing in industrial marketing, Tiecas understands the unique challenges manufacturers and industrial companies face. We don’t learn industrial marketing at your expense; we leverage our deep industry knowledge to create customized solutions that deliver real results.
Don’t let your industrial marketing efforts fall short. Partner with Tiecas and experience the difference that specialized expertise in industrial marketing can make. Reach out to us today for a consultation and discover how we can help you achieve your lead generation goals and drive sustainable growth for your business.
Manufacturing lead generation is a perennial top priority for most manufacturers. To thrive, these companies must consistently attract qualified leads to fuel their sales pipelines. However, this sales-driven environment presents unique challenges for industrial and manufacturing marketers.
Some of these challenges include:
Limited pool of qualified prospects: The manufacturing niche often targets specialized buyers and decision-makers.
Global competition: Manufacturers face intense competition from around the world.
Low search volumes: Relevant industry keywords may have less search traffic compared to broader consumer markets.
Long sales cycles involving multiple stakeholders: The decision-making process typically involves engineers, executives, and procurement, making for longer sales cycles.
Low brand awareness of suppliers: Potential customers may be unfamiliar with smaller or specialized suppliers.
Why Inbound Marketing is Essential for Manufacturing Lead Generation
The industrial buying process has undergone a dramatic shift in recent years. Today’s engineers and industrial buyers are increasingly self-directed, conducting extensive online research before ever engaging with a sales team. This shift makes it harder for traditional sales approaches to gain traction and build meaningful connections with decision-makers.
Gartner’s prediction that 80% of B2B sales interactions will take place in digital channels by 2025 underscores this transformation. To adapt, manufacturers must embrace inbound marketing as a core strategy.
Meets buyers where they are: Inbound content marketing positions you as a valuable resource in the very places where buyers are already searching for solutions.
Builds trust and authority: By providing informative content (blogs, whitepapers, case studies), manufacturers establish themselves as thought leaders and trusted advisors.
Nurtures leads through the sales funnel: Inbound tactics guide prospects through each stage of their decision-making journey, from awareness to consideration to purchase.
Is Your Industrial Website Optimized for Engineers and Technical Buyers?
Before diving into content creation, it’s crucial to ensure your industrial website is a robust sales and marketing asset. Here’s a checklist to assess your website’s readiness:
Content quality and relevance: Is your content up-to-date, and does it clearly communicate your unique value? Beyond product specs, does it address the specific pain points and challenges your target audience faces?
User experience (UX): Is your website easy to navigate, with a design that provides a positive experience for visitors?
Clear calls to action: Does your website guide users with prominent calls to action (e.g., downloading resources, requesting further information), even if they’re not ready for an immediate RFQ?
Search engine optimization (SEO): Is your site optimized with modern techniques that focus on search intent rather than just keyword stuffing?
Mobile responsiveness: Can your website be easily viewed and used on smartphones and tablets?
If you answered “no” to any of these questions, it’s time to consider an industrial website redesign. A well-designed website acts as a powerful lead-generation engine and a 24/7 resource for potential customers. At Tiecas, industrial website design is a core service we offer to help manufacturers succeed online.
Now that we’ve addressed the foundation of your online presence, let’s delve into the importance of understanding MQLs vs. SQLs and the role of quantitative lead scoring in optimizing your manufacturing lead generation strategy.
Manufacturing Lead Quality Matters: Understanding MQLs vs. SQLs
When it comes to manufacturing lead generation, not all leads are the same. To optimize your efforts, it’s crucial to differentiate between Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).
MQLs: Show interest in your products/services through actions like downloading resources or attending a webinar but may not be ready for immediate sales interaction.
SQLs: Exhibit a higher level of purchase intent, often demonstrated by requesting a quote, demo, or direct sales contact.
Develop collaborative lead Scoring: Work closely with your sales team to establish a quantitative lead scoring system. This structured approach assigns points based on buyer behaviors and demographics, helping prioritize the most promising leads.
Harness marketing automation: Implement marketing automation software to track leads throughout their journey. This provides visibility into engagement history and identifies the most opportune time for sales outreach.
Prove marketing’s impact: The data obtained from lead scoring and marketing automation provides concrete evidence of marketing’s contribution to sales and revenue. This addresses the long-standing challenge of attribution in manufacturing marketing.
Now that you understand how to qualify and nurture manufacturing leads, let’s dive into the power of industrial content marketing – another core service that Tiecas specializes in to fuel your lead generation success.
Industrial Content Marketing—Your Key to High-Quality Manufacturing Leads
Industrial content marketing, or inbound manufacturing marketing, has proven to be a potent tool for generating high-quality manufacturing leads. As explored earlier in this blog, this success stems from its close alignment with modern industrial buyer behavior.
Strategic planning is essential: Invest in developing a comprehensive industrial content marketing strategy before creating content. This strategic roadmap will help you in many ways, as follows:
Identify and refine buyer personas: Craft content tailored to specific pain points, ultimately establishing your company as a thought leader.
Analyze content gaps and repurposing opportunities: Maximize the value of existing resources.
Define clear goals for each content piece: Outline the desired action you want your audience to take (e.g., download an asset, register for a webinar, etc.).
Quality over quantity: Generic content won’t move the needle on lead generation. Focus on creating targeted, high-quality content that resonates with your buyer personas.
Patience pays off: While some content might yield quick wins, industrial content marketing is a long-term investment. Over time, this strategy will deliver sustainable results and build valuable brand equity.
Data-driven refinements: Consistently track and measure results to analyze performance, refine your strategy, and demonstrate ROI.
Walk the Talk: At Tiecas, we live and breathe industrial content marketing. Explore our extensive industrial marketing blog with close to 400 articles, specifically the industrial content marketing category, for insights and examples of our expertise in action.
Leverage GenAI & Organic SEO to Amplify Your Reach
Harness the power of GenAI: Incorporate Generative AI (GenAI) into your workflow to streamline content creation, brainstorm ideas, and identify valuable long-tail keywords. Remember, GenAI is a powerful tool that should be used strategically in conjunction with human expertise for the best outcomes.
The enduring importance of SEO: While social media generates buzz, organic search engine optimization (SEO) remains crucial for long-term visibility. Today’s SEO success hinges on understanding search intent and crafting high-quality content that provides answers rather than simply chasing keyword rankings.
Now that we’ve explored these essential strategies, let’s recap the key takeaways to fuel your manufacturing lead generation success:
5 Key Takeaways for Manufacturing Lead Generation Success
Inbound marketing aligns with modern industrial buyer behavior: Position your company as a helpful resource by providing valuable content that addresses the pain points of engineers and technical decision-makers.
Your website is a lead generation engine: Ensure your website is optimized for search engines, user experience, and clear calls to action.
Differentiate between MQLs and SQLs: Develop lead scoring with Sales to prioritize outreach and maximize conversion rates.
Strategic content marketing drives results: Develop a comprehensive content strategy and execute it effectively to target specific buyer personas and provide value throughout their decision-making process.
Leverage GenAI & SEO: Combine the power of Generative AI with human expertise to understand search intent for increased content efficiency and visibility.
Ready to fuel your manufacturing lead generation? Let’s partner!
Throughout this blog, we’ve explored essential strategies and the services we offer to help you succeed. To take the next step, we recommend exploring these key areas:
Once you’re ready, let’s discuss how we can supercharge your manufacturing lead generation and help you achieve your goals. Use the form on our service pages to schedule your free 30-minute consultation today, or fill out the form at Let’s Talk.
In the industrial sector, the focus often falls heavily on driving lead generation, with branding seen as a secondary concern. But the truth is, a robust manufacturing brand creates a strong foundation for attracting the right prospects, building trust, converting Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) into Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and shortening those long sales cycles.
Many competing manufacturers offer similar products, so there is parity in value propositions, making it difficult for decision-makers to differentiate. Think of it this way: your brand is what sets you apart, defining your unique story and the distinct value you offer.
In today’s digital age, manufacturing branding has evolved to be more about the customers’ perception of the company rather than what the manufacturer claims it to be.
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This post will provide practical tips and actionable steps to harness the synergy between manufacturing branding and industrial lead generation, fueling your company’s sustainable growth. It will also recommend when it may make economic sense to outsource at least some of the work.
2 Key Components of a Successful Manufacturing Brand
Define your company’s value proposition from the customer’s perspective. Manufacturers often focus on technical features instead of how their solutions solve their customers’ real-world problems. Don’t get me wrong, product specifications, datasheets, and performance data must be there; they are not optional. Engineers consider this type of content as the most valuable when considering work-related purchases. (See Content Preferences of Engineers and Industrial Buyers).
However, to stand out, consider the specific benefits of your products or services. What pain points do you address? How do you help customers save time and money or improve their operations? Are they even aware they have a problem? This understanding is the bedrock of your manufacturing branding.
Craft an “elevator pitch” that highlights your unique benefits. Having a concise, compelling statement about your manufacturing company is essential. It should clearly define who you serve, the problems you solve, and what makes you different from the competition. Quickly answer the What, Who, and Why questions to address their WIIFM (What’s in it for me ) concerns.
This elevator pitch should be front and center on your website, sales materials, and day-to-day conversations—ensuring a consistent manufacturing brand message.
With vast amounts of information vying for our attention online, people are more likely to skim and switch sources quickly. That’s why presenting your manufacturing company’s unique value proposition clearly and succinctly is critical. A strong “elevator pitch” allows you to make a powerful impression, even within today’s fast-paced digital environment and short attention spans.
Industrial Content Marketing: Address Your Buyer’s Problems, Generate More High-Quality Leads
Before jumping into content creation, a carefully planned and well-thought-out content marketing strategy is imperative. It’s the key to meeting the unique challenges of the manufacturing sector. You need a clear roadmap instead of implementing hit-or-miss marketing tactics.
Armed with extensive online resources, industrial buyers are increasingly in self-select and self-serve mode, preferring to research and compare options independently before engaging with salespeople. Industrial content marketing offers a solution: by providing informative, helpful content addressing their pain points. You attract these buyers early in their journey and keep them engaged throughout the long sales cycle.
Building credibility, earning trust, and establishing thought leadership are vital for manufacturing companies. Industrial content marketing is your platform to showcase your expertise. You demonstrate your understanding of industry challenges and solutions through technical blog posts, in-depth whitepapers, and insightful webinars. This builds a strong brand message of reliability, quality, and professionalism, making you the go-to choice when a buyer is ready to reach out.
Targeted content tailored to each buyer persona ensures you’re speaking directly to their needs – whether it’s an engineer seeking specifications, a procurement officer interested in cost-saving analysis, or an executive wanting to know payback time and ROI. This constant reinforcement nurtures Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) into Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), maximizing sales team efforts and boosting win rates.
Build Relationships, Fuel Referrals, Motivate Your Team and Attract Top Talent
Build Relationships: Industrial content marketing puts your expertise and values on display. By providing valuable insights and solutions, you build trust with potential and existing customers, strengthening relationships for long-term success.
Fuel Referrals: Happy customers become your most powerful marketing asset, naturally encouraging valuable word-of-mouth referrals. Content that showcases client success stories and addresses industry pain points solidifies your reputation.
Motivate Your Team: A strong brand gives employees a shared purpose and a sense of pride. Content marketing can highlight company successes, employee achievements, and your unique culture, boosting team morale and engagement.
Attract Top Talent: Potential hires research companies just like customers do. Compelling content that showcases your expertise, values, and company culture makes your manufacturing company a top choice for the most talented professionals in the industry, especially important for the younger generation.
Use Industrial Content Marketing KPIs to Refine Strategy and Overcome Attribution Challenges
Tracking and measuring your industrial content marketing KPIs is absolutely essential for understanding what works, what doesn’t, and where to focus your efforts. You can gain valuable insights by monitoring metrics like website traffic, lead generation, and engagement rates. This data allows you to make informed adjustments to your strategy, ensuring the optimal use of resources and maximizing ROI.
However, it can be challenging to directly attribute marketing’s contribution to closed deals in long industrial sales cycles with multiple touchpoints. This is why breaking down silos by encouraging collaboration between marketing and sales teams is necessary.
Open communication, shared goals, and a unified approach to tracking customer journeys will help everyone appreciate marketing’s role in driving business growth and demonstrate the power of a cohesive team effort focused on increasing revenue for the company.
Tap Into Industry Expertise, Solve Your Bandwidth Issues, Scale Your Efforts and Not Your Team
For many small to mid-sized manufacturers and industrial companies, the demands of consistent, high-quality content creation and marketing can be overwhelming for a lean marketing team. Wearing many hats makes it challenging to devote the dedicated time for strategic planning and the specialized content creation needed to reach engineers and industrial buyers.
“Many manufacturing marketers wear too many hats.” (Source)
This is where partnering with an experienced industrial marketing agency can make all the difference. Agencies bring deep industry knowledge, technical expertise, and the skills to create engaging and relevant content—allowing you to scale your efforts without increasing headcount.
If you’re ready to see how outsourcing your industrial content marketing can boost your ROI, start a conversation with us today. Our 35+ years of hands-on experience working with manufacturers, distributors, and engineering companies can help take your industrial marketing to the next level. Let’s talk.
Industrial marketing for manufacturers is complicated, with many moving parts that must mesh together to produce measurable and sustainable results, i.e., generate better quality leads that turn into sales opportunities.
Let’s look at this problem from the perspective of an owner of a small to mid-sized manufacturing company, the Sales Manager, or the VP of Business Development, and finally, from the point of view of the Marketing Manager to understand why s/he needs outsourced help to improve their industrial marketing ROI.
You may notice some overlap between the challenges for different roles. You may face other challenges but these seem most common in my conversations with manufacturers and industrial companies.
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Industrial Marketing for Manufacturers: Perspective of a Founder/Owner of a Manufacturing Company
As the owner of a small to mid-sized manufacturing company, I face several significant challenges in growing our business. These challenges are common among companies of our size and often require strategic solutions to overcome. Here are some of the biggest hurdles we encounter and how industrial marketing can assist us in achieving our goals:
Limited Resources: One of the most significant challenges for small to mid-sized manufacturing companies is limited resources, including budget, manpower, and time. Industrial marketing for manufacturers offers solutions that allow us to maximize our resources. For example, industrial content marketing can be a cost-efficient way to engage with our target audience and showcase our expertise without requiring a significant financial investment.
Competition from Larger Players: Competing with larger manufacturing companies with more extensive resources and brand recognition can be daunting. Industrial marketing for manufacturers helps level the playing field by allowing us to target niche markets and communicate our unique value proposition effectively. By focusing on our strengths and differentiating ourselves from larger competitors, we can carve out a space for our brand in the marketplace.
Reaching Target Audience: Identifying and reaching our target audience of engineers, procurement managers, and other technical decision-makers within industries can be challenging. Industrial marketing strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), targeted advertising, and content marketing enable us to connect with the right audience online. We can increase visibility and attract potential customers by optimizing our digital presence and delivering relevant content to our target audience.
Building Brand Awareness: Building brand awareness is crucial for small to mid-sized manufacturing companies looking to expand their customer base. Industrial marketing tactics such as social media, email, and thought leadership content help us increase brand visibility and establish ourselves as industry experts. We can raise brand awareness and attract new customers by consistently engaging with our target audience across various channels.
Demonstrating Value Proposition: Effectively communicating our value proposition is essential for persuading potential customers to choose our products or services over competitors. Industrial marketing helps us showcase our unique selling points through targeted messaging, case studies, and customer testimonials. By demonstrating our value to customers and addressing their pain points, we can convince them of the benefits of choosing our offerings. (See How Manufacturers Can Use Content for Differentiation and Create a Competitive Edge).
Generating Quality Leads: Generating high-quality leads is critical for driving business growth. Industrial marketing tactics such as content marketing, lead nurturing campaigns and targeted advertising help us attract leads that are more likely to convert into customers. By providing valuable content and solutions to our target audience’s challenges, we can effectively capture their interest and guide them through the sales funnel.
Measuring ROI: Like any business investment, we need to measure our marketing efforts’ return on investment (ROI). Industrial marketing provides us with tools and metrics to track the performance of our campaigns, allowing us to measure the impact of our marketing activities on business outcomes such as lead generation, sales, and revenue. By analyzing data and making data-driven decisions, we can optimize our marketing strategies for maximum effectiveness.
Industrial Marketing for Manufacturers: Point of View of a Sales Manager/Director of Marketing
As the Sales Manager or VP of Business Development of a small to mid-sized manufacturing company, I encounter several significant challenges in growing our business. These challenges often require strategic solutions to overcome and drive sustainable growth. Here are some of the biggest hurdles we face and how industrial marketing can assist us in achieving our goals:
Limited Market Visibility: One of the primary challenges is limited market visibility, especially when competing against larger players in the industry. Industrial marketing plays a crucial role in increasing our brand’s visibility and awareness among our target audience. By leveraging strategies such as content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media marketing, we can enhance our online presence and reach a broader audience of potential customers.
Long Sales Cycles: Sales cycles in the manufacturing industry tend to be longer due to the complexity of products and decision-making processes. Industrial marketing helps facilitate these longer sales cycles by providing valuable educational content that nurtures leads throughout their journey. By delivering informative content such as whitepapers, case studies, and webinars, we can educate potential customers, build trust, and guide them through the sales funnel more effectively.
Technical Sales Process: Selling technical products or solutions requires a deep understanding of the customer’s needs and technical specifications. Industrial marketing assists in this process by providing relevant technical content that addresses our target audience’s specific challenges and requirements. By creating detailed product documentation, specification sheets, and technical articles, we can empower our sales team with the resources they need to communicate our value to potential customers effectively.
Competitive Landscape: The manufacturing industry is highly competitive, with numerous companies vying for market share. Industrial marketing helps us differentiate ourselves from competitors by highlighting our unique value proposition and strengths. By developing targeted messaging and positioning ourselves as industry experts through thought leadership content, we can stand out in a crowded marketplace and attract customers who value our expertise and offerings.
Lead Generation and Qualification: Generating high-quality leads and systematically qualifying them are essential for driving business growth. Industrial marketing tactics such as content marketing, email marketing, and targeted advertising help us attract leads that are more likely to convert into customers. By creating compelling content that addresses the pain points of our target audience and implementing lead scoring and nurturing processes, we can identify and prioritize leads with the highest potential for conversion.
Why Would a Marketing Manager of a Manufacturing Company Outsource Industrial Marketing Tasks?
As the Marketing Manager at a small to mid-sized manufacturing company, there are several reasons why seeking outside help can be beneficial in improving our marketing ROI:
“59% of respondents said their organization outsources at least one content marketing activity. Their top challenge is finding partners with adequate topical expertise (60%).”(Source: The Content Marketing Institute).
Expertise and Specialization: Outside agencies or consultants often bring specialized expertise in industrial marketing that may not be available in-house. They have experience working with manufacturing companies and understand the unique challenges and opportunities within the industry. Their specialized knowledge can help identify effective strategies and tactics to improve marketing ROI.
Resource Constraints: Small to mid-sized manufacturing companies may have limited resources, including budget, manpower, and time, to dedicate to marketing efforts. Outsourcing certain marketing tasks can help alleviate these resource constraints by leveraging external resources and expertise. This allows the internal marketing team to focus on core strategic initiatives while external partners handle specific tasks.
Access to Tools and Technology: Marketing agencies often have access to advanced tools, technology, and analytics platforms that may not be affordable or practical for small to mid-sized companies to invest in independently. These tools can provide valuable insights and data-driven recommendations to optimize marketing strategies and improve ROI.
Fresh Perspective: Outside agencies or consultants bring a fresh perspective to marketing initiatives. They can offer new ideas, creative solutions, and innovative approaches that may not have been considered internally. This fresh perspective can help break through existing barriers and drive more effective marketing campaigns.
Scalability and Flexibility: Outsourcing marketing tasks provides scalability and flexibility to adapt to changing business needs and market conditions. External partners can quickly scale up or down based on demand, allowing the company to maintain agility and responsiveness in its marketing efforts.
Specific industrial marketing tasks that could be outsourced to improve marketing ROI include:
Content Creation:Outsourcing content creation tasks such as blog writing, whitepapers, case studies, and technical articles can help ensure a consistent flow of high-quality content that resonates with the target audience.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is crucial for improving online visibility and driving organic traffic to the company’s website. Outsourcing SEO tasks such as keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building can help improve search engine rankings and increase website traffic.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: Managing PPC advertising campaigns on platforms like Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads requires specialized knowledge and expertise. Outsourcing PPC advertising tasks to a qualified agency can help optimize campaigns, maximize ad spend, and improve ROI.
Social Media Management: Managing social media accounts and creating engaging content requires dedicated time and resources. Outsourcing social media management tasks such as content creation, scheduling, and community engagement can help maintain a consistent presence on social platforms and drive engagement with the target audience.
Email Marketing: Email marketing is a powerful tool for nurturing leads and driving conversions. Outsourcing email marketing tasks such as campaign management, list segmentation, and performance tracking can help improve email deliverability, engagement rates, and overall effectiveness.
By outsourcing these tasks to external partners with expertise in industrial marketing, I can focus on strategic planning, analysis, and optimization to improve overall marketing ROI and drive business growth.
You may have noticed that increasing brand awareness is a common challenge. Yet, when I talk to manufacturing prospects, our conversations inevitably start with, “We need more leads.”
85% of manufacturing marketers successfully use content marketing to create brand awareness. The fact is that manufacturing branding directly impacts the quality of the leads generated. Look at this chart from the 2023 Insights Manufacturing Content Marketing report published by the Content Marketing Institute.
To summarize, industrial marketing offers strategic solutions to help small to mid-sized manufacturing companies overcome challenges and achieve their business goals. By leveraging cost-effective tactics, targeting niche markets, building brand awareness, communicating our value proposition, generating quality leads, and measuring ROI, industrial marketing enables us to compete effectively in the marketplace and drive business growth.
Tiecas has extensive knowledge and over 35 years of hands-on experience in marketing to engineers and industrial buyers. If you want to improve your industrial marketing ROI, contact us today for strategic help tailored to your manufacturing business. Let’s Talk.
On top of that, manufacturing marketers have to deal with and understand a bunch of acronyms—AIDA, ToFU, MoFu, BoFU, CTA, MQLs, SQLs, SAL, PPC, CTR, ROMI, etc., to name just a few. Are you familiar with all of them?
AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action
ToFU: Top of the funnel
MoFU: Middle of the funnel
BoFU: Bottom of the funnel
CTA: Call-to-action
MQLs: Marketing Qualified Leads
SQLs: Sales Qualified Leads
SAL: Sales Accepted Leads
PPC: Pay-per-click
CTR: Click-through rate
ROMI: Return-on-marketing-investment
Really, the list is endless.
The success of industrial lead generation depends on SAL
You know all about the problem of Sales and Marketing operating in separate silos. Sales always blames Marketing for generating “crappy” leads, and Marketing points fingers at Sales for not taking follow-up action.
SAL to the rescue!
Huh? What am I talking about – Sales Accepted Leads is the bridge between Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Clearly defining MQL, SAL and SQL are critical to the success of lead generation for manufacturers.
What are MQLs and SQLS?
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is someone who has shown some interest and filled out a form with their basic contact information to download your content they believe is valuable. These are top-of-the-funnel (ToFU) leads.
A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is someone who has shown an interest in your product or service and not just in consuming your content. These prospects are further along in their buying journey. These are middle-of-the-funnel (MoFU) leads who may be ready to have a conversation with your sales team.
One of the biggest mistakes Marketing makes is they tend to hand off MQLs to Sales to qualify and close. However, marketing’s job doesn’t end with generating MQLs. There is a lot more work to be done.
There is an essential step between MQLs and SQLs. I refer to it as SAL – Sales Accepted Lead; it bridges the gap between the two.
SAL cannot be subjective or arbitrary. Assigning a numeric score to qualified sales leads based on a predefined set of rules removes the subjectivity out of qualitative ranking like Hot, Warm, and Cold leads. Quantitative lead definitions reduce the friction between Sales and Marketing.
SAL is a three-letter word that is the critical step in achieving Sales and Marketing alignment.
The two have to work together to come up with a unified definition of a qualified lead
Sales agrees to take follow-up action on these leads
Sales provides feedback to Marketing to refine these definitions and scores over time
Marketing must be willing to adjust scoring rules based on feedback from sales to refine lead scoring for optimal results (closed loop system)
Without SAL, Sales and Marketing will continue to point fingers at each other when things don’t go right
Marketing Automation for manufacturers
Scoring and grading leads manually or using a simple spreadsheet are time-consuming and prone to errors. Manufacturers should use Marketing Automation software to make the process a lot more efficient and accurate. There are many more benefits to using Marketing Automation.
The key takeaway is that you may be making a very costly mistake if you treat all your leads the same, put them in a common bucket, and toss them over to sales to qualify and close. Instead, you will need some form of SAL to maximize your ROI for lead generation for manufacturers.
Gated content is the most common way for manufacturers to generate leads from industrial websites. If you are not familiar with the term gated content, it refers to content that needs the reader to fill out a form and submit it before either downloading or reading the full version.
Obviously, you can’t gate all your content without seriously pi***ng off your readers. So, the question is, what content should you gate?
There isn’t a simple answer because what you may consider valuable, your readers may not perceive it the same way. So, they may not see it as a worthwhile value exchange.
What gated content do engineers and industrial buyers consider valuable?
If you use gated content such as white papers, e-books, etc., you know they usually work well at the top of the funnel for Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). However, instead of guessing, let’s look at the findings from an independent research study—2022 State of Marketing to Engineers.
Don’t miss the last item on the chart, some industrial professionals just won’t fill out a form, period.
Avoid increasing resistance in your sign-up forms
There is always the temptation to ask for all information you can get from a gated content. Don’t! The more fields you have on your sign-up forms, the greater is the resistance of your readers to complete them. Or they may just fill out garbage information just to gain access to the content. For example, don’t ask for a phone number for someone to download a PDF. Using progressive fields in your forms is a better solution.
Going back to an older research report from 2020, the increasing resistance of engineers to the number of fields in a sign-up form is very clear. (Source: 2020 Smart Marketing for Engineers).
“Engineers are most likely to complete the following form fields on a company’s website: work email address (84 percent); first name (82 percent); company name (70 percent); and last name (69 percent). Conversely, engineers are least likely to provide mobile phone number (20 percent) and purchase timeframe (17 percent).”
Challenges of creating valuable content in manufacturing marketing
In my previous post, Marketing to Engineers—Why Digital is the Dominant Strategy, I wrote about the value of product datasheets. In fact, engineers consider them the most useful when researching work-related purchases. However, your readers expect these to be freely available and not gated.
Most manufacturing companies I’ve worked with have a sales-oriented mindset. It is difficult for key decision-makers in these organizations to think about content marketing as setting the table for Sales.
Creating valuable content instead of sales-oriented content (51%)
Overcoming the traditional marketing and sales mindset (51%)
Accessing subject matter experts to create content (50%)
Using gated content as sales enablers
Refer to the first chart in this post—CAD Drawings are the second most valuable gated content for engineers. There are very good reasons for that. These are critically important to manufacturers of industrial components and parts. I’ll cite three of them from the report, 6 Digital Essentials for Selling & Marketing to Engineers & Architects published by CADENAS PARTsolutions.
65% of engineers & architects see native CAD/BIM models as the #1 criteria for part selection
80% of designers bounce before contacting a supplier with limited CAD or BIM data
82% of CAD/BIM downloads convert into physical product sales
I have also seen other content assets that are used effectively as sales enablers. Not all of them are gated either.
Online configurators
Valve and pump sizing programs
Part number guides for cross referencing
…and many more
Another trend that I have seen is for some manufacturers and industrial distributors using e-commerce to sell directly. This works great for standard products. A combination of e-commerce solution with a configurator works well for custom engineered systems where you build a detailed RFQ instead of adding it to a cart and checking out.
Making sales teams more productive with the right content
This is more of an internal issue between marketing and sales teams. I’m sure you’ve heard and read a lot about how the two need to play together nicely. The reality is that it takes a lot of hard work and willingness for both parties to make that happen.
I recently downloaded an excellent guide called, The Complete Guide to Sales Content Management, published by Allego. Here’s a direct quote from their guide: “Your first priority is to deliver the best content that will move deals through the pipeline. But, too often, this content never sees the light of day. Research shows that reps spend 10+ hours a week searching for customer-ready material when content is scattered or lost in silos.”
The main reasons they provide for this underutilization are:
Sellers don’t really like the content and think it’s not relevant, too long, too short, etc.
Sellers don’t know there is new content and keep using old, familiar pieces
Sellers can’t find new content when they need it
Sellers don’t know how to use the content or understand its value in the sales process
The key takeaway is—Manufacturing marketers can’t focus only on lead generation; they also need to help their sales team use the content they create effectively to become more productive.
You should have a good overview of gated vs. ungated content in manufacturing marketing now that you have read this post to the end; I thank you for it.
You can’t avoid technical content writing if you are a manufacturing content marketer. Let me first differentiate technical writing from technical content writing. They may be used interchangeably, but they are not the same.
A technical writer is good at creating documents such as User Manuals, Product Descriptions & Specifications, Safety Procedures, Assembly Instructions, and a host of other technical documents.
On the other hand, a technical content writer creates content for manufacturing marketing such as blog posts, web page copy, case studies, and white papers, to name a few. These are used for achieving marketing goals such as increasing traffic to the site, improving SEO, generating Marketing Qualified Leads(MQLs), branding, thought leadership, and gaining trust.
Technical writers and technical content creators both play essential roles for manufacturers. I’ll focus on technical content writing for industrial and manufacturing marketing in this post.
A manufacturing content marketer is much more than a copywriter. S/he is capable of developing a content marketing strategy, creating buyer personas, knows SEO, understands how engineers and industrial buyers go on their buying journey, knows about email marketing, content promotion, social media, and tracking & measurement. I’ve only listed the important responsibilities, but there is a lot more that goes into content marketing.
It’s not just technical content writing that’s a hurdle
51% of manufacturing content marketers said they are challenged with creating valuable content instead of sales-oriented content and overcoming the traditional marketing and sales mindset. That’s according to the Manufacturing Content Marketing – Insights For 2022 published by the Content Marketing Institute.
As you can see from those stats, the problem is not an isolated issue, but it affects more than half of the manufacturing marketers.
What is making the problem worse is the fact that 59% of manufacturing companies have a small or one-person content marketing team serving the entire organization. They just have too much to do and not enough time.
Finding qualified technical writing partners is another challenge
Lack of time isn’t the only problem. Internal content marketers have limited to little access to their in-house Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). The one-person content creator may know marketing, but s/he may lack the technical knowledge to create content that the target audience of engineers and industrial professionals will find relevant and engaging. Learn more about how to work with SMEs for creating engaging content.
As a result, 59% of manufacturers outsource at least one marketing activity. Last year’s survey found content creation was the most outsourced activity at 80%.
However, it is not just a matter of finding freelance copywriters from one of the many services that are out there. The two biggest challenges were finding partners with adequate technical knowledge and understanding the target audience’s mindset.
Research findings are great when they validate your personal experiences. Most often than not, my conversations with manufacturing marketers start with something like this, “We need someone to create good technical content that will generate leads.” Therein lies another problem, a lack of understanding of the difference between content creation and content marketing.
Just writing technical content is not good enough. You need someone who understands and has first-hand experience in the full range of industrial marketing strategies and tactics. (Shameless plug coming up) That’s why you may want to consider my Manufacturing Content Marketing for Industrial Lead Generation service, which includes technical content writing.
