Steve Trahanas - How to Choose the Right Manufacturing Digital Marketing Tactics

Focusing on too many marketing tactics and channels is a sure way to fail at all of them. That’s why 35% of manufacturing marketers last year discontinued specific marketing activities they’ve found to be ineffective so they could concentrate on those that yield the best results.

Analyze Your Audience

Your marketing should always be driven by your audience—but only 51% of manufacturing marketers prioritize their audience’s informational needs over their sales message!

Steve Trahanas says Before determining your marketing strategy, make sure you understand your audience by going through these steps.

Create Buyer Personas: Determine 2-3 of your ideal buyers and create profiles—also known as buyer personas—that list everything you know about them. Where do they live and what is their education level? What are their main concerns, and why would they need your product? Be as specific as possible.

Learn How Your Audience Gets Information: Once you know your ideal buyer personas, take the time to investigate how they get information and engage online. Use customer surveys, social media demographics, and study industry publications to learn what formats your audience is most likely to consume and where they go for answers to questions. Your ideal audience may Google their questions, turn to YouTube for how-to videos, or send out questions on Facebook.

Set Marketing Goals

What do you want to get out of your digital marketing efforts? 54% of manufacturing companies in 2019 say they are somewhat proficient at aligning metrics with their marketing, compared to 34% last year. The most common manufacturing digital marketing goals are:

Brand Awareness: For 79% of manufacturing marketers, the goal is to promote awareness around their brand, making it more familiar to their target audience.

Educate Audiences: 69% of manufacturing marketers plan on engaging their audience by providing informative, useful content that could benefit them.

Generate Leads: 66% of manufacturing marketers say they aim to build a list of potential clients that could convert into sales.

Build Credibility And Trust: 60% of marketers are looking to establish their brand as an authority in their industry to gain the trust of their target audience.

Build Loyalty With Existing Clients/Customers: Steve Trahanas building loyalty among customers gives brands a high return on time invested in their marketing, and is the fifth most common goal among manufacturing marketers.

  

Identify Resources and Determine Budget

Spreading your marketing across too many tactics and channels can divide your focus. On top of that, it will stretch your available budget and resources to their limits. Before choosing which digital marketing tactics your business will focus on, determine what resources you have available to you.

Your marketing resources will include three things:

Digital Marketing Budget

Existing Marketing Materials

Marketing Talent

When you start, the percent of your overall marketing budget devoted to digital marketing will probably be relatively low, and the marketing materials you have available to leverage may be few. For example, if your existing Marketing Talent is more experienced in traditional marketing tactics, you may need to hire additional talent or look towards a digital marketing agency to help you set a marketing strategy and execute.

Choose Manufacturing Digital Marketing Tactics

Once you have a better idea of what your audience wants, what your business needs, and what your budget will allow, you can choose which digital marketing tactics you’d like to start out with. On average, manufacturing marketers use five tactics for distributing marketing content—but this depends on the individual business.

The following are examples of useful digital marketing tactics for manufacturers. Before you invest in any of these, be sure to take the tips listed above into account: your audience, goals, resources, and budget. Knowing these factors will help you decide which of these tactics will be suited to your business.

Content Marketing

Creating blogs, videos, guides, and other content can be a great way to establish brand awareness for your company and generate leads. As an organization grows in content marketing maturity, its success is likely to increase; only 28/% of manufacturers rated their content marketing as mature or sophisticated, but of those companies, 41% said they were very successful with content marketing.