Month: January 2020

5 Industrial Marketing Challenges – and How to Overcome Them

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

If you’re responsible for marketing, sales or business development for your B2B company, you have a unique and different set of challenges than businesses looking to market directly to consumers. While B2B marketing uses many of the same techniques as B2C marketing, the application is very different and marketing to other businesses requires a different content strategy focused on different channels. It’s essential to set good metrics and make sure you’re tracking the impact of your efforts. While there are a number of challenges of industrial marketing, here are a few common ones, and how you can overcome them.

Producing Quality Content

Content marketing, as part of a broader inbound marketing system, is an incredibly effective way to draw in an audience of potential leads, showcase your expertise, and get leads reaching out to you. However, producing that content, especially in an industrial setting, can be a challenge. The content has to be technical enough to show a clear understanding of the material without being so complex as to turn off potential leads who come from business backgrounds, like a VP Purchasing or CMO, who aren’t experts in the technical side of your product. The solution is to have content marketers work closely with technical staff to ensure that content produced is both accurate and readable. With the directive from upper management to participate, technical team members often enjoy explaining everything they do.

Promoting Your Content

Putting out great content is only the first step. Once you’ve written an article that you think will resonate with potential leads, you have to publish it in different channels that will get their attention. Your business needs to have a presence in a number of different content channels and plans to attract leads to your content. It’s key to think about your target market and to understand what channels they use most for industry learning and research. For example, in the US LinkedIn is a primary content channel for serious B2B companies. However, in India, Facebook and Youtube are extremely relevant even for highly technical businesses. Making a good content distribution plan based on your target audience before you start publishing content is a good way to ensure that what you write gets read by the right people.

Setting Expectations

Everyone, including upper management, reads stories about runaway successes with internet marketing, so it’s important before you begin your marketing campaign to research what is typical for your industry and set expectations accordingly. Then, revisit your plan periodically and compare your expectations to actual campaign metrics. Show how many people are viewing your content in different channels and how many are clicking through to your website or reaching out for follow up. If you can, work with your sales team to track how many of these leads convert into sales so you can show, with a dollar amount, the impact of your marketing efforts.

Maintaining Publishing Schedules

Once you’ve started a successful content campaign, you need to continue to develop content so that fresh material containing the correct keywords appears on your website and in your content channels. Someone on the marketing team has to take responsibility for researching and creating content and making sure it gets out on time. If you don’t have an in house marketing team, consider outsourcing your marketing to an external agency that specializes in B2B companies – sticking to a publishing schedule gets challenging if there is no one dedicated to the project. Don’t think you need to publish daily for success. Instead, focus on quality, reliability and applicability so that your articles have the biggest impact.

Trying New Channels

If your organization is having success with one content channel, it may be difficult to get them to consider trying a different or new channel. This is often a place where recycling old content can be useful to establish yourself on the channel or, if you’re looking at something like YouTube where you’d have to create video content, that content can then be used on your existing channels. Shaking up the type of content offered can get the attention of your existing audience and give you a great way to cross-promote your efforts.

While inbound marketing for industrial B2B businesses can be challenging, with good planning and execution, it can be very effective. Bringing in a team like StepUp can help meet this challenge. We take the time to understand your business and brainstorm content ideas that will resonate with your leads. Then we work with your staff to ensure our content is accurate but we take the responsibility for keeping the good content coming. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to us for a free marketing strategy session and learn how to apply inbound marketing principles to your business.

 

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Top B2B Marketing Trends to Follow this Year

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

Top B2B Marketing Trends to Follow this Year

Digital marketing has become increasingly popular for B2B and manufacturing companies. The field of digital marketing has also evolved both contextually and technologically. 

Marketers constantly need to consider how they incorporate the new online channels and platforms that are emerging. They also need to adjust how they work with their existing marketing tools which are also constantly being updated.

With all of this change, keeping up with the current marketing trends can be challenging. Even more so for marketers of B2B and manufacturing companies, where marketing can be a greater challenge due to the highly technical nature of the value offer. In this article, we present our top 6 picks for the most important B2B marketing trends to follow this year.

Dive Deeper: Download the Playbook for B2B and Manufacturing marketers >>>

1. Specialized Content Marketing

One of the most important marketing principles in B2B is content marketing. 

The trend is moving from generalized “marketing speak” to presenting technical information in a educational, concise and easy to understand manner. 

Educational content is found to be effective for all different types of formats: professional articles, videos, podcasts, and webinars.

2. Smart Lead Qualification

We are increasingly seeing more companies investing in smart CRMs, powered by artificial intelligence for lead qualification automation. These systems help in identifying qualified leads from early on in the process. When companies increase the effectiveness of their marketing and sales efforts in this way, they are able to allocate resources towards leads that are more likely to convert to paying customers.

3. Personalization

Marketers are increasingly serving prospects with personalized content, rather than the traditional one-size-fits-all approach. Personalization tools can target content depending on personal information such as demographics, interests, and other profiling criteria. This type of targeted content resonates more with the audience, resulting in increased engagement.

4. Offline & Online Working Together

The benefits of participating in trade shows and industry meetups is multiplied when they are coupled with online marketing activities. Firstly, targeted online marketing efforts before a trade show can increase the effectiveness of the trade show. Secondly, by adapting and customizing online marketing after a trade show, a company will have an even stronger impression on their target audiences. When offline and online marketing activities are in sync, a company is able to optimize their effects and provide maximum returns in both cases.

5. PR & Influencer Marketing

Companies are increasingly turning to PR techniques for online marketing. For example, a manufacturer will select middle to high-level managers to publish guest posts on industry trade magazines. Another technique is involving renowned celebrity professionals in their marketing to strengthen their brand.

6. B2B2C

For B2B and especially manufacturers, it can be extremely effective to sell directly to the consumer. Even though they are not the ones who will be purchasing directly from you. The aim is simple, by educating you can influence the end consumer and thereby create demand in your market.

Although we see a technology shift in the industry, what most B2B and manufacturing companies still lack is a clear marketing strategy and an actionable plan. Moreover, there are so many marketing possibilities for B2B manufacturers to choose from. Structuring an actionable strategy that contains the parts that are right for your company can be difficult. This is where StepUp comes in, an inbound marketing agency for manufacturers and B2B companies in unlocking their full potential.

Our clients worked hard to achieve where they are today and we strive to build on that by helping them devise strategies that not only raise their visibility and competitive advantage, but also accelerate their sales and growth.

Contact us for a free consultation to hear how we can help you conceive and implement a solid online marketing strategy plan, tailored to your needs and budget.

 

Digital marketing for B2B

The Manufacturing Marketing Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide for Industrial B2B

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

Originally published January 2020. Updated October 2026.

Manufacturing marketing has a reputation problem, and it’s mostly earned. For decades the plan was a trade show booth, a brochure that hadn’t been updated since the previous CEO, and a sales team that “handled the relationships.” (It’s always the relationships.) Marketing was the department that ordered the lanyards.

Then buyers changed. The engineer who specs your part now does most of her research before she ever talks to you. She reads datasheets at 11 pm, compares three suppliers on Google, and asks ChatGPT which one has the better tolerance range. By the time she calls, the shortlist is done.

It’s a strange time to be marketing a machine.

Meanwhile, someone in the boardroom has decided AI will fix it, and that by Q3 the company will have “a digital-first industrial brand” with the same two people who currently run the website and the trade shows. Bless.

The good news is that manufacturers don’t need a giant team to compete. They need a plan: written down, tied to sales, aimed at the right buyers and honest about what the team can do. A manufacturing marketing plan is that document, and it fits on a few pages.

This guide walks through how to build one in eight steps, with a template at the end.

What Is a Manufacturing Marketing Plan?

A manufacturing marketing plan is a written plan for how a manufacturer will find, win and keep the right customers over the next year. In short, it sets the goals, names the buyers, picks the channels, assigns the work and decides how results are measured.

What makes it different from a general marketing plan is the buyer. Industrial purchases are technical, slow, expensive and decided by several people at once. So the plan has to speak to an engineer, a buyer in procurement and an operations manager, often for the same order.

Why Manufacturers Need a Different Plan

Four things set manufacturing marketing apart:

  • Long sales cycles. Six to eighteen months is normal. The plan has to support buyers for that long, rather than chase a burst of leads.
  • Technical buyers. Engineers want specs, data and proof. Vague claims lose them on the first page.
  • Several decision-makers. Engineering, procurement, operations and finance each need a different reason to say yes.
  • Sales owns the relationship. So marketing’s job is to make sales conversations easier, start more of them, and keep the company in the buyer’s mind between them.

As a result, the plan leans on content that answers technical questions, a website that works as a sales tool, and tight alignment with the sales team. Our post on industrial marketing challenges also covers the common traps in more detail.

How to Build a Manufacturing Marketing Plan in 8 Steps

1. Set Goals That Start From Sales

Begin with the number sales needs. How many new customers this year? Then, how many opportunities does that take, at your usual win rate? How many qualified conversations to create those opportunities?

Work backward from there. If sales needs 40 opportunities and half of qualified conversations become opportunities, marketing needs to help create 80 qualified conversations. That is a goal both teams can agree on, and it beats “increase brand awareness” every time.

Then write the goals as two or three objectives with numbers attached. Our guide to marketing OKRs shows the format.

2. Define Your Ideal Customer

List the industries, company sizes and regions where you win most often and at the best margin. Then describe the companies you want more of. This list then becomes your ideal customer profile, and every other step points at it.

If you don’t have one written down yet, our practical guide to building an ICP walks through it step by step.

3. Map the Buying Group

For each target account, name the people involved in a purchase and what each one needs from you.

Role What They Care About What Wins Them Over
Design or process engineer Specs, tolerances, materials, compatibility Datasheets, CAD files, application notes, a fast answer from a real engineer
Procurement Price, lead times, supplier risk Clear terms, certifications, references
Operations or plant manager Uptime, installation, support Case studies, service plans, training
Finance or leadership Total cost, payback, risk A cost comparison and proof from similar companies

Engineers deserve special attention, because they often decide the shortlist. Our post on marketing for engineers explains why your own technical team belongs in the process.

4. Write Your Positioning Down

In one paragraph: who you serve, the problem you solve, and why you’re the better choice. Then the three proof points that back it up, such as a certification, a performance number, or a customer result.

This sounds basic, yet most manufacturers skip it. As a result, the website, the brochure and the sales deck each describe the company differently. Write it once and use it everywhere.

5. Choose Your Channels

Pick the few channels where your buyers actually look, and do them well. For most industrial B2B companies, that means:

  • The website and search. Engineers search for specific problems, materials and part types. So pages that answer those searches bring buyers who are already looking.
  • Technical content. Application notes, comparison guides and how-to articles that an engineer would bookmark.
  • LinkedIn. For reaching named accounts and keeping leadership visible between sales cycles.
  • Trade shows. Still valuable, if you plan the follow-up before the show. Our trade show ROI tips cover how.
  • Email to existing contacts. The cheapest channel most manufacturers underuse.

In general, two to four channels done consistently beat seven done occasionally. For inspiration on the website side, see our roundup of industrial website examples.

6. Build the Content Plan

List the questions each member of the buying group asks, then plan one piece of content for each important question. Organize the plan by quarter, with one main theme per quarter, so the work builds on itself.

For example, a quarter on “reducing downtime” might include an application note for engineers, a cost comparison for finance, a customer story for operations and a webinar recording for sales to send. Our collection of content marketing examples for manufacturers has more ideas.

7. Set the Budget and the Team

Decide what you’ll spend on each channel and who does the work: your team, sales, engineering, an agency or AI. Be honest about capacity, because a plan that needs 30 hours a week from a team of one will fail by March.

This is also where AI earns its place. An AI assistant can draft application notes from engineering’s notes, keep product pages current, pull the monthly numbers and repurpose one webinar into five posts. A person still owns the technical accuracy and the sign-off, which in manufacturing matters more than anywhere. Our AI marketing playbook for manufacturers goes deeper.

8. Measure and Review Every Quarter

Track a short list of numbers tied to the goals in step 1: qualified conversations, opportunities created, website leads from target accounts and pipeline from marketing. Then review them every month with sales and adjust every quarter.

Keep the list short. Our guide to B2B marketing KPIs covers which numbers to keep and which to drop.

A Manufacturing Marketing Plan Template

Use this outline as your plan’s table of contents. Each section can be a few lines.

Section What Goes In It
1. Goals Two or three objectives with numbers, worked back from sales targets
2. Ideal customer Industries, sizes, regions, and why you win there
3. Buying group Each role, what they need, what wins them over
4. Positioning One paragraph and three proof points
5. Channels Two to four channels and the job of each
6. Content plan One theme per quarter and the pieces under it
7. Budget and team Spend by channel, who does what, where AI helps
8. Measurement Five to seven numbers, reviewed monthly with sales

If you’d like to fit it all on a single page first, start with our one-page marketing plan and expand from there.

Common Mistakes in Manufacturing Marketing Plans

Planning Activities Instead of Outcomes

“Attend four trade shows” is an activity. “Create 30 qualified conversations from trade shows” is a goal, and it changes how you plan each show.

Writing for Everyone

A plan aimed at “manufacturers” is aimed at no one. Name the industries and roles. It’s also fine to say no to the rest.

Leaving Sales Out

A plan that sales hasn’t seen will be ignored by sales. Instead, build the goals with them, agree on what a qualified lead is, and review results together.

Treating the Website as a Brochure

For an engineer at 11 pm, your website is the salesperson. If she can’t find specs, compare options or reach someone technical, she moves to the next supplier.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should a manufacturing marketing plan include?

A manufacturing marketing plan should include goals tied to sales targets, an ideal customer profile, a map of the buying group, written positioning, two to four channels, a quarterly content plan, a budget with owners, and a short list of numbers reviewed monthly.

How do you create a marketing plan for a manufacturing company?

Start from the sales target and work backward to how many qualified conversations marketing must help create. Then define the ideal customer, map who is involved in buying, write the positioning, choose the channels, plan content by quarter, set the budget and team, and review results with sales every month.

What marketing channels work best for manufacturers?

For most industrial B2B companies, the website and search, technical content, LinkedIn, trade shows with planned follow-up, and email to existing contacts. Two to four channels done consistently work better than many done occasionally.

How long should a manufacturing marketing plan be?

A few pages is enough. Each of the eight sections can be a short paragraph or a table. A one-page version is a good starting point, and the full plan grows from it.

Can a small manufacturing team use AI in its marketing plan?

Yes. AI can draft technical content from engineering’s notes, keep product pages current, pull monthly numbers and repurpose content. A person should still own technical accuracy, the message and the final sign-off.

The Lanyards Can Stay

Marketing at a manufacturer doesn’t need to stop ordering lanyards. It just needs a plan that sits next to the order form: goals sales agreed to, buyers with names and roles, and a website that answers the engineer at 11 pm.

Write it down. Review it with sales. Let AI carry some of the load, and keep the technical sign-off with someone who knows the tolerance range by heart.

The board’s “digital-first industrial brand” will show up eventually. Probably by Q4.

Want to know if your team is ready to bring AI into the plan? Take the free AI-Readiness Self-Audit.