How Your Industrial Company can Deal with Marketing Challenges Head-on
Daniel Kelly
Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist
With the onset of digitisation, the way buyers research potential solutions to their problems have completely changed. Traditionally, the role of marketing is to support the sales team with brochures and static website pages but that has changed inside out. Buyers are now capable of doing their own independent research online to give them all the information they need. This is why you need to be ready to cater to your customer’s searches and queries, whether online and off. So, how can the marketing team keep up with the streamlined, data-charged way of doing business?
Your Website: To DIY or Not
Ingredients of a superb industrial B2B marketing plan
To be able to keep up with digitisation, every industrial marketing manager should include the following in their marketing plan:
1. Content marketing
Most industrial organisations have marketing teams that manage trade show requirements, come up with materials for sales, produce and update brochures, help write proposals, and supported sales with promotions and campaigns on an ad-hoc basis. Most of these are content so experienced marketers can easily transition into producing data-driven and contextual ways of delivering content to potential buyers online.
To help you deliver the right message, it is important to understand your customer’s information needs and behaviour at every stage of the buying process. This can help you attract and nurture leads to sales-readiness and then hand them over to the sales team for a successful close. One local SEO strategy that you can use is to make sure that your site is optimised for local searches since most potential customers are always looking for suppliers that are close by. Make sure you get hold of the marketing strategy, automation tools, and data skills needed to help your industrial company rank well and get ahead of the competition.
2. Brand
Before the age of digitisation went full blast, the role of a website is to provide brochure support for the sales team. Now, it is used to attract, convert, and nurture buying leads. Most senior stakeholders in industrial marketing have been doing their thing for years, including personal selling which is a crucial role, and have a relatively small number of big customers. At present, industrial companies face the challenge of bridging the gap between the salesperson and the potential customer before they even come into contact since most of the communication is done online (via the web, social media, review sites, and industry peer networks.) It is therefore important to know the value of a strong brand which helps establish credibility, professionalism, and adaptability which in turn builds customer trust.
3. Account-Based Marketing
In an industrial environment, big-deal decision-makers are harder to reach via digital methods since they are further up the chain than regular the B2B, especially with accounts of more than $250,000. This is where Account-Based Marketing (ABM) comes in. This form of personalised, end-to-end marketing strategy and sales process concentrates resources on a target or a set of target accounts within a market. By finding a way to measure interest and create supporting content, this tailored sales and marketing approach will help you meet the needs of your target client and gives you a high chance of closing a deal.
Conclusion
Stakeholder engagement and support are key elements in launching a successful industrial B2B marketing. Start small and scale from there. Choose an industry vertical to do some account-based marketing or improve your website pages with UX-Design. With these essential industrial marketing tools, you can easily attain your marketing goals!