Blog Post

Digital Industrial Marketing: Blending Sales and Marketing for Success

  • By Mark Baker
  • 11 Dec, 2015

Imagine this: You help run a manufacturing, distribution, or engineering company. Lately, sales have been slow, and you need to take action to start generating more qualified leads.

Someone at the top of the company suggests that lowering prices is a good strategy to see more prospects and sales immediately.

After a few weeks, you discover that lowering prices hasn’t actually been working. Why?

UNCOVERING INVISIBLE BUYERS

Currently, many industrial buyers are very self-selecting. This makes it nearly impossible to reach out to prospects. They don't want to have a conversation with your sales team, and they don’t want to engage with your brand until they feel that they are truly ready. Inundating prospects with cold calls and filling up their inboxes with unwanted emails isn’t going to convince them that your industrial product or solution is right for them.

If you want more prospects, more buyers, and more revenue, you need to take the battle online.

Studies done by IHS GlobalSpec showed that:

  • Forty-eight percent of industrial professionals will spend at least six hours online for work-related research every week.

  • Approximately 42 percent of industrial professionals will use the internet to look up at least ten different industrial-related websites per week.

  • Seventy-four percent of these industrial professionals search online for equipment, services, and suppliers.

  • Seventy-three percent are looking for product specifications.

  • Sixty-nine percent compare supplier's products, while 68 percent are using the internet to find pricing information and conduct industrial research.

The numbers show that your brand needs to be located exactly where engineers and industrial buyers are constantly seeking information. Your digital marketing campaign should concentrate on making your core ideas, facts, and solutions readily available to prospects.

UTILIZING DIGITAL INDUSTRIAL MARKETING

It's anything but easy to convince industrial and manufacturing management to change the way they do business. The industrial mindset has always been that sales are superior, and are vastly more important than marketing.

It's time to push reset and shift gears.

Industrial buyers are 60 percent to 70 percent done with their purchasing decisions before they even connect with a sales team. This makes it increasingly difficult for salespeople to connect with prospects.

The key to connecting with more qualified prospects and to having sales and clients engage in more meaningful conversations is to align online industrial marketing with the consumer’s behavior and their information needs.

In decades past, outbound marketing would create the message and the sales teams would create the business-to-consumer relationship. But times have changed, sales teams are dwindling, and digital industrial marketing has evolved to the point where a harmonious relationship between sales and marketing is necessary for success.  

OBSERVE THE COMPETITION

It's always a good idea to head over to your competitors’ websites and see what they're saying on their blogs and social media platforms. Are they successfully implementing a content-marketing plan, or are they missing the mark somewhere?

Evaluating your online competition makes it far easier to create a digital marketing plan that helps you carve out a place for yourself. What does the content on your competitors’ sites have in common? How can your brand stand out? What can you offer that your competitors don't?

Creating and implementing a digital industrial-marketing strategy that uses compelling content and personalization methods is no easy feat, especially in the industrial B2B space, where prospects are limited. However, with a coordinated working relationship between your sales and marketing teams, and the right research, your digital marketing campaign can help the right prospects find you when they need you.

Mark Baker

Mark Baker is a natural artist. Since starting his first business hand painting graphics onto vehicles in high school, Mark gained experience in the entertainment, sports, and retail industries before founding this company in 1993. Honest and pragmatic, Mark knows that anything can be accomplished with a great communication plan and creative thinking. 

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