It takes more than a quality product or service to grow your business — if you’re ready to expand your manufacturing company, you need to develop your marketing and sales teams.
Strategic marketing and sales tactics can provide a massive return on investment, giving you the ability to scale your operations and reach a wider audience. But how do you get started with building and implementing a powerful marketing and sales strategy?
Below, we’ll share tips and tricks for growing the marketing and sales arm of your manufacturing business. By exploring the fundamental principles that drive business growth, you can better tailor your marketing and sales practices to have more impact.
Marketing and sales are closely related. While they both aim to attract more revenue, they go about the process in slightly different ways.
Marketing
Campaigns aim to generate interest in products and services among potential customers. Their primary goal is to attract new leads. Marketing may utilize videos, blog articles, social media, emails, search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising, and other campaigns to stir up brand awareness and interest.
Sales
Initiatives are centered around closing deals and converting leads into customers. Your sales team may only have a handful of interactions with these leads before they convert. As such, these exchanges are much more direct and individualized than marketing initiatives. They often involve in-person meetings, sales calls, and product demonstrations.
When done right, marketing and sales can work synergistically to grow your manufacturing business — you just need to optimize each one accordingly.
To that end, let’s start with marketing...
When establishing a marketing strategy, focus on setting up systems that consistently generate leads in the long term. You want your marketing assets to work for you and provide steady growth instead of relying on short-term expansion. A successful marketing strategy continually brings in leads and guides them through the sales funnel. It also creates a cohesive brand identity that consumers can recognize and relate to.
As you build your marketing plan, focus on establishing marketing processes that support your ongoing business operations. Before implementing your marketing plan, create a cohesive voice for your brand across your social media, web content, emails, and other tools. Outline what your growth goals are, what messaging you want to use, how you want to communicate with customers, and the timeline for releasing marketing content.
Enhancing how you communicate with prospects through branding can help attract more leads and build lasting relationships with existing customers, allowing for steady, consistent expansion.
Once you have a general idea of how you want to engage with your potential customers, it’s time to outline specific, actionable marketing steps for your manufacturing business. Here’s a primer on how to craft a custom marketing plan using proven, actionable steps:
Be prepared to demonstrate your value to consumers by understanding your unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP is a summary of what distinguishes your products, brand and business from competitors. It directly explains why customers should work with you instead of pursuing an alternative. Your USP could relate to your efficiency, product features, quality customer service, innovation, or any other selling point that attracts customers.
To develop your USP, conduct market research to learn about how your target audience views you and your competitors. Once you understand how others view your brand, you can incorporate the most compelling aspects of your reputation into your USP. This helps you highlight your unique assets in a way that connects with existing perceptions of your business.
The marketing mix is a time-tested framework that can help guide your overall strategy. It encompasses the main elements that you consider when marketing your products and services to a target audience:
As you establish the details of your marketing mix, keep your target customer in mind. By prioritizing their interests, you can position your products and services to appeal to their needs.
Consumers frequently use the internet as their first avenue for researching different subjects; and your business can use this to its advantage. By providing consumers with educational content related to your sector online, you can establish yourself as an authority in your field while growing your web presence. This online content can range from educational articles to webinars — all of which lead back to your products and services.
By optimizing your online content for SEO, you make it more likely for your content to appear when customers search for specific keywords. Persona research can teach you what keywords and topics relate to different segments of your target audience. You can then entice leads with helpful, educational information that directly relates to their interests and needs.
You can also use promotional emails, newsletters, press releases, and even direct mail as tactics for enhancing growth. Set up an ongoing content and marketing calendar to promote consistent, ongoing expansion and get the full benefit of each growth strategy.
After enacting your marketing strategy, you can expect to see an uptick in sales down the line. For instance, Tail Lights Inc. experienced the benefit of innovative digital marketing techniques when they partnered with CMTC to overhaul their website and social media for the launch of their latest product line. Since launching thoughtful SEO strategies and activating a network of influencers, Tail Lights Inc. has enjoyed a significant increase in web traffic. And because their updated marketing strategy aligned with the release of a new product line, that traffic led to a 47.8% increase in sales.
Elite Robotics also enjoyed a sizable sales increase by heavily advertising their product diversification initiatives. They used email campaigns with flashy graphics to generate interest from new target markets, allowing them to reach new leads and continue their diversification efforts.
Once you have a general idea of how you want to engage with your potential customers, it’s time to outline specific, actionable marketing steps for your manufacturing business. Here’s a primer on how to craft a custom marketing plan using proven, actionable steps:
Be prepared to demonstrate your value to consumers by understanding your unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP is a summary of what distinguishes your products, brand, and business from competitors. It directly explains why customers should work with you instead of pursuing an alternative. Your USP could relate to your efficiency, product features, quality customer service, innovation, or any other selling point that attracts customers.
To develop your USP, conduct market research to learn about how your target audience views you and your competitors. Once you understand how others view your brand, you can incorporate the most compelling aspects of your reputation into your USP. This helps you highlight your unique assets in a way that connects with existing perceptions of your business.
The marketing mix is a time-tested framework that can help guide your overall strategy. It encompasses the main elements that you consider when marketing your products and services to a target audience:
As you establish the details of your marketing mix, keep your target customer in mind. By prioritizing their interests, you can position your products and services to appeal to their needs.
Consumers frequently use the internet as their first avenue for researching different subjects; and your business can use this to its advantage. By providing consumers with educational content related to your sector online, you can establish yourself as an authority in your field while growing your web presence. This online content can range from educational articles to webinars — all of which lead back to your products and services.
By optimizing your online content for SEO, you make it more likely for your content to appear when customers search for specific keywords. Persona research can teach you which keywords and topics relate to different segments of your target audience. You can then entice leads with helpful, educational information that directly relates to their interests and needs.
You can also use promotional emails, newsletters, press releases, and even direct mail as tactics for enhancing growth. Set up an ongoing content and marketing calendar to promote consistent, ongoing expansion and get the full benefit of each growth strategy.
After enacting your marketing strategy, you can expect to see an uptick in sales down the line. For instance, Tail Lights Inc. experienced the benefit of innovative digital marketing techniques when they partnered with CMTC to overhaul their website and social media for the launch of their latest product line. Since launching thoughtful SEO strategies and activating a network of influencers, Tail Lights Inc. has enjoyed a significant increase in web traffic. And because their updated marketing strategy aligned with the release of a new product line, that traffic led to a 47.8% increase in sales.
Elite Robotics also enjoyed a sizable sales increase by heavily advertising their product diversification initiatives. They used email campaigns with flashy graphics to generate interest from new target markets, allowing them to reach new leads and continue their diversification efforts.
Now that we’ve covered the marketing side of things, let’s shift our focus over to sales...
One of the main challenges for salespeople is finding prospects who are interested in hearing their pitch. Research shows only 3% of people find salespeople to be trustworthy — this greatly contributes to the common challenge salespeople face.
To combat this issue, companies must implement sales methods that build positive customer relationships and genuinely provide value to their leads. Here are a few sales tips for manufacturers that drive positive engagement with prospects.
Know your customer: Manufacturers can sell their products to other companies or directly to consumers, but both B2B and B2C sales involve thoroughly researching your customer. Understanding their needs as either a business or an individual allows you to align your offerings to their goals when you make your pitch.
Offer value: Instead of focusing on what you can do as a manufacturing company, explain what outcomes you can provide for your customer. Entice them by helping them understand your role in achieving their goals.
Focus on education: Be prepared to provide your customers with case studies or statistics on how your products and services can solve their unique problems. Supplying concrete data and relevant examples empowers your customers to make informed decisions.
While having a long-term strategy for generating sales is important, making quick sales can give you access to the short-term capital you need to grow. One of the best ways to secure a quick sale is by focusing on prospects that are already primed to make a purchase. Conduct customer analysis to learn about the buying history of your prospects and to identify which customers are most likely to convert again.
Once you identify opportunities for quick sales among your current and former customers, craft personalized messages to engage with them through direct calls, surveys, and emails. By connecting with customers who already have a history of making purchases, you can encourage fast sales and build stronger relationships with your customer base.
Part of conducting effective sales outreach is storing customer data appropriately. You want to be able to access information about your customers as needed. A good customer relationship management (CRM) database can help you sort, manage, and even analyze your marketing and sales data.
Your CRM’s data can help you to pinpoint patterns in how your customers connect with you and learn about your new products and services. You can then use these insights to identify customer engagement patterns and inform sales strategy refinements.
Equipped with detailed knowledge of your customers and their habits, you can develop a custom combination of methods to consistently grow your business. A few options include:
You can also reach new audiences by crafting new, inventive product offerings that align with your customers’ needs. Whether you’re streamlining your manufacturing processes or expanding your product lines, you can highlight these innovations as selling points when connecting with your target audience.
Whether in-person or virtual, trade shows are a staple in the world of manufacturing. They provide you with the opportunity to directly interface with customers and answer niche questions about your offerings. Although face-to-face trade shows can offer the benefit of in-person interactions, virtual trade shows can often connect you with a wider audience of customers.
When planning for virtual trade shows, consider how to represent your business using different digital assets and be open to connecting with customers over chat, live video, and online content.
Whether you’re overhauling your marketing strategy or seeking out shrewd sales techniques, partnering with a consulting team can help you maximize your return on investment.
CMTC is dedicated to supporting small and medium-sized manufacturing businesses through comprehensive marketing and sales services. From enhancing the user experience and design of your website to creating lead generation funnels, CMTC provides an expert perspective on all aspects of your marketing and sales growth.
Schedule a discovery call today to learn more about how CMTC can transform your marketing and sales initiatives today.
