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Marketing

The Power of Marketing Automation in the Manufacturing Industry

by Amy Montague

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Manufacturing has changed considerably within the last 3-5 years. As an industry which relies heavily on in-person meet-ups, the effects of COVID-19 were significantly felt by manufacturing businesses as trade shows were cancelled and meetings postponed. 

Due to the shift away from how the manufacturing industry traditionally functioned, many businesses adopted new technologies that have not only filled the gap during the pandemic, but also facilitated an improved way of working. Used across both their marketing and sales teams, supporting business growth and scale, which is especially important for SMB (small-to-mid sized) manufacturing businesses. One of these technologies is Marketing Automation. 

What is Marketing Automation? 

Marketing Automation is a technology which businesses can use to help find, nurture, and convert prospects by guiding them through the buyer journey across multiple different platforms. The primary tools used within Marketing Automation are email marketing, campaign automation, social posting and lead scoring 

How can manufacturers use Marketing Automation? 

Though the manufacturing industry relies heavily on in-person events, businesses that adopted automation have a greater deal size of 40% and a 20% higher attainment rate compared to those without.  

Businesses have done this by unifying their processes to facilitate greater results from in-person events, as well as improving their overall marketing efforts. 

Using their large contact databases full of vendors, distributors, leads, reps and more; marketing automation provided these businesses with the tools needed to distribute strategic, personalized content and messaging customers and those alike all at the click of a button. 

Marketing Automation is most effective when it’s driven by a persona-centric, buyer-focused, process-founded strategy – Source

Another huge benefit of Marketing Automation for manufacturing is the ability to automate lead scoring on the marketing front designated lifecycle stages and statuses. This can then either be passed to sales or cycled back for further nurturing. The actual construction of these strategies must be done by internal teams, but your Marketing Automation tool should provide you with all the data you need to know when a lead qualifies and which strategies work best depending on the buyer persona.  

Need help constructing successful marketing campaigns? Talk to our Marketing Services team who will provide expert advice on how to improve your campaigns and strategies. 

This data will also give your teams greater clarity on your customers, ROI and revenue, as manufacturing businesses who adopted Marketing Automation stated that their forecasting accuracy improved by 17%. 

The Benefits of Marketing Automation for Manufacturing 

Ultimately the success of Marketing Automation technologies comes from the ability to improve buyer journeys, which match changing customer expectations and implement an improved marketing strategy. Here are 5 tools that you can use from your Marketing Automation solution that will help improve your customer journeys and marketing strategy. 

Automated Lead Nurturing  

We touched briefly on the importance of nurturing leads early on, but to explain it further; Marketing Automation nurtures leads by meeting them at specific points in their buyer journey and providing content/messaging which has listened to triggers and met their needs. For example, if a prospect signed up to your company’s newsletter, then opened a specific email about a new product and spent some time reading the email (this would be the trigger), lead nurturing automation will identify the customers’ interest and offer more information to guide the prospect along the customer journey until they are ready to make a purchase.  

Fact – On average, 50% of the leads in any system are not yet ready to buy – source 

Through the cultivation of prospect relationships, your internal teams gain greater clarity on not only what the customer wants, needs and when, but also which content pieces and messaging work best, improving your buyer journeys and conversion rates.  

List Segmentation (Personalization) 

Email is a huge part of why Marketing Automation technologies are so successful and one of the features which makes it such a success is list segmentation. This tools feeds partly into strategic personalization as your marketing team can segment customers into lists depending on their job role, country, product interest and more. 

With these segmented lists you are able to send emails at the right time and provide personalized messaging depending on the prospect’smanufacturing marketing automation infographic country of residence, product interest and more. For instance, one of your campaigns could be to send promotional emails with a discount code to a specific list of customers interested in a certain product during an annual holiday, like Black Friday for the US or the January Sales for the UK.  

This multilayered type of segmentation mixed with personalization makes your customers feel listened to and heard as you give them the customer experience they want, which nurtures them into making a purchase. 

Lead Generation 

We’ve talked a lot about improved buyer journeys but have not yet mentioned two of the most important digital factors which affect them; landing pages and forms. 

Unless a prospect is walked through the entire lead generation process in person, then there’s a high likelihood that prospects will interact with your business on a more digital format, namely through your website.  

This is where landing pages and forms are the key tools used to garner customers and collect their data for you to use in your marketing strategies.  

What are landing pages? Landing pages are web pages constructed with the purpose of facilitating conversions through specific call-to-actions. 

What are forms? Forms are used on landing pages to collect a prospects data when they click a call-to-action button and download a piece of content or request a demo with your team. 

Marketing Automation will help you construct landing pages and forms, and also use the data provided by prospects to allocate them in your database, add them to lists which your marketing team can then use. 

Follow ups 

One tool which will be greatly appreciated by the manufacturing industry is automated follow ups. These follow ups could be sent via SMS, email or post and will reference a specific issue or topic that needs to be considered. For manufacturing, follow-ups are a fantastic tool to use when a customer’s guarantee ends, annual maintenance needs to be performed or when an improved product is launched which can help your customers address a specific need.  

The best thing about follow-ups is that once they have been set up, they require little to no maintenance. This means that once a customer buys a product, they will be put on the follow up list and automatically notified in 5 years or so when their guarantee runs out, creating a space for cross-selling to occur. 

Want to find out more about Manufacturing and Marketing Automation? Read our latest manufacturing case study! 

Improved Internal Processes 

Manufacturing businesses specifically have a wide range of prospects and processes which all require different levels of marketing and internal team effort, which is not only complicated but also takes up a lot of time. Marketing Automation helps improve internal team efficiency by taking the manual labor out of many processes, freeing up more time for your Sales and Marketing teams to spend on building relationships and strategies that aid business growth. 

Above we have discussed some of the ways businesses can do this through examples such as automated follow-ups and lead scoring, but there are also so many more ways businesses can automate internal tasks, including custom task creation for sales teams. 

As Manufacturing has changed due to the effects of COVID-19 and the rising adoption of digital technologies, Marketing Automation provides businesses with the tools they need to not only nurture leads through the buyer journey but also improve internal team efficiency, through strategic automations that aid business growth and scale.  

With access to so many tools, Marketing Automation is constantly evolving to provide better customer experiences and close that gap between sales and marketing, ensuring no lead is left behind.  

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