What is Inbound Marketing for Manufacturers? Find Out Here

Looking for a marketing strategy that even your most skeptical sales rep can get behind? Inbound marketing for manufacturers combines best practices in the digital age with tried-and-true tactics to position your business as a trusted advisor and supplier.

In essence, the inbound marketing approach aims to attract potential customers to your business rather than you chasing after them. 

In this article, we’ll equip you with inbound marketing tips for manufacturers, effective strategies for industrial inbound marketing, and show you how to deploy your content in sync with your buyer’s journey. 

We’ll look at ideas that utilize a modern B2B marketing flywheel focused on attracting, engaging, and delighting buyers. And we’ll show you how inbound content marketing for manufacturers – coupled with developing target buyer personas and strong attention to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – can produce more high-quality leads. 

As we unpack the details, we’ll show you Beyond Marketing’s three stages of inbound marketing methodology: Reach, Relate, Resolve. First, let’s go over a few foundational elements.

Manufacturing and Industrial Inbound Marketing 

Inbound marketing in the manufacturing and industrial sectors seeks to connect with a potential buyer before that customer officially becomes a lead. With a sophisticated digital content strategy powered by search engine results, targeted ads, and social media, customers discover your product and brand early in their research. 

Creating content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience naturally draws a prospect toward your business. Instead of bombarding prospects with cold calls or unsolicited emails, inbound marketing positions your business as a helpful resource that customers seek out on their own accord.

With B2B sales cycles, especially, inbound marketing presents a unique solution for what is often a complex and lengthy buyer’s journey.

Prospects typically start their research online, looking for solutions to their challenges. By implementing an inbound marketing strategy, manufacturers can intercept these potential buyers at the early stage of their decision-making process, positioning themselves as trusted advisors even before direct contact is made.

Some marketing pros call this the “attract” phase. In this guide, we’re referring to it as the “reach” phase. In older marketing models, it was thought of as the top of the funnel.

No matter what you call it, there’s an important step – developing target personas — before you bring buyers to your website. That’s what we will tackle next.

Target Personas for Manufacturing and Industrial Marketing

A target persona is a realistic representation of your ideal client. While you may serve a broad range of customers, personas are important for the targeted nature of inbound marketing. Conducting market research and analyzing your own data can help you identify your most likely buyers or develop content strategies for the market segment you want to attract.    

First, segment your audience or the largest group of your client base. The first layer of developing personas produces a segment of potential buyers – for example, maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) managers. 

Analyze individuals in that category who might be on the hunt for a new supplier. Based on what their company sells and purchase volume, you can break this buyer segment down further.

Now imagine your target client’s day-to-day and their connection to your product or process:

• Do they often need emergency orders?
• Are they looking for news about new products?
• At one point each year do they compare their options?
• When do they make a final budget decision or purchase recommendation?

With inbound marketing, you have the flexibility to build digital communication specifically for each persona. Start with your strongest target client group or the one whose business you want to attain and begin crafting your content strategy following the buyer’s journey described below. We’ll show you how each step corresponds with “Reach, Relate, Resolve” tactics associated with inbound marketing.

The Buyer’s Journey

Paying close attention to the buyer’s journey will help ensure that marketing-qualified leads produce better sales results over time. 

If you’re familiar with the sales funnel that once reigned supreme in marketing strategy, you know that the top of the funnel is all about capturing as many leads as possible. This approach plays out with total market coverage-style ads followed by often aggressive sales tactics when a lead provides their contact information.

Inbound marketing differs from the onset, using strategic digital content to connect with specific buyer types. From there, leads are still effectively funneled but this approach frames your marketing around solutions – not the hard sell. 

In this model, content and customer service work hand-in-glove at every stage of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness: Positioning your brand or business as the solution when a buyer begins research on a problem or need.

• Consideration: Providing helpful content and materials for a buyer narrowing down potential options.

• Decision: Giving buyers a clear call-to-action after building trust, providing value, and demonstrating a commitment to solving their problem.

Now, let’s take a closer look at how inbound marketing is used at each step in the buyer’s journey. We’ve identified the key goal of each phase – Reach, Relate, Resolve – to help guide your strategy.

Inbound Marketing Tips for Manufacturers and Industrial Business

In the first stage of a prospective lead’s research, your inbound marketing seeks to build awareness. Grow your reach by offering genuinely useful and authoritative content. 

Designing content to surface when a prospective client is looking for a certain product or process – or simply doing research about a problem they face – is how inbound marketing accelerates your reach. 

Makes sense for a number of industries, but does inbound marketing work for manufacturing companies? Let’s look at an example of inbound marketing for industrial manufacturers in context:

Your facility recently added powder coat capabilities in-house to gain more control over finishing. Some buyers may not think about this when comparing manufacturers, but they likely know the frustration of delays, cost increases, and other problems due to jobs stuck in finishing. Or, they’re researching sub-processes when they’d prefer to work with a single vendor. 

Inbound Marketing Methodology Stage 1: Reach

There are a number of ways to reach this potential buyer:

• An ad on search pages (like Google ads) for keywords about common finishing problems
• A LinkedIn post focused on solutions to eliminate corrosion and flaking
• A blog post or video explainer showing examples of finishing works in diverse applications

The main goal of creating this kind of inbound marketing content is to expand reach – meaning connecting with would-be buyers and people interested in your product or process. To gain maximum ROI on your pay-per-click Google ad or blogs, tools like Semrush are useful for discovering high-performing keywords and optimizing website content.

From here, you’ll want to use gated content or another means of obtaining contact information for buyers. Even if a lead isn’t in the consideration or decision stage of buying, ongoing marketing is important to instill trust, provide educational resources and value, and demonstrate authority. Examples include a newsletter or free webinar signup form. 

Taking the time to create a range of content – from videos to white papers – tailored for specific sectors or products will supercharge your inbound marketing strategy in the next step.

Inbound Marketing Methodology Stage 2: Relate

Here, you want to relate quickly to your prospective client. 

Use the target personas you created earlier and details from contact form information (industry, services, buying stage, etc.) to power your next communication. In the relate phase, you supply value to the customer by showing you understand their challenges and needs. This could include:

• A live stream event with Q&A sector-specific concerns or trends
• A video series with how-to demonstrations or walk-throughs
• A detailed white paper or e-book on innovative products or processes

While your business will surely be prominent, keep the content focused on specific client questions or concerns – and demonstrate a deep understanding of the problem they want to solve. 

Email marketing tools and customer relationship management software like Salesforce will help you organize and stay in touch with leads from inbound marketing. 

Buyers will vary greatly in how long it takes for them to move from awareness to consideration to decision. 

Inbound Marketing Methodology Stage 3: Resolve

Your goal, ultimately, is to help them resolve their problem and (hopefully) choose your manufacturing or industrial solution. The power of inbound marketing toward this end lies in personalization. An abbreviated example from email marketing shows this in five steps:

1. While researching a problem they face, a potential buyer clicks on a Google ad or a link to a relevant blog article on your website.

2. A site pop-up (specific to that process or product they’ve been reading about) invites them to download a case study or white paper, which will be sent to their inbox.

3. An automated email campaign delivers the content they signed up for instantly.

4. A follow-up drip campaign keeps the buyer engaged with helpful videos, blogs, recorded webinars, and other content. 

5. A call-to-action in your email campaign prompts the buyer to schedule a free consultation, which leads to a live demo or another sales-focused call.

Tracking the Impact of Inbound Marketing

Throughout each stage of the buyer’s journey, it’s crucial to track KPIs. For instance, in the awareness stage, KPIs may include website traffic, blog engagement, and social media interactions. Conversion optimization techniques such as compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) and personalized content can help move prospects through the funnel more effectively. 

Using a marketing communications platform like Constant Contact can give you in-depth analytics like engagement heatmaps to see which CTAs in your email campaign performed best. As you get started, develop a calendar for new content, social media posts, and email campaigns so that you can keep up with updates and changes and produce as much as you can ahead of publishing or sending.

As you can see, manufacturing and industrial inbound marketing is a long-term strategy. So, why would a company use inbound marketing? Because meeting buyers where they are puts your business at an advantage by supplying genuinely helpful resources and content at their first step of research. Strategically designing follow-up communications with your potential customer’s pain points in mind accelerates lead conversions. In all, the process could take weeks or months to pay off but it results in more leads – and better-qualified leads – with a sustainable strategy for future growth. 

At Beyond Marketing, we partner with manufacturers, suppliers, and industry leaders to jumpstart comprehensive inbound marketing tactics and power long-term success. We focus on high-quality content, developing results-driven websites, and multi-channel inbound marketing that positions your business at the forefront for buyers. Call or email us today to learn more!