Growth Marketing Strategies for Manufacturing Brands

The manufacturing vertical, traditionally, has relied heavily on dealer networks to do the heavy lifting in marketing and sales. But gone are the days when marketing involved simply responding to potential customer queries, participating in events, holding launches and meets for dealers and creating basic collaterals.

While the B2C landscape underwent the customer-first change to their marketing approach decades ago, we’re now seeing it take center stage for the B2B industry as well. Marketing for industrial brands today involves a mix of B2C and B2B manufacturing marketing strategies designed to drive growth and long-term customer engagement.

Before we get into the different growth marketing strategies you can use as a manufacturing brand however, let’s take a second to set the stage:

What is growth marketing?

If you’re looking to learn more about growth marketing, we’ve got an entire blog post about it here. In a nutshell, however, we can say that growth marketing is the use of certain strategies focused on driving long term growth that boosts the bottom line and brings you higher returns over a longer period of time.

And now, without further ado:

4 B2B Manufacturing Growth Marketing Strategies To Put into Practice Right Away :

1. Make Experimentation A Part of Your Approach:

Relevant resource: Experimentation in Digital Marketing 101

2. Engage Your Customers to Build Trust and Advocacy

This would ensure that your brand stays top-of-the-mind and continues engagement with customers, long after their purchase. That level of trust and involvement is also a strong trigger for referrals.

3. Fuse Digital Trends into Your DNA

4. Be Visible, Stay Top of Mind

1. This involves establishing a goal for your marketing, and then running smaller experiments with a fraction of the budget/time to see whether the hypotheses in your strategy actually run true. For example, you decide to run a lead generation campaign for a line of products and decide to use LinkedIn to target the right customers. You could run A/B testing experiments that incorporate different kinds of creatives as experiments, or different buckets of potential customers to target. Once you know what’s working, it’s easier to pump in more budgets and scale it.
2. Turning customers into brand advocates is one of the most fast and cost-effective ways of not only continuing their association with you, but also bringing in new customers through referrals. One of the best ways to earn their advocacy is to engage them and create a community around your brand. An online portal - accessible off your website - is a great way to do this. The features you’d want to include in the portal will vary based on your business and customers’ unique needs but these are a few good ideas:
3. It’s important to stay on top of how people are consuming content online - keep in mind that your customers, though procuring for a business, are still consumers online. As we mentioned in the introduction, the B2C customer-centric approach to marketing is well on its way into the B2B sphere as well.

   Videos, for example, have been a consumer-favourite medium for a few years now. Think of different videos - live shoots, animations, motion graphic and so on - that you can create to add value to your potential customers.

   Adapting to trends helps keep your brand relevant and relatable for customers in the long term. It also shows a certain progressive dedication and intent from your brand that customers will find promising as a reason to establish a long-term association with you.

4. This is where social media comes in - not a new platform, even for the manufacturing industry, but in many cases a vastly underutilized one. Social media includes platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, that are best utilised for truly connecting with your audience and putting your brand in front of them repeatedly, day after day. Remember, your customers are consumers that spend a significant amount of time on social media in their daily lives.

   It’s this visibility that will help build great brand recall for you, and will ultimately help influence the research done during the procurement phase. Staying on top of social media allows you to keep your brand visible in a time span when consumers are constantly in the discovery mode.

   A couple of things to keep in mind here:

   1. With the algorithms of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, consumers’ content feeds are constantly changing second by second - to be visible, frequency of posting is an important factor.
   2. As consumers are in discovery mode when on social media, they won’t want to see promotional content - share insightful posts that add knowledge, entertainment or humanitarian content to get thumbs stopping.

In conclusion, we’d like to leave you with a last bit of advice - don’t forget to be persistent, constantly analyse what’s working for you (and what’s not) and optimise, optimise, optimise. A couple of these strategies may also be new territory for you - we’d love to help. Feel free to reach out to us below!