Successful Marketing for Manufacturers
November 11, 2024HOW-TO: Successful Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers
The steps to “do marketing” well for any business aren’t complicated. They are well known and time-proven:
- Set Goals and Objectives
- Assess Brand and Gaps
- Develop a Strategy and Set a Plan
- Execute Tactical Plan
- Review Results and Adjust
Why, then, does it often seem more difficult to reach marketing success if you’re a brand or business in “certain segments?”
Is Marketing For Manufacturers Harder?
Yes and no. Marketing for manufacturers can be more challenging if your brand isn’t in solid shape. If you just said, “What ‘brand?’ We sell ×, everyone knows that/us” in your head – I am talking to you. Every business has a brand. Not always an intentional one, meaning one you’ve set out to cultivate – but you have one.
Maybe you’re the people who always deliver on time, or the ones who are the most fun at industry trade shows, or the people who don’t care that much about import taxes – but it’s something. Your brand is what people believe to be true about you and your company. Your advertising and marketing are what you promise people their experience of your company will be:
-How you will perform
-How you treat your employees
-How you participate in the larger community
Your brand is the truth of that experience. How well DID you perform (or, more precisely, how well does the target audience THINK you performed?) You cannot execute Step 2, Assess Brand and Gaps, without knowing the truth of your brand. If it isn’t what you want it to be, then your first step is to get that right.
Address internal issues if they exist: If you want to be the always-on-time option but you aren’t, and some factors are within your control – deal with that.
Carrying our “always on time” example forward: Once your promise is true, or well on the way to being true – change what you say about yourself and your value proposition to reflect this new truth.
How? Tell your story. Not just your history or the big moments in your present. Tell your story of this moment and this truth whenever it makes sense. Without information, people make up their own version of the truth – of who your brand is – themselves. If being the always-on-time option matters to (adds value to) your audience (customers, potential customers, and advocates), it is a valuable brand attribute to cultivate. What did it take to make it happen? Investment in new trucks? Publicly celebrate their delivery. Does it take highly trained and disciplined team members? Talk about them; highlight how they contribute to the outcome. Does it take solid supply chain relationships in order for you to deliver as promised? Tell that story, too, because solid relationships don’t happen in a vacuum.
The 5 Basic Steps in Strategic Marketing
To recap, let’s look at Marketing For Manufacturers again through the lens of the basic 5 Steps in Strategic Marketing:
- Set Goals and Objectives. This step is business-driven. What do you want marketing to achieve for your business?
- Assess Brand and Gaps. Truth time for your brand. If it is not what you want, what do you want it to be? How far apart are the desired state and the current state? Will your current marketing tone, plan, efforts, and materials work to bring about the change you need?
- Develop a Strategy and Set a Plan. Why does the new brand matter for your success? Clarify the value proposition to markets so that you can develop a tactical plan that includes defined key messaging by audiences/publics you need to reach. How do you take your brand from its current state to the desired state? What has to change, and how will you go about doing that internally if needed, and then communicating it externally?
- Execute Tactical Plan. Execute efforts as dictated by the strategic objectives and accompanying tactical plan, guided by the messaging by market/audience approach so that you’re highlighting the right part of your overall story in each marketing effort. PR? Social Media? Ads? Community Engagement? Industry efforts? Email? Website? Video? Podcasts? Associations? Specific outreach? Events? Targeted Digital? Other tactics?
- Review Results and Adjust. Review every 6 months while the brand is in transition (change takes time) and then every quarter after that: measure progress and adjust tactics if needed. Annually, revisit strategy and goals to determine if they are still relevant; adjust if needed.
See this kind of approach in action in these case studies:
And if you’re ready to discover the power in your story – we’re ready to help.
