After all the efforts that you have made to market your business online and generate more leads, you wouldn’t simply walk away from the progress you have made, isn’t it?
Many times, B2B marketers make some common mistakes that derail months of hard work and effort. These mistakes, although small, may result in lost leads, customers, and no revenue for months.
In this article, we will outline some of the most common marketing mistakes made by manufacturers. Understanding these will help you avoid them and ensure you keep making efforts in the right direction. So, let’s begin.
Top 5 Marketing Mistakes That All Manufacturers Must Avoid
1. Not having a clear strategy or goal plan
What do you want to attain with your marketing efforts?
Although this is a simple question, not too many manufacturing marketers have an answer to this. If you don’t know the desired outcomes of your marketing initiatives, it is almost impossible to formulate an effective strategy.
Implementing a robust strategy for B2B marketing for manufacturers takes a lot of time. In fact, there is no way you can start seeing instant results. It also includes its fair share of trial and error. For instance, it may take you several tries to come up with the best email that attracts leads. Similarly, you may have to work on a variety of social media posts to find out what is working and what is not.
And all this will only be fruitful if you understand your business objectives. Many times, manufacturers focus on the wrong goals. For instance, while it may seem worthwhile in the beginning to improve metrics such as clicks, visits, and social followers, what truly matters is revenue and conversions. So make sure to have the right goal plans before you develop a marketing strategy around it.
2. Not tracking results
This is another one of the biggest mistakes that many manufacturers make. They fail to track the results of every specific marketing campaign to understand its effectiveness.
Keeping track is crucial for many reasons. It helps you build on what is working and attract new customers. It also saves a lot of effort that otherwise would have gone into trial and error. For instance, that print advertisement you have been giving in the local business magazine might be costing you a lot of money but still producing little ROI in comparison to your email newsletters.
Once you track results, you can easily differentiate between what is working and what is not. Consequently, you can enhance your B2B marketing strategies.
3. Ineffective inbound marketing strategy
Manufacturing buyers take time to finalize their B2B purchase decisions, which are driven by complete information. If your manufacturing website only includes salesy content, it won’t attract any potential buyers who are looking for answers to address their problems.
On the other hand, providing your potential customers with relevant, useful, and unique information on your industry, its processes, etc. can position you as an authority. You can push SEO-friendly content through targeted campaigns that address the needs of your potential audience while giving them confidence in your ability. Thus, investing in SEO for manufacturers is crucial to ensure an effective inbound strategy that ultimately provides long-term results.
4. Not personalizing your marketing initiatives
Personalization has become the new norm. Every organization is now aiming at targeted marketing by using cookies and other customer information.
As per statistics, personalized emails have a much higher open rate than generic emails. Many times, personalization could be as simple as incorporating the customer’s name into the content. Even these small things can go a long way in showing that you care about your customers and make an effort to offer a good customer experience.
5. Not recognizing when you need professional help
Often, manufacturers don’t realize the importance of online marketing for their business. As a result, they are reluctant to hire professionals. But in today’s digitally advanced world, even B2B companies need to have a robust presence online.
As per statistics, most professionals who are in decision-making positions in large-scale organizations are millennials. And these millennials depend on the internet for anything and everything. So when they need to look for a manufacturing organization, they begin their research online. And manufacturers who are not present on the online channels are missing out on a huge opportunity.
A good and professional digital marketing company can help manufacturers capitalize on the online trend and reach their audience where they are.
Wrapping Up
This is our roundup of the top five mistakes that every manufacturer makes. Avoiding these mistakes will take your manufacturing business to an altogether new level.
That said, digital marketing is a long and intimidating process. There is a lot of work involved that can get extremely overwhelming, especially for those who aren’t familiar with the practices. In such a scenario, hiring a professional B2B digital marketing agency such as StratMg can help. These agencies work with professional and highly experienced marketers who can devise smart solutions that are designed specifically for your business.
